On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/10/20 Ryan Delaney ryan.delaney@gmail.com:
This is an important point. A proper application of IAR should go
unnoticed
-- at least, by everyone except the "rules are rules" folks who memorize
the
laws and are ready to deliver citations for all your transgressions
whenever
you step a quarter inch out of line. If what you did was a good idea and everyone agrees it was a good idea, nobody should even notice that it was against the rules or that IAR was necessary. Explicitly announcing that
you
are invoking IAR rarely accomplishes more than triggering "rules are
rules"
responses and starting up another round of the perennial IAR
interpretation
debates. (See what has happened in this very thread?)
In an ideal world, that is how things would work. We don't live in an ideal world. What actually happens is people complain that you having followed the rules and never get as far as reading your explanation.
You're right-- we don't live in an ideal world, and people often do insist on inappropriately citing policy as a response to a reasoned argument. You might notice that usually the people who do this do it on the basis of arguments rather like the ones you are making in this thread.
-- causa sui