Re: Evolving Documents (nee "Living Documents") side meeting at IETF105.)

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 18, 2019, at 10:31 PM, Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> On Jul 18, 2019, at 10:10 PM, Keith Moore <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>  I’ve lost count of the number of WGs I’ve seen for which I did understand what they were doing, and did understand how they could harm other interests.
> 
> This is the cognitive bias to which I was referring.   You think you know better than they do; indeed, you are sure of it. 

Non sequitur.   Just because I saw a way that a WG’s output could harm other interests does not mean I thought I knew better than the WG, especially in the absence of evidence that the WG considered the potential for that harm at all.  There may also be a writing convention at work here: anytime one is expressing an opinion, the words “I think...” are implied.  Leaving them out doesn’t mean the writer is certain, and some consider it poor writing style to include words like that.

But the model that most often seems to apply, as far as I can tell, is the one of the elephant in the dark room, where nobody can see the whole elephant.  But each of several people has a hand on a different part of the elephant and each one insists that the part he or she is touching is representative of the whole elephant.  Even for someone who realizes that the elephant is somehow like a tree, spear, rope, hose, etc., all at the same time, it’s a challenge to imagine the whole elephant.  But the person who says “there’s an important part of the elephant you’re not seeing” isn’t wrong to point that out.

To apply the analogy to ietf, it seems that ietf WGs often focus entirely on one or two parts of an elephant and either fail to consider the others or consider them out of scope.  And sometimes this is baked into their charters.
  
> Quite possibly some of the time you are correct, but I’ve known you for a long time, and I’ve seen you be utterly sure of yourself when you were clearly wrong.   I’m sure you’ve seen me do it too.

You seem quite sure of yourself in declaring me wrong.  :). And in insisting that you know what I’m thinking. 

But if someone keeps telling me I’m wrong by simple nay saying, without showing me that they understand the argument (or when it’s clear that they don’t), or if they insist they know what I’m thinking when they clearly don’t, or if (for example) they insist that a particular proposal is demonstrated to be harmless by significant deployment when the deployed protocol is significantly different than the one proposed - I’m not likely to be (favorably) impressed by any of those lines of argument.   It doesn’t mean I’m certain of my own argument, but I’m probably all the more certain that the other party is mistaken in some way.  (Of course just because a proponent ‘s argument is unpersuasive doesn’t mean the proposal is inherently bad or can’t be fixed.)

Keith