Keith - thanks for the pointer to "Harrison Bergeron". Coincidentally, I was trying to recall this story in a conversation recently and had
forgotten the details and the author...
But, I don't see how it applies here. I'm not claiming "Nobody was smarter than anybody else." Yakov explained it better than I have: "for each AD there is more than one person in the IETF who is more technically astute than that AD. So, why should the IETF decision
process favor opinion of such AD more than the opinion of these other individual who are more astute that the AD ?"
Ralph,
While for each AD there may be more than one person in the IETF who is technically astute than that AD, it is difficult to reliably identify those people, and those people will typically _not_ be the other individuals who are reviewing a document in Last Call. Technically astute people who are able to review a significant number of documents probably end up on IESG sooner or later anyway - presuming that they have the other skills and attributes that make for good ADs. The other thing is that given a set of people who are technically astute in a general sense, the ones who specialize in a particular activity probably end up being better at that activity than their peers. So for instance the ones who specialize in reviewing large numbers of documents and trying to ensure some consistency between those documents are likely to be better at that skill than the other IETF participants. It is not expected that ADs know more about each WG's topic than the WG. But WGs sometimes have trouble seeing the forest for the trees. It's part of the AD's job to examine things from a broader perspective.
There is no way to have meaningful external review of WG output without somehow "favoring" the opinion of those doing the review. And in order for such review to maintain some consistency between documents, there need to be a relatively small number of selected reviewers. Peer review cannot work as well, both because the average clue level of a larger number of reviewers will inherently be lower, and because peers will not be as adept at looking at the document from a big picture perspective.
One inherent consequence of this for IETF is that it is possible for a single AD to have a large say in whether a document is found acceptable. This is both good and bad. Often a single AD will spot a significant problem that nobody else has seen. Sometimes that problem is a subtle problem that others in IESG and/or the WG don't immediately accept or understand. The other side of this coin is that when a single AD gives a document a good review, other ADs are less likely to state an objection to that document. Giving a single AD a large say often has the effect of speeding a document's approval.
In other cases an AD will act capriciously or out of unreasonable prejudice, and there are sometimes accusations that an AD acted out of malice. IETF and IESG processes try to provide multiple remedies to those situations. It may be that the processes need to be tweaked or that other remedies are needed, and we should constantly be looking for ways to make our processes better. But I don't see how to dispense with either external review or giving a single reviewer's opinion a lot of weight, at least on an initial review, without drastically reducing the quality and/or volume of our output.
Thinking about the disagreements between ADs and WGs that I've seen, they generally fall into two (overlapping) categories:
1. There is a legitimate difference of opinion about how to reconcile the conflict between the interests of the community of users that the WG hopes to serve, and some other community of users. In this case I think "favoring" IESG is the right thing to do, because WGs frequently produce results that will cause problems for other communities - though naturally both IESG and the WG should attempt to work out a compromise that serves both sets of interests while minimizing the conflict between them.
2. The AD has a legitimate concern, but the change suggested by the AD is either (a) lame or (b) worse than the problem the AD wishes to remedy. Part of this problem is that in practice the AD has relatively little ability to fix a document. No matter how bad the document is, the most an AD can generally manage to do is to insist on small changes to the text. Yes, in theory the AD could insist that the document undergo significant revision, but the pressure from both inside and outside the IESG to move even bad documents along is considerable. [*]. Sometimes there's no way to fix a document with small textual changes. But because of the pressure to either approve a document or to ask for fairly small changes to the document text, ADs sometimes suggest small changes to the text that end up being poor fixes.
The best cure for both of these problems, I suspect, is not to give ADs less "favor" in reviewing documents, but to identify such problems earlier, at a time when there is less investment in the WG's output and less sense of urgency to get the document out the door.
The connection with the Vonnegut story is this: an insistence on making things "fair" has the effect of discouraging excellence.
Keith
[*] Bad documents take more time to review than good documents -- both because they tend to be poorly written and because the AD is struggling to think of a simple fix while reading the document -- and nobody on IESG wants to review a bad document over and over.
_______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf