Would your work emails look conspiratorial?

Late last week, hackers broke into a server at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Britain and stole several private emails between leading climate researchers there and elsewhere.

After some of the messages were made public, global warming skeptics cited examples of correspondence that points to "an internal smear and data manipulation campaign targeting critics of catastrophic global warming predictions," according to the energy and tobacco industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute.

One of the researchers whose work was mentioned in a particular email that is being highlighted says that the messages are being taken out of context and that no such conspiracy is taking place.

If emails that you send to your colleagues about the inner workings of your research were made public, do you think they might look conspiratorial?

Bob Grant -- Associate Editor, The Scientist

Conspiratorial - no
Cast doubts on the conclusions of my and others publications - yes

Emails generally are "free verse", that is they are not structured and are stream of conscious. In this format there is more room to misinterpret the meaning of the email, especially if the previous emails and other modes of communication or shared events between the correspondents are not known, compared to a structured letter or formal communication. Consequently, nearly all emails can be easily misinterpreted when dealing with complex issues. Complicating the issue is that in personal emails is where we generally share our doubts and problems. These are generally (but not always) ironed out before a theory is presented to the public (general public or our peers).

Yes, in the sense that I and the email recipients would be the only people who actually knew what was being said (and sometimes even that is not true). You end up with ambiguity, and in the case of communications consisting of single sentences, wonderful chances for misinterpretation.

If my emails discussed how to massage statistical data to make my pet theory appear more plausible (eg http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1016&filename=1254108338.txt) or discussed how to avoid complying with FOI requests (eg http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=485&filename=1106338806.txt and http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=490&filename=1107454306.txt) or how to remove from office a critic of my work (eg http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=484&filename=1106322460.txt) then I might expect to be considered conspiratorial should they ever be seen.

And if I discussed possibly fraudulent activities regarding funding (eg http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1&filename=826209667.txt) now, that would get me into hot water.

BradleyICN000311324 reply is one of the best I have seen to put good perspective on how people should "read" emails. It would be easy to see sinister things in personal email exchanges if you had an agenda and use this to discredit the sender/recipient.

Whatever goes on in personal emails I would expect that the outcome from research and collaboration to be objective and aimed at testing the important hypotheses to take things forward

FredTS1011780 wrote:
If my emails discussed how to massage statistical data to make my pet theory appear more plausible (eg http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1016&filename=1254108338.txt)

This is not about massage of data, but on how to interpret these data so that meaningful conclusion can be drawn from it. If someone wants to massage data, one goes over the undesired out-layers and reasons them away as experimental artifacts. This mail discusses different models to explain different causes of global heating, specifically ruling out the contribution of solar fluctuations is mentioned.

FredTS1011780 wrote:or discussed how to avoid complying with FOI requests (eg http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=485&filename=1106338806.txt

There seems to be worry about a formal researcher possibly taking her own part of the work. Dirty competition appears to be feared.
The FOI should not be mentioned by the reviewer in the review process, but this can be seen from many different angles. It is a typical example of the modern peer-to-peer review, where scientist can suggest their peers.

FredTS1011780 wrote:and http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=490&filename=1107454306.txt)

This mail actually shows data massage, in careful selecting the lines of interesting data in accordance with their theory. It is common practice in science, but it opposes Wittgenstein's ideal philosophy where researchers do their utmost to disprove their theories.

FredTS1011780 wrote:or how to remove from office a critic of my work (eg http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=484&filename=1106322460.txt) then I might expect to be considered conspiratorial should they ever be seen.

It is a typical scientific-political debate on putting your own hypothesis forward with strength. It does not include specific actions against critcs, and it appears that the critical work can be debated. There is a lot of politics and beliefs in science.

FredTS1011780 wrote:And if I discussed possibly fraudulent activities regarding funding (eg http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1&filename=826209667.txt) now, that would get me into hot water.

This email could be understood in the context of the Russian situation. Russian scientist earns $ 100 per month or less, which is insufficient to live, even in Russia. They have to have a plan to survive, which in the ethics of the Western community would be regarded as corrupt or fraudulent.

So all in all, the email excerpts highlight how science works today.
It is not science at its best looking, with a lot of hypothesis finding mixed with personal and political and belief issues, but all from the within science. Importantly, there are no references to external factors influencing the community.
It does not show any evidence of external involvement. Considering that this is dirty laundry or a kind of black book, I would conclude that the scientist involved are no saints but also not corrupt.
I can imagine that outsiders might be shocked that science is not only on objective observation. But objective observation on itself does not generate hypothesis. Trying to understand how things work, involves a lot more, and requires at least some traces of belief in a hypothesis.

John

The only proper interpretation here is to discount ALL alleged stolen e-mails as meaningless. We already know that the people who released them did something underhanded. They could have been altered or made up from scratch. You can't trust the copies - you can't even trust the originals once the server has been hacked. I think anyone hit with such a political persecution would need to be wary that the remaining files had been modified with viruses, Trojan horses, worms, rootkits - for all I know the hackers could have tacked child pornography into hidden layers in the image files. These e-mails are not evidence of anything, and they don't deserve formal consideration.

If we don't believe that every mafia with a few thousand hacker-friendly Windows zombie computers should have carte blanche to shake down scientists and scientific institutes for money and favors whenever they want, then we need to set just such a hard line, and stick to it even when tempted and goaded to the contrary. That's our choice to make.

Good question.
When we do simulations, we actually manipulate the data in various ways to see how robust is the signal we got. Discussions get pretty hot on outliers when the data is scanty. There are those who argue that atleast some should be 'faulty' for the data to be genuine. We have had occasions when we repeated the experiments since the data looked too cute and found it prudent only to use the worse looking data (as in a time series).
Emails are personal. The globe is there for everybody to see and for heavens' sake get your own data. If I hear of Kilimanjaro ice vanishing and Himalayan glaciers actually enhancing their ice content, are these local variations in measurements and local variations in the phenomenology itself? I don't know.
Jimmy Carter, when he was the President of the USA, made a remark at a dinner in India once, forgetting the mike was on, that one should teach these Indians a lesson. There was an uproar and The Indian PM (I think it was Morarji Desai)was asked to comment. He simply said that it was a private internal conversation of a guest and we should ignore it. Are not emails private internal conversations, regardless of how they look? In fact, do we have a business to look?