I'll have to read those two. I agree with you 100%. Obviously the desire to know or predict the future could be beneficial in society on so many levels (and in some cases detrimental, depending on who would use it for selfish reasons and how that knowledge would be used).

You bring up a good point. But by just changing one word in how I view statistics, I believe, makes it fundamentally different to me. For me, statistics is more about calculating the risk or finding how likely something could occur, not how likely something will occur.