Statistics is dangerous for life

Translated from Dutch. View the original post here

Statistics is not about you! That's the lesson.

Sometimes people are told that they have a disease in which the survival rate is only a few percentages. The fact that they hear that regardless of the disease they have can already be a death sentence in itself. The thought is going to live a life of their own and they're dead before they even know it..

so. This statistic does not apply to you.

It's a construct. These are all figures often from another country made about people other than you are. By people who don't know you. You are your own. You're not a statistic.

The best story I read about this was about an American CEO who got his son an incurable disease. This boy would die. From this disease no one had ever been cured. His father turned his life around and decided that this would not happen. He did everything he could up to and including a study of medicine. The boy is so far the only survivor of this disease.

Statistics, of course, by definition, is a method of generalizing and generalizing. And certainly useful to make policy. If you have a good idea of how large groups of people behave and relate.

But it also takes the individual out of the story.

Famous quote: A child in a deep pit is a tragedy. The newspapers are full of days about the rescue of the boy or girl.

100,000,000 children starving is just statistics..


#voormyrthevanpapa : lesson x

• The plan: https://yoo.rs/voormyrthevanpapa-0-1611673066.html?Ysid=1
• I'm trying to formulate 48 life lessons for my 18-year-old daughter.
  (Without pretending to be right.)
  Birthday on 2 May. So I'm in a hurry.
• For: @Eva Myrthe
• Comment is greatly appreciated so that I can make the post better for @Eva Myrthe
• I've decided not to publish every lesson anymore and to keep some private for @Eva Myrthe . Hence my irregular posts.