I want statistics on the outcomes for people who ignore statistics, people who take statistics much less seriously than their gut, people who take gut much less seriously than their statistics, and people who ignore their gut.
My gut feeling is that the outcomes for people who use their gut over statistics are significantly better. And if you showed me statistics that they aren't, I'd trust my gut on it.
If your gut feeling was accurate, no one would be on vaccines and we'd all have smallpox, we'd only invest in feel-good companies that have no chance at profit, and communications systems (which entirely depend on statistics) just wouldn't work.
"The German Statistik, first introduced by Gottfried Achenwall (1749), originally designated the analysis of data about the state, signifying the "science of state" (then called political arithmetic in English). It acquired the meaning of the collection and classification of data generally in the early 19th century."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_statistics
This correlation suggests that as soon as people stopped using their gut feelings smallpox evolved to take advantage.
The problem is that people want things to be all one way or another. The reality is that in some cases it's better to trust your intuition, and in some cases it's better to trust science. It isn't so much that science is wrong, it's just that people will try to misapply toy models often generated for a different range of initial conditions. These toy models end up producing worse answers than well trained intuition.
My gut feeling is that the outcomes for people who use their gut over statistics are significantly better. And if you showed me statistics that they aren't, I'd trust my gut on it.