[nickknw]

> As a negative person, I focus on all the way things can go wrong. I've envisioned what would happen with each one. But as a positive person, you don't see them. Or, if you do see them, you think they're so unlikely that you don't consider them serious.

That's interesting, we seem to have wildly different definitions for these words. I view it like this:

As a programmer, I plan for things to go wrong. As a positive person, I try to express it in a constructive way. Caution and forward thinking is not necessarily tied to being negative!!

Planning for when things go wrong isn't just something a negative person would do, it's also something a cautious or sensible person would do. Or an experienced software developer! If I've learned anything from programming it's that no matter how unlikely an error condition seems, it WILL happen sooner or later.

I HAVE seen the kind of person you are talking about though - there are the people who think that just being positive will make bad things less likely to happen, and then people who are just overly optimistic about everything. Not every person who identifies as positive thinks this way though! :)

[RougeFemme]

It's like employing defensive programming in your everyday. You plan for the unlikely negative event so that you can contain/minimize the impact. . .but you don't dwell on it forever.