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
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