The Stats of Life

Here is something that I have never been able to figure out, but the weird thing is that I think it might actually be important. It's all about stats.

How many times have you heard stats like: "1 in 5 people have cancer" or "1 in 3 people have been abused" or things like that? How many times? It seems like these kinds of stats are thrown around on the nitely news like it's no big deal. But I got to thinking the other day. If all of these are true, wouldn't that mean that all of us are going to have like 4 or 5 of these things? Can this really be true?

Ok, stay with me on this. If there are five different studies out there about health and things that all say "1 out of 5 people have this..." - does that mean that I would have to have that? Five studies with 1 in 5 chances - wouldn't that mean that I would have one of those five? Maybe my math and logic is off a little bit, but there are like thousands of these studies! There are just thousands of these studies that have things that say "1 in 3 people will have this..." or "1 in 5 people have done this..."! Just thousands!

Wouldn't that mean that we would have to have some of these things? Like if you took a thousand of those studies and a room with thirty people - wouldn't the studies show that the people in the group would have like hundreds of these diseases or whatever? Am I making any sense here? Probably not.

I just think that there are a ton of statistics out there, and I don't know why we believe all of them blindly.

And I am not alone. 1 in 3 people agree with me.