Reliability and risk assessment becomes more and more important as a background for decision making in the field of flood defence design in the Netherlands. In this development reliability experts have to cooperate with a large group of hydraulic, geotechnical, structural and mechanical engineers. This cooperation leads to many discussions related to the exact meaning of both input and output of the failure probability calculations. Additionally, there are from time to time also discussions with civil servants, politicians and the public in general. In those discussions confusion often seems to be a major key word. This holds in particular for the debates on so called epistemological or knowledge uncertainties. This paper summarises a number of the discussions that have taken place in the past few years and hopefully contributes to a gradual better communication on this difficult but important issue.
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