Katy, I find your compelling reasoning to be parallel to arguments used about medical testing. Take breast or prostate cancer, for example. Sometimes medical authorities evaluate statistics and decide that routine testing in some circumstances is uncalled for, that the negative consequences of false positives and unnecessary treatment outweigh the benefits of detecting a rare cancer.

More lives are improved by stopping the testing, or so say the numbers.

That’s all well and good, I’m sure, until you’re the one whose cancer was caught too late, and you’re the one who will die early when routine testing would have saved you.

I think sometimes statistical analysis overlooks important human questions.

Jim