On 4/19/21 12:35 PM, Dave Cridland wrote:
Radical thought: What if explaining in detail why a proposal is a Bad Idea *is* useful work?
What if it might bring new people in to provide new insight? That strikes me as very useful work indeed.
Under some conditions, it certainly can be useful work. That's
why, for example, refuting proofs of how to square circles might
have made a good exercise for math graduate students, who are
basically indentured servants anyway so they're not free to
resist, and maybe could use a better grounding in the math that
underlies such arguments.
But there's a limit to how much of this is useful, and when writing the Nth explanation for why (for example) assigning IP addresses geographically isn't as good an idea as it might initially seem, the point of diminishing returns is probably around N=1.
I also suspect there are better ways to generate new insights than to endlessly try to refute Bad Ideas. For instance, try to approach a problem from a completely different angle than has been proposed before.
Keith
