开会，是越开越会，还是越开越不会?

There are some people whom I will just not understand.

For people widely regarded with high calibre, to say the things that they have said was just unbelievable to me. Yes, in their own words, they can make stupid comments, but to dismiss some method as pure lazy, to me, is just disrespectful. Random sampling and random stratified sampling are well known and well researched statistical sampling methods. But in their words, “randomness is a lazy way to do things“. I didn’t expect someone of that calibre to come up with that, especially someone who is doing research to discredit fellow academics’ work. If they are not sure what random sampling and random stratified sampling mean, they can always google, like what they always ask us to do. Never should they conclude in such a harsh manner – it’s simply disrespectful and irresponsible. It’s not about making stupid comments, though one would think that people with that responsibility and education should say something intelligent. It’s about making respectful and responsible comments.

And those people of the high calibre always think that things are easy. All you need to do is to read and can reproduce work of the same quality. That’s precisely what they said when they told us that we can read reports by practitioners and produce similar reports of that quality. Don’t they know about the wealth of experience and expertise that these practitioners have which we lack? If things are that easy, why don’t the companies out there hire interns or the like to read up and produce the reports? Why do they pay huge amounts to hire those with qualifications? It’s because of their experience and skills. And these practitioners have lots of resources to do their work and they even go to the interview the companies’ personnel. But what have we got? What skills and experience do we have? Well.. All I could say that someone is making some comment too simplistically… And they don’t understand why we don’t take to their view…

It’s true that one should take ownership of their work. Take ownership of your work; take a stance and defend it – that’s what our team was told. But how do you take ownership of work that you do not know what you are doing. That’s simply the case with us. With the people up there not knowing why they are doing certain things, how are we in the position to know what stance to take – and to even defend it?

Life has to go on I guess.. As someone has said, we will get smarter – from learning how to deal with these people…