Do you feel that your own personal experiences outweigh statistical data?

Yes.
I’ve been a Type 1 diabetic for 30 years and I do not fit into compiled data for having that disease for the length of time that I’ve had it.
I never thought of these things that I’ve read as my fate anyway although I am pretty sure I will die at some point. XD

It depends on the subject matter. Wisdom accrues with age and experience, imo.

The problem as I see it is when people use their own personal experience to generalize about others and argue with statistical data. Anyone’s experience can be true for them but it doesn’t mean it is The Truth.

Sometimes.

Statistics can be manipulated. Statistics are very useful though as a check on how we think about things. Sometimes personal experience is a very narrow perspective.

No, what may be true for a specific (you) does not lead the to general (the rest of population)!

No. I actually know how statistics work and confirmation bias has no basis in truth.

All the time and I do often believe my own experience on certain matters more because statistics on those things are often straight up lies.

@ARE_you_kidding_me Ain’t that the truth?

I believe in data and statistics. In the long run that is they way to bet. But there are always outliers and woe be to you if you’re one of them.
When I had my annual “complete” physicals my GP never ordered a PSA blood test for me because a “European study” showed for men 55 and younger screening PSA tests would only save 1–3 men in 1000 from prostate cancer. Unfortunately the same tests would result in many false positives resulting in unnecessary worry and testing.
When I finally had my first PSA at age 56 my PSA was 18 and 22 on the retest. (That is crazy high) The biopsy indicated 7 out of 12 cores cancerous with up to 70% involvement, Gleason 4+3. I was in serious trouble.
If my GP had checked the PSA box as part of my physical at 50, or even 45, we could have discovered this mess much earlier and maybe my treatment would have been less severe.
I was one of the 3 out of 1000. Lucky me.

Don’t panic. I’m fine now. The odds of me having a biochemical recurrence in 10 years are less then 3%. Big data tells me so.

Statistics are important, but too many people believe them without question and without investigating the source and the method. And while statistics may be valuable for revealing general trends, they don’t explain everything and they leave many nuances ignored. Personal experience doesn’t invalidate statistics, but nor do statistics nullify my experiences.

If you mean am I:

average,

often at variance,

slightly askew

with quite some weight in the tail

then I’d probably say that my four senior moments are my business.

It’s definitely subjective.

Statistically speaking, every US citizen has on average exactly 0.984 testicles.
For simplicity, we can round up to 1. ;-)

@LuckyGuy Great point!

@KNOWITALL You know I researched that. I tried to find a body part that differed between 2 groups. Then I used US Census figures for men and women. I’m sure I missed a small number of surgical cases but this is close enough to make the point. :-)

@LuckyGuy Well statistically the average American family has 2.5 kids, which is rather hard to do. Usually people don’t want half a kid. haha!

That’s why the Simpsons, have two kids, and a baby…Fun fact.

@MrGrimm Love fun facts!

Me too. It helps us understand the world around us.

I’ve beaten the odds more than once, I went against the stats and kicked the shit out of what I had tackled. I’m sure my guardian Angel said: “Oh Shit! Not again…”
https://youtu.be/V7dQ3FcVrP8Enjoy.
Hey nobody did music like Survivor.

In many cases, statistics, just give us probability.

Statistics don’t predict or decree anything about a single member of the group. They simply describe the whole group.

If 90% of the group thinks green is the best color, and you like blue, you don’t “outweigh statistical data.” You’re not better or worse or special. You’re simply in the other 10%.

You’re as much a part of the statistic as anybody.

That’s not true, necessarily. If you are rolling dice, or playing poker, you can beat the odds…

@MrGrimm888 Not going to happen in the long run.

Four semesters of of college level statistics.

You can’t beat the odds but you can get lucky once, twice or even ten times. If you keep sitting at the blackjack table you’ll be at zero eventually. Been there, done that.

Mmm hmm.

If you are rolling dice, or playing poker, you can beat the odds…

Nope. If the odds are 100 to one, sometimes the one comes up.

Otherwise, it would be described as 100 to zero.

Rarely, are odds 100–0.
I once read about a woman who survived a plane wreck, in a jungle. She was the only person who survived a passenger jet, that hit the side of a mountain. Probably going several hundreds of miles an hour. Then, she walked out of a jungle, in several days. The odds of her surviving the wreck, had to be astronomical. The odds of her surviving alone in a jungle, were probably pretty bad too…

I recently read she finally died. But she lived, if I remember correctly, into her 70’s…

Just to make things clear, odds and statistics are two different things, are they not?.

@janbb The way I remember it is odds and probability are two different ways of stating chances of something occurring and they are both terms used in statistics. I guess kind of like statistics is the main category of what is used mathematically to determine the chances.

Someone more versed in math will know better than I do, but I know I used statistics to figure odds and probabilities.

As far as the English language, people use odds and probability synonymously, but technically there is a difference. Using statistics is basically the same thing, it is statistics, or data, that give you the information for the chance of something occurring.

^Correct.