The set of people disagreeing with ADs include both technically astute people and egocentric fools.
Ditto for the ADs themselves.
Depending on whom you ask, you'll get differing opinions as who which people are in which category.
On both counts.
yes, and yes. But there are far fewer egocentric fools in IESG than among those disagreeing with IESG.
The real trick for IESG is to pay due attention to valid comments without getting bogged down in discussion with egocentric but otherwise intelligent fools.
nor are [ADs] immune from favoring one of a number of equally valid approaches, esp. when disagreeing about architectural futures (e.g., NATs vs. non-NATs).
NAT vs. non-NAT are not equally valid, by any stretch of the imagination. A network with large numbers of NATs is inherently less reliable, more complex, less capable of supporting applications, more difficult to manage, more failure-prone, and generally more costly than a similar-sized network without NATs - even if those NATs support mechanisms for allowing apps to circumvent some of their limitations.
The ability to understand the consequences of technical choices - like the choice of whether to endorse or discourage NAT - is essential for doing good engineering, and for reviewing others' engineering work.
It's naiive to assume that ADs are self-selecting for anything except
the set of rules that have been setup as prerequisite. It's certainly
not self-selecting just on broad expertise, lack of vendor bias, etc. -
although the NOMCOM tries to do a good job, they often don't have an
alternative (as has already been noted) because many good people have
the qualifications but aren't allowed to apply.
ADs aren't self-selecting, they're selected by NOMCOM. And it's been my understanding that NOMCOM generally does have alternatives, though perhaps not many _good_ alternatives. If you want to claim that the workload of being on IESG is so high that we can't recruit enough good candidates, you'll get no argument from me about that. That's why I look for ways to lessen IESG's workload while still maintaining document quality.
And the ADs, just because they are enamored of sitting at the dias at meetings, don't have a lock on broad perspective. If they want THEIR positions endorsed by the ENTIRE organization they can make their case to the ENTIRE organization before Last Call.
If they're right, rough consensus will work. If not, then they shouldn't
have a unique right to overrides.
ADs don't have a "right" to override anything. They are, however, entrusted with the power to review documents on behalf of the organization. We extend this trust to a few carefully-screened people to avoid the situation where a much larger number of self- selecting people have the ability to make arbitrary, contradicting, and sometimes incompetent statements on behalf of the organization.
The latter kind of organization would be useless, and its imprimatur would carry negative weight, because only the incompetent would work there.
Keith
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