On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 06:32:13PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > An alternative is to throw out the member who is youngest. No, that would again ensure stagnancy in the group, with the older members being permanently appointed. > Or use birth month to throw out Likewise. > -- the members born later in the > year should be thrown out first. Or people born in odd number years > go first. "Odd number years" doesn't give a complete ordering; what happens once all the members are born in even numbered yearS? > All thse are equally silly. And selectingone algorithm or the > other with no regards to if they have any bearing on the solution, or > have any rationale for actually improving things seems exactly to be an > argument in favour of novelty. The fallacy of argument from novelty is "foo is new and different, therefore it's better". The fallacy of tradition is "foo is the way we've always done things, therefore it's better". Neither is the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is that because it's likely there are better ways of doing things than the way we're doing things now (ie, "though foo is the way we've always done things, there probably exists some bar that is better than foo"), we should look at new ways of doing things in the hopes that we'll find one of them that's better that we can then incorporate into our traditions. That's not a "let's replace Ian, Manoj or Anthony and everything will be better" -- which without any particular person being selected to do so would be an appeal to novelty; it's a process change to make it easy for the technical committee to try new things with the aim of finding better ways of doing things, and assumes that you trust that the committee won't stick with new ideas that are worse than traditional ideas, and that the DPL will tend to select new people whose ideas have a history of being better than purely random selection. > Why is no one responding to the fact that the last ingestion of > new blood did not solve the problems? It didn't solve the problems; but it did reduce them. According to the tech-ctte page, 60% of the ctte's decisions have been made in the since Andi, Steve and I joined which represents about 25% of the ctte's life... Like I've said earlier, that doesn't count issues that have been punted one way or another, though my impression is there's been an improvement there too. I don't believe there's been a single instance of the ctte deciding that an issue brought to them is entirely out of their remit in the past few years, in particular. Cheers, aj
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