Re: [Rfcplusplus] Sunk cost + not about us

["Paul Hoffman" <[e-mail]>]

On 10 Jul 2018, at 10:45, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Jul 09, 2018 at 06:32:28PM -0400, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
>> This formulation assumes that change does not have a cost.  It does.  
>> I
>> agree that not changing has some cost.  However, absent indication 
>> that the
>> changes will actually address the claimed problem, paying the various 
>> direct
>> and indirect costs of changing things is not inherently a good thing.
>
> I think this argument would be stronger if we understood what your
> estimation of the costs are.  The analysis underpinning the proposal
> (in the BoF request), as near as I can tell, is that the costs are the
> using up of a few letters (for new series names) plus the cost of
> possibly reserving RFC numbers for the alternative series publications
> (in case they turn out not to work after 3 or more years), plus the
> costs to tooling changes.  Are there other costs you can think of?

1) Human costs for all authors for pointing to the new series while the 
experiment is running.

2) Human costs of arguing about how to measure the successfulness of the 
experiment.

3) If the experiment ends in failure (likely because we can't evaluate 
if there is less confusion with the new series than in the current 
setup), we will either have a bunch of small vestigial series with a 
bunch of RFCs pointing to them, or we have to update all of the RFCs 
that have pointers to the new series to instead point to the RFC 
numbers.

> Keep in mind, the proposal is for an experiment.  Experiments do
> indeed result in some costs, and I think it is entirely reasonable to
> ask what those costs really would be.  But I also think we ought to
> keep in mind the potential benefit of the experiment, which is to do
> an empirical evaluation of whether the long-debated confusion can be
> clarified (at least, in this way).

We have not seen any suggestion of how such an empirical evaluation 
would take place. We have not seen any suggestion for, even if we could 
measure the problem today and a reduction of the measured problem, how 
much reduction would be labeled "success".

--Paul Hoffman