> Armed with a small amount of data about information over a population on average gives you absolutely no information about any specific case That's akin to s

> Armed with a small amount of data about information over a population on average gives you absolutely no information about any specific case That's akin to saying that being armed with all of medical science's knowledge about appendicitis gives one absolutely no information about any specific case. There's a valuable point buried deeply there (every case is different), but the statement itself is just plain wrong. A physician or surgeon must have reasons to treat a specific instance of appendicitis differently than the statistically expected range of instances; a person would have reasons to treat a random green or blue person differently than the statistically expected range of persons. > the green-skinned child gets special treatment to bring them up to scratch, where the blue-skinned child gets written off as "she's achieving less well because blue-skinned children do". Economically speaking, investing resources in bringing green children up to scratch has a higher rate of return than doing the same for blue children. That really does mean that spending resources on the latter is wasting them on average (although certainly not in specific cases, where it really is a good investment). So, do you impoverish the world by wasting resources or do you enrich it by prudently investing them?