On the topic of negative comments, this article prompts me to leave what the author assuredly would consider one. Frankly, if our society fails in education it'

On the topic of negative comments, this article prompts me to leave what the author assuredly would consider one. Frankly, if our society fails in education it's that students make it through without acquiring critical thinking skills. The idea that we are critical because "it’s so much easier to challenge other people’s thinking than our own" is hard to take. If anything, this speaks to a failure to be self-critical more than a surplus of outward negativity. More generally, I'm frustrated by what I see as an increasing tendency of people to parse the world into "positive" and "negative". This by itself speaks to a lack of truly critical thinking. Further, I believe that the idea that critically taking apart other ideas is somehow a fundamentally distinct activity from developing one's own ideas is incorrect. In mathematics you develop ideas precisely by searching for what might be unsatisfying in the arguments and theories of others. And most successful start-ups seem to have some roots in looking at how what others are doing is sub-optimal.