You seem to be imputing a lot of intent into my comment and then extending that to value judgements about smartness etc. I don't know what any of this has to do with what GP was saying. Yeah, there's a balance between questioning everything and questioning nothing, but there are a lot of bureaucratic things that happen in organizations and its generally a good thing to question certain things that don't have clear explanations, isn't there?
The doubt was simply about whether or not what GP is saying is smart behaviour to exhibit - Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people. is the same behaviour that you are saying you've experienced ( i.e you are talking about different things).
I'm not even questioning if you can tell if someone is smart or not - its just obvious that forcing decisions based off things that are not understood is not a smart thing to do - which..we all agree on -, and neither I nor GP were saying people should do this?
Maybe I could've phrased it better but my whole point was GP says X, you are saying Y. I think there is a distinction between X and Y and I doubt that the people GP is talking about are the same people you are talking about (hence, smart as you put it vs smart as GP put it).
I see you don't understand the point, and you're doing that thing of imposing on me trying to help you understand it, which seems highly unlikely to work. Going back, again, to your quote:
> I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it
And yet that is quite simply exactly what I have seen multiple times in multiple organisations on multiple continents, but for some reason you "doubt" this because it doesn't fit what you think of as "smart behaviour" when spelled out like that, and then spend ages arguing that now there's no intent to this comment? Or any of the others . . .
I am going to do what I always end up doing in such situations, of just giving up and walking away, which every normal person does way earlier in proceedings. Ils sont fou ces physiciens.