Senior wizards are wise

Doing some academic writing about a thing that made me very mad when I heard about it quite a while ago. Mad mostly because it was so disappointing - someone was proposing a solution to a serious problem that jived very much with an idea I wanted to propose in my dissertation, but they were doing it in a totally misguided way that seemed like it was guaranteed to fail. I talked with my advisor back then, and she agreed with my assessment of the bad proposal, but cautioned me to not publish the rather strongly worded blog post that I'd been writing up. She thought I'd just end up offending the (famous) person I was mad at and nuke my chances of building allies in a community of people whose goodwill I'd be needing in the future when I was ready to make my own ideas happen.

In hindsight, she was totally right. Now I'm in a much better place mentally and knowledge-wise to not just critique that proposal, but to also recognize the ways in which it could be a big step towards a real solution, and to offer not just a (justified) harsh critique, but constructive criticism with suggestions for improvements.

This doesn't mean that I'll never again rip apart someone's ideas on the internet while angry at them. Some "ideas" deserve to be shot with a very big cannon and without warning. But this sort of thing makes me glad that I'm often too lazy to blog about things when they're still hot news.