jamesp:

That's a wonderful document - I shall treasure it.

There is, I think, a parallel with our climate alarmist friends. They have been living in their own world (I initially wrote "little world" but thought better of it - it may be a closed world, but it's not little) with their own little certainties (and their own silly jargon) for many years. But now - really for the first time - they're facing reality: that their "solutions" don't actually work. And they don't have the tools (an open mind, familiarity with uncertainty, willingness to learn, etc.) that would enable them to cope with that.

It would be amusing if it weren't so serious.

I started my professional life as a commercial lawyer working in an engineering context. I quickly learned that, to get things done, both I and the engineers had to abandon our "trade" jargon. It made me a better lawyer. And I think it made them better engineers. Although, to be fair, they didn't use much jargon: as CM says, engineers work in a commercial environment anyway.

Two observations:

1. The "one of three cases must apply" (paragraph 8) is amazingly similar to the "three possible views" I suggested in my email to NLP (see my post at 4:34 PM yesterday).

2. I particularly liked his concept of '"epistemologically challenged": a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff'. It reminds me of my favourite New Yorker cartoon. Two precious-looking men are in an avant-garde art gallery - one is saying to the other, "I know everything about art, but I don't know what I like".

Thanks again.