“Their direct experience means nothing to the actual reality.”

This is how the enlightenment ends, in a nutshell. Over-confident denial of reality, supported by misleading statistics and buggy models.

“Since we’re awash in this contemporary ocean of speculation, we forget that things can be known with certainty, and that we need not live in a fearful world of interminable unsupported opinion. But the gulf that separates hard fact from speculation is by now so unfamiliar that most people can’t comprehend it.” — Michael Crichton