When is passive play right?

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The question is: what's the best way to make the most when I'm ahead, and lose the least when I'm behind?

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You lose the least when you are behind by folding, but there is no way to know we are behind yet. I wouldn't worry about "making the most" when you are ahead in this hand per say. Your profit will come from making 1,000s of positive excepted value decisions over time. Focus on making decisions to maximize your EV.

Having said that, AA is the highest EV hand possible preflop!!!! RAISE!!

On the flop you have great pot equity!! A raise tends to show a profit (+EV). RAISE!!

If you had to play this hand over and over 1000 times you make more money on average by raising preflop and beting/raising the flop . . .

Slow playing is best against good thinking players because it will induce them to make mistakes . . . I really don't think this table qualifies for the exception of a slowplay . . .

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On a 3-flush, 4-straight board, I think that there's a large number of players (at party 2/4) who will bluff-bet if checked to, and fold if bet to.

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And an overwhelming number of them will call/call/call. Therefore I raise preflop/bet/bet/bet.

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Legions of 2+2'ers can't be wrong, so I give in. What most persuaded me is jason_t's statement above. I wrote a database query to test what he's saying. In my database (sample size of 20k hands), after somebody bet on a 3 flush flop, I had 990 calls, 316 raises, and 1036 folds. Checking for the straight draw is quite a bit harder, so I didn't figure that into the calculation; undoubtedly it'd bump the calls & raises up in relation to the folds. Still, the numbers substantiate what many of you are saying.