Stories and intuitions give us hope: the most scarce and valuable resource known to man.

If you believed only in the market research and the statistical analysis of, well, of anything really, then you'd soon give up. You'd lose hope.

Statistically the universe is empty, and even apparently solid matter is so much empty space that any actual "real" substance you might perceive is so statistically insignificant as to be meaningless.

Statistically (as measured by their behaviour) most people are effectively morons and all the advances of human civilisation have only lead to more horrific ways of torturing ourselves and our planet.

It is the stories and intuitions that are our lives; the events we perceive, and the insights we receive, that make living worthwhile, not the statistical analysis. Meaning can only be found in people because people are what gives meaning to matter, meaning itself has meaning only in the context of intelligence, emotion, and spirit. Without these things matter is just matter.

When my elder sister was 13 she wrote a story for an English class about some scientists who performed subtle and disturbing experiments with spiders. They finally succeeded in teaching the spiders to respond to basic commands: forwards, backwards, left, right.

Then they successively removed individual legs from the trained spiders, until finally the legless bodies of the spiders were left motionless on the lab bench.

Which experiments proved the theory; that when you remove the legs from a spider it goes deaf.