I don't think this is necessarily about people who are critical, it's that you can have someone who is just as stupid as a "yes man": they just say "no" just be

I don't think this is necessarily about people who are critical, it's that you can have someone who is just as stupid as a "yes man": they just say "no" just because instead of, you know, actually thinking. I don't believe this "no man" is someone who is managing their attention or saying no for an actual reason. They're just contrary. And yeah, there's a lot of them around. What I actually find even more frequently are "parrots". These are people who "learn by runbook". Instead of asking why something is done a particular way, they want to learn how to parrot some procedure. It's another variation of things: instead of saying "yes", or "no", they just parrot "process X". I think this is really where the "no swap in production" example came from. I've seen _lots_ of stupid similar ideas in software development.