Re: Tolerance

["Andrew G. Malis" <[e-mail]>]

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.

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
>
>