David Laibson Question (4/6/21)

During the discussion between David Laibson and Professor Goodman, Laibson was explaining the connections between behavioral economics and climate change. He stated that people have a very hard time understanding uncertainty, and that the predictions of scientists deal with bell curves that have larger tails than what the public expect (meaning more extreme events like extreme global warming and extreme global cooling). Because of this, Laibson posited that we have to understand climate change both on the point estimate (i.e. what the general public sees) but also on these extreme possibilities that we have to plan for. I thought that the previous arguments were really interesting, and I would love to have been able to ask David Laibson this follow-up question: how do modern-day scientists (or those making predictions) wrestle between reporting/analyzing the uncertainty that the general populace sees and understands as well as the uncertainty that academics and scientists focus on? https://www.labxchange.org/library/pathway/lx-pathway:b5121779-9f49-49db-93d9-80d5d67dadb3/items/lx-pb:b5121779-9f49-49db-93d9-80d5d67dadb3:lx_simulation:f10b9110?source=%2Flibrary%2Fclusters%2Flx-cluster%3AModernPrediction