On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 03:26:02PM -0700, David W. Hankins wrote: > I was very dissatisfied with the IETF's performance towards its agenda > until this occurred to me. It would have helped me immensely if it > were formally identified in this way (but then that would require the > IETF carry a 'Philosophy Area'), and to some extent I imagine that > this is also the problem some of the IETF's more vocal detractors are > wrestling with; the belief that the IETF does or should follow a > Socratic, Aristotelian, or even Democratic methodology, and the > resulting confusion and hurt feelings to discover that blatantly > Sophist rhetoric has succeeded where their deductions or even > elections have failed. That's a rather interesting, and dare I say it, insightful way of looking at it. Maybe (and I'm only half saying this in jest) "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" should mentioned as recommended reading to the "Tao of the IETF" --- and that what we are after, is "Quality" in our standards. Quoting from a description of that book: Much of the book focuses on a rather surprising topic: quality. We think of quality as a measure of a product or a person, and we feel the right to make judgments about it because it is clear when something is of quality or is not. The narrator recounts taking his motorcycle to a workshop and reluctantly handing it over to a crew of young men playing loud music. Instead of fixing the machine, they butcher it, and he learns a lesson: it is the attitude towards a technological problem, not simply rational knowledge of how a thing works, that makes all the difference. Merely going by the manual is a clumsy, low-quality approach. Thereafter, he did the work himself. Quality cannot be defined in a rational way, it can only noticed when it happens. Yet quality is everything: the difference between someone who cares, and one who does not; between a machine that can enrich your life, and one that explodes into a heap of useless mental. Yet instruction manuals, the narrator observes, totally leave out of the picture the person who is putting something together. If you are angry or unmotivated, you will not succeed in tuning the machine or finding the problem, but if you patiently put your mind into the place of the original designer, you come to see that a machine is really just the physical expression of a set of ideas. Paradoxically, it is only when you go beyond the classical idea that we can separate our mind from the world, that 'objects' begin to come alive. Quality is appreciated not as a thing, but as the force that drives the universe. The narrator notes, "Obviously some things are better than others.but what's the 'betterness'?" His epiphany comes in reading the ancient Tao Te Ching, when he realizes that what we call Quality, or 'betterness', is the same as the Eastern concept of 'Tao', the universal power or essence which can never be identified as such, but whose presence or absence makes something good.[1] [1] http://butler-bowdon.com/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance.html Another way of putting this is the oft-made observation that "Engineering" is the IETF's middle name, and that very often, especially when the problem is heavily constrained, the engineering tradeoffs that we often have to make are very much a matter good taste and judgement, and not necessarily something that can decided using traditional Socratic or Aristotelian modes of argumentation. - Ted _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf