Probabilities

I have been reading The Canon by Natalie Angier in which she explains in delightful language the enduring fundamental of scientific thinking. She begins with concepts and approaches to thinking about the world. An understanding of statistics is one of the fundamental things that people who buy lottery tickets and so on, do not seem to have a good grasp of. Behaviour during the pandemic also seems indicative of people thinking with their hopes rather than probabilities. Maybe because of access to so much information because of the internet, highly improbably incidences get amplified and distort people’s perception of reality.