Chances are...

In his marvelous book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, Peter L. Bernstein tells the story of a Soviet statistics professor in World War II who refused to go to his neighborhood bomb shelter during the frequent German air raids.

“There are seven million people in Moscow,” he would tell his concerned friends. Why should a bomb pick him, specifically, out of that crowd?

Then one night he showed up in the shelter, to the surprise of his neighbors. “There are seven million people in Moscow,” he explained, “and one elephant. Last night they got the elephant.”

Our reaction to identical probabilities can be distinctly colored by subjective interpretations. The probability of the professor being hit by a bomb was about the same as the elephant being hit by a bomb. But where the professor felt statistics were on his side as one of seven million, the elephant was unique. And always, someone has to be the elephant.

“We pay excessive attention to low-probability events accompanied by high drama,” Bernstein writes, “and overlook events that happen in routine fashion.”

(me dio fiaca buscar la cita exacta del libro, así que publico esta referencia sacada de aquí)