> any passage could be interpreted that way through a sufficiently flexible framework (and enough imagination), it was difficult to say what evidence would prove the claim wrong

The field of social research in a nutshell

Statistics has been great for social sciences is the foundation of any rigor in the field. There are many 'valid' statements about society that can be drawn using statistics.

At an individual level, those statistics are fairly meaningless. You can bucket yourself into any number of statistical groupings but being a representative datapoint or an outlier doesn't really explain nor does it solve anything.