Jay Lund: I just want to say something along the lines of what our two commenters have made. Education is a very important part of modeling. It's probably the most important part of modeling, not only educating the stakeholders and the decision-makers and the modelers because it's all mutual. And engaging them. At some point, we have to keep the legitimacy of the technical enterprise as broad-based as we can in order for our work to be effective. And I'm as guilty as any modeler of just wanting to geek out and have fun with the problem.

But the real effectiveness of this kind of enterprise is when people trust you, and they only trust you if you talk with them. So we do have to have some way of making this kind of collaboratory have at least an ancillary function of engaging with people that don't know what they're talking about technically. But they're real people, and they're taxpayers, and they're voters. And they are responsible for some of the important functions, or they see themselves as responsible for some of the important functions that we're trying to model. And so this is a, you know, sort of a sociological conundrum that we face as individuals and as a group. So I think it's important for us to engage with them.

And one benefit of engaging with them productively is that they will ask better questions, just like we want to do modeling so that the decision-makers will ask better questions. That's probably the most important thing we should be doing -- helping them ask better questions. And the same applies to all of the stakeholders and the folks that I think would like to engage with us, but we have to figure out ways to engage with them without too many equations.

‪Jay Lund - ‪Google Scholar

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Davis