4.20.2005 |  77.67% of the people who read this post will live to be 100

posted by Jon
12:06 | SAY SOMETHING |



I was exposed to a brief conversation Monday night about the tendency of people to make their decisions based on statistics (kind of like Ben Stiller's character in Along Came Polly, but less exaggerated). We love to be told by scientists and doctors and politicians what to do and how to do it. Some of us don't smoke because 5 million or so people have died from it, or because 90% of lung cancer cases in men and 80% in women are supposedly caused by smoking, or because 46% of male high school dropouts smoke. We are told that people in accidents who don't wear their seatbelts are more likely to die, and that red wine is good for your heart, or that it isn't, and that video games cause real-life violence. Now the CDC is saying that overweight people are actually at a lower risk of death than average-weighing people. Maybe this stuff is true, maybe it isn't, but I do know that the people who release these "facts" are always changing their minds. I'm tired of trying to keep up.