On 29/04/2013 01:53, Margaret Wasserman wrote:
Hi Tom,
On Apr 19, 2013, at 6:03 AM, t.p. <daedulus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If we required the IETF to reflect the diversity of people who are,
e.g., IT network professionals, then the IETF would fall apart for lack
of ability.
[…]
If the ADs of the IETF have to represent the diversity of the world -
which could in extremes..
Has anyone even suggested that IESG should reflect the diversity of these groups? Where is this coming from? You are putting up strawmen, so that you can tear them down…
The question that people are asking is why the diversity of the IETF leadership doesn't reflect the diversity of _the IETF_.
The evidence seems to be that human's are terrible at "guessing"
statistics, and the only statistics that are reliable as those
objectively gathered and subjected to rigorous statistical analysis.
You can often see this in human assessments of risk. It is
also in the nature of statistics that you get long runs of outliers, and
that only when you take a long view to you see the averages you
would expect. Again Humans are terrible with this, assuming
for example that a coin that comes up heads 10 times in a row
the assumption is that this is bias, and not a normal statistical
variation that you would expect in an infinite number of throws.
Given the diversity ratios that we see, it is unclear to me whether
we are observing a systematic effect or a statistical effect.
It would be useful to the discussion if we could see data on diversity
that was the output of a rigorous statistical analysis. i.e. one that
included a confidence analysis and not a simple average in a few
spot years.
- Stewart