Re: Bad/Good ideas and damage control by experienced participants

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 6/14/22 10:47, John Levine wrote:

>> On the other hand, is it really a negative when someone is snarky with a
>> snot-nosed kid who doesn't appreciate being told that their "great new
>> idea" is a retread of something folks learned not to do decades ago?
> Depends.  If your goal is to make sure nobody new ever comes to the IETF, sure, do that.

What if your goal is instead to try to make effective use of the 
precious little time you have to spend on WG meetings, reviewing drafts, 
and following mailing lists (and now github commits)?

Hopelessly naive proposals are a big time sink.   Sure, politeness goes 
a long way.   But politely responding to a hopelessly naive proposal in 
an effective way requires trying to find some merit in it, so that the 
author of that proposal will know you've actually taken the time to 
understand it.    And that's actually a lot more work than reviewing a 
potentially useful Internet-Draft.   Shouldn't most of our effort be 
spent on documents that actually have some potential?   Especially given 
that there are already too many documents to read?

Given that, it's not surprising that a lot of proposals get rudely and 
quickly rejected.   Even when some of them have merit.

I'm not saying it's right that good proposals get rudely and quickly 
rejected, I'm saying that I understand why it happens and it's not only 
because of arrogance.

The trick is to get out of the mode where new ideas are reflexively seen 
as a waste of time, or worse, as threats.

Keith