I meant coward in a more technical sense of a leader who won't stand by their decision and caves to pressure against it, rather than actual argument, and supported that position within my comment -- no different than saying poor judgment. It certainly was not an ad hominem argument, and not the main thrust of my comment.
I think that many readers are simply being uncharitable in interpretation because they don't like the message.
That aside, Ill omit such language in the future (though Ill leave it here for posterity sake).
If you smack someone or tweak their noise while talking, it doesn't matter if that was your 'main thrust'. Please just don't be uncivil here.
My decision was to try out an idea briefly and learn from it. We achieved that, and what we learned stabilized quickly, so the value of continuing was small. Meanwhile the cost of continuing was nonzero, and possibly high. It turns out that when you tell people you're going to try an idea out briefly just to see what happens, many hear "this is a permanent change". That was not intended, and I didn't want to do damage by allowing that misconception to linger for another several days.
I don't believe that accurately labeling poor behavior is uncivil, but I should have used a phrase like "showing cowardice" (more in line with my phrasing of poor judgment) to make it about the specific behavior (and faults with it), rather than a comment about you. I also will, in the future, pick less emotionally charged synonyms or phrases, because they're clearly distracting.
I appreciate the time you've taken to engage with me and explain your thinking (though I disagree with your choices still).
I hope you'll make a post explicitly about the experiment, so we can talk more fully (and civily!) about why I disagree with you.
I think that many readers are simply being uncharitable in interpretation because they don't like the message.
That aside, Ill omit such language in the future (though Ill leave it here for posterity sake).