[slavik81]

Nothing he said contradicts the data. What he showed was what you miss when you treat a distribution as if it were a single data point.

A younger person is more likely to be irresponsible than an older person, but that is just an average. There are many young people who are responsible, and to disregard the impact of such a policy would have on them would be disregarding important data.

More to the point, data doesn't make decisions. It gives you the ability to make positive statements, i.e. how the world is or what the result of some policy would be. Normative statements, i.e. how the world should be or what should the goal of our policy be, depend on your personal subjective values. Like, how much you value freedom vs prosperity vs safety, etc.

[davesque]

I feel like only the most naive statistician would make any assumptions based solely on averages so it's kind of meaningless to point that out. The comment just seemed reactionary to me and was mostly anecdotal.