Skeptics deny the direct apprehension of things and the mediation by our senses then caste everything into doubt. Their origins want to create a mind that's not deceived by appearances and guide someone to ataraxia. This process often starts from something that appears clear and by continually reminding oneself that nothing is clear a person can see through the charade.
This attitude is also the same in statistics when we give a probabilistic measure that something is the case or it is not the case. The first step is to see what is in question as possibly true or false. The Skeptics practiced this, too, but only to see this dual possibility as a reason to reject either case at the same time. Yet the statistician role is to use probability to conclude whether something is likely or not by the end of the calculations.
But the truth of a statistic is never fully granted and either possibility is still granted some validity. Nothing is truly apprehended in this way in comparison to a truth we find indisputable. The statistic also undermines any knowledge of causality. For example, in some philosophies the belief in God asserted with no possibility for God to be false. Furthermore, in these philosophies the creation of our existence is also given as an absolute reality. While there are observations within this system that are 'indifferent'--as the the Stoics say--there is no place for chance in the important matters.
A statistical view or a skeptical view do require a basis of thought underlying them. This is obvious when a statistical model is formed from metrics that do not relate to each other. Because of the formulaic nature of statistics even poorly formed metrics can be calculated and assessed by calculation. What is most troubling is often statistics is used in cases where something is not clear to us. Why would we bother with all the work to calculate the probability of, for instance, the likelihood a person will die or live indefinitely? Because statistics is used to clarify something we do not have a grasp on, it is hard to judge if the criteria of the model is rigorous or even coherent.
Statistics are also largely generated from some type of measurement by a machine. These machines are not always precise or accurate. If we had a machine that grossly measured speed wrong, we could statistically surmise that there is no indication that the velocity of something falling increases with time as it falls to the earth. The skeptics are concerned about our biological machines--our senses. And variation bothers the skeptics and they often use the diversity of thing of a particular genus as grounds to reject forming fixed opinions about them even if we see them clearly with our eyes.
Yet the conclusions made from statistics reject a mindset that values concrete reality just as the skeptics do. Statistics differs from skepticism in that its goal is to assent or reject some observed experience. Both ways of thinking do not organize experience in a coherent framework of thinking derived from first principles. Statistical expertise would largely fit into Aristotle's explanation of 'working knowledge' rather than 'actual knowledge'. 'Actual knowledge' is knowing the causes behind experience. Statistics can have some agency in our decision making but we can not fully deduce from it because it lacks the rigor of known premises. Statistics makes a recommendation on what is real or not but does not have a framework for reality. The distrust of reason is implicit in statistics as it is in skepticism.
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