The following is an excerpt.
Genetic counselors – and their clients – tend to make a big to-do about numbers. We expend a disproportionate amount of energy calculating, reciting, and explicating numbers such as the complication rate of amniocentesis, the likelihood of Down syndrome, bayesian probabilities, or empirical recurrence risks. Sometimes we even pull them out of thin air. Those statistics pass through patients’ psychological, cultural, social, and educational filters and out of the other side comes a figure that more often than not bears little resemblance to the number that went in.
View the original article here: The Resta Paradox: On The Perception of The Likelihood of Rare Events
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