Why are statistics important?

Answer 1

Knowing about a single incident, or even a collection of incidents, does not necessarily allow you to understand the significance of your data. For example, the comedian George Burns smoked cigars and lived to be 100 years old. From this we might conclude that smoking cigars is very beneficial to your health. However, if we look at the statistics that describe cigar smokers as a group, we would obtain a different result.