Climategate

This only demonstrates that the subject is extremely complex. I was watching Question Time and found Melanie Phillips' analysis of the emails as absolutely ludicrous. I listened on Radio 4's PM to an analysis of what one particular email meant in context by a knowable scientist and was perfectly happy with the explanation.

I often find in my own line of work, which is the relatively simple area of computer science and software development, that a phrase taken out of context on a complex system can be interpreted in many and varied ways by non-experts. When writing support emails to clients about my software products I have learned to take great pains to explain in overly-detailed ways what something is doing and why; if I do not, it is unlikely that the information will be effectively communicated.

However, when emailing colleagues I instead use short and terse emails. These would be baffling to non-experts and I write like this in the knowledge that I am talking privately to experts who will understand the nuances of what I am saying.

This has always been the case. If it were not, technical discourse would become impossibly tedious.

We can learn this from the past. Often the private correspondence of great people is published after their death; a good demonstration of how it is possible to misunderstand professional correspondence is to use Isaac Newton's private letters to show that he falsified his gravitation theories.

While gravitation remains a theory to this day, it has such a body of evidence that it is a fact in all but rigorously-scientific-nomenclenture, much as with natural selection and evolution.

The example of Newton's private correspondence is used by carbonfixated.com to great effect. This unknown blog came to my attention by the myriad of articles linking to this very posting.

http://carbonfixated.com/newtongate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-rena...