Science Quote by Jon Postel

Postel is drawing a bright line between the part of collaboration that sharpens ideas and the part that can quietly kill them. “Group discussion” is where a community discovers its constraints, surfaces edge cases, and stress-tests assumptions. It’s adversarial in the best sense: people argue, clarify, and refine. “Group drafting,” by contrast, is where the incentives flip. The goal stops being truth or usefulness and becomes text everyone can tolerate. You get prose engineered to avoid objections, not to make decisions. The result is often a document that looks legitimate because it’s consensus-made, but reads like it was written by committee because it was.

The context matters: Jon Postel wasn’t a management guru; he was a central figure in the early Internet, editing and shepherding RFCs that turned messy, distributed engineering into shared standards. In that world, ambiguity isn’t poetic, it’s a bug that ships to millions. Postel’s jab carries a protocol designer’s impatience with process theater: the meeting can be open, but the draft needs an owner. That doesn’t mean dictatorship; it means accountability, coherence, and speed.

The subtext is a philosophy of governance for technical communities: let many people contest the ideas, then let one (or a small few) make the language precise. Discussion generates legitimacy; drafting requires authorship. Postel is defending a version of collaboration that scales without dissolving into polite paralysis.