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

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 6/15/22 16:12, Miles Fidelman wrote:

>
> It strikes me that hard-nosed questioning & design review are a good 
> sieve - folks who do their homework, and want to get results, tend to 
> welcome hard-nosed review & comment.  They tend to welcome hard 
> questions, as well as brutal design review & editing.  When caught in 
> a dumb mistake, or have something obvious pointed out, their response 
> is likely to be a face plant.
>
> Someone who's done their homework, and is looking for honest feedback, 
> deserves politeness & constructive response.  These are the future of 
> the Internet.
>
> And true newbies, asking honest questions - deserve a bit of 
> kindness.  They're trying.  (Though "participation trophies" don't 
> really help them to push themselves & develop.)
> [etc.]

I've seen very experienced and knowledgeable IETF participants propose 
dangerously naive ideas and waste tremendous amounts of others' 
extremely valuable time (that they collectively paid tens of thousands 
of dollars for).   I've also seen very experienced and knowledgeable 
IETF participants proposing potentially useful ideas, metaphorically cut 
off at the knees by very experienced and knowledgeable (and arrogant and 
impatient) IETF participants who seemed to think they had a divinely 
inspired knowledge superior to everyone else's.

If you get down to enough detail, there are as many categories as there 
are people, and the same person can be in different categories at 
different times.

I appreciate that it's better to cite vague descriptions of people and 
their ideas as examples, rather than make examples of actual people and 
their proposals.  But I hope we can get past trying to pigeonhole 
people, and try to evaluate each proposal on its own merits (or lack 
thereof).

Keith