Re: Tolerance

[Richard Barnes <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 5:21 PM Andrew G. Malis <[e-mail]> wrote:

> My personal rule of thumb is that life in tech means putting up with a bit
> of hyperbole every now and then. :-) But that's really not unique to tech -
> just look at question time in Parliament!
>
> When someone says or writes something to me like "your proposal is idiotic
> because ... " or "you're an idiot to propose that because ... ", I just
> ignore the first part of the sentence and try to parse out the actual
> technical point being made.
>

Reacting to this "I just ignore..." part because it's come up twice in this
thread...

While I'm glad that the folks saying this are able to ignore this sort of
language, that's not really the question.  The question someone should be
*expected* to have that level of thick skin in order to participate.  As
Jacob's example shows, we lose important contributions from important
contributors when we set the bar that high.

--Richard



>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 4:58 PM Brian E Carpenter <
> [e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Jacob,
>>
>> On 17-Jul-19 07:39, Jacob Hoffman-Andrews wrote:
>> .....
>> >  However, the first post
>> > was one WG regular telling the author "You are insane to propose
>> > <technical thing>."
>>
>> Clearly that was out of order and IMHO the WG chairs should have said so.
>> But (having started professional life among physicists) I don't think
>> it can be called unusual. As a matter of curiosity, I just ran a search
>> on my personal email archives and found 174 occurences of the word
>> "insane"
>> going back to 1995.
>>
>> The first one of all reads:
>>
>> > It could be that the
>> > 4 bits may be better devoted to making the flow id be a full
>> > 32 bits.
>> >
>> >     I think Brian's words of
>> >     SHOULD and MAY are important and a good idea too.
>> >
>> > Frankly, this is positively insane.   Either IPv6 is a variation
>> > of IPv4, and shares the same ethernet type, with demux early
>> > in the IP processing, or its new, and is demuxed at the ethernet
>> > (and other) layers.   Having it both ways is just idiocy.
>>
>> So X is telling Y that Brian's idea is insane and idiotic, as far as
>> I can see. But IPv6 ended up with both its own Ethertype and an IP version
>> number field.
>>
>> The point is that this wasn't offensive, because it was directed at
>> the technical proposal, not at the proposer. I think that's what people
>> should bear in mind.
>>
>>      Brian
>>
>>