> Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > That said, I readily admit that as IETF attempts to be hospitable to a more > > diverse set of people (which is what we need to be doing), it may paradoxically > > require us to be less diverse in what we as a community consider acceptable > > behavior. > I think your point here is important. More and more science is emerging > that shows crowd diversity is critical to creating novel, optimal and > widely useful solutions. As a IETF Guides co-lead, I've received > feedback at certain IETFs from newcomers that were not interested in > returning due to some of the dialog they were exposed to, which is > certainly not ideal. Granting that this is not really my area of expertise, I have to question whether crowd diversity studies are particularly relevant to the IETF case, which IME doesn't really have the properties of a crowd. And even if they are, it has been argued (You Are Not a Gadget, etc.) that "the wisdom of crowds" works quite well on optimization problems but isn't espectially effective on coming up with solutions in the first place. It seems to me that studies on team diversity would be closer to the mark. Such studies report a wide range of resuls as to the effect of diversity. And while most of these have focused on paid teams (management, engineering, scientific, etc.), there have been some that considered volunteer groups that don't appear to me to be significantly different. The bottom line is that the functioning of teams is and likely will remain a bit of a mystery, our huge dependency on them notwithstanding. And this certainly matches my experience in the IETF. Just as one example among many, I've seen instances where a well functioning group was brought low by unnecessarily vitriolic pushback that another group would have simply ignored. And I don't think diversity was a factor in this. > A counter argument or technical issue should be able to stand upon its > foundational logic and merits regardless of how it is presented. In > other words, rude arguments should have no greater weight than nicely > phrased ones. I think sometimes people seem to struggle to create terse > statements that aren't simultaneously considered rude, but I don't > believe terse and polite are mutually exclusive. Antifragility is definitely a desireable quality, and ideally the tone should not matter. But there's the ideal and then there's the real. Ned
