“Probability is too important to be left to the experts. […] The experts, by their very expert training and practice, often miss the obvious and distort reality seriously. […] The desire of the experts to publish and gain credit in the eyes of their peers has distorted the development of probability theory from the needs of the average user. The comparatively late rise of the theory of probability shows how hard it is to grasp, and the many paradoxes show clearly that we, as humans, lack a well grounded intuition in the matter. Neither the intuition of the man in the street, nor the sophisticated results of the experts provides a safe basis for important actions in the world we live in.”

—  Richard Hamming

Source: The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers (1991), p. 4 [emphasis in original]

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Richard Hamming 90
American mathematician and information theorist 1915–1998

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