The pattern on this list is that folks will endlessly respond to any
sort of critical statement -- no matter that it has no visible support
-- or any sort of assertion of authority, rather than pursue
constructive dialogue about making changes and reaching consensus on
them.
More generally, the pattern on this list (and many other lists) is that
some number of folks will respond to any statement which seems
incorrect, and will attempt to refute such statements by any means that
requires minimal effort, whether or not either the original statement or
the refutation is convincing.
Basically, email conversations encourage quick responses even in cases
where quick responses are not useful. If one takes extra time to study
the issue and form a more useful response, e.g. one that is more
convincing or one that might further consensus, one risks that the list
will have already formed an opinion on the issue and the opportunity for
the response to be useful will have passed.
In other words, this list prefers to discuss process rather than perform useful work.
Process issues are harder to resolve than technical issues, because it
is often (not always) relatively easy to determine the degree to which a
technical statement is valid without time-consuming testing and
measurement, whereas for process issues we really need to run
experiments that last for months or years to know how well a change
might work.
Given the pattern stated above, it follows that process discussions will
take more time to reach closure - or continue indefinitely - because
there's inherently more speculation on process questions.
Hence, my focus is entirely upon anything that will place less load on
the IESG, and therefore:
Not that placing a lighter load on the IESG is a bad thing, but you said
"Hence" and I don't see how one follows from the other.
p.s. My conclusion from the above is that we need a better medium for
conducting process discussions over the network, or better tools for
conducting discussions over email. But of course that's a research
topic and therefore this message is unlikely to be persuasive.
Keith
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