You're right about the prevalence of guesswork about probability along laypeople (and everyone until Pascal was essentially a layperson). The Emergence of Proba

You're right about the prevalence of guesswork about probability along laypeople (and everyone until Pascal was essentially a layperson). The Emergence of Probability is a very interesting book on this topic that sketches how statistica emerged from an odd mix of intuitive advances, from places like medicine and alchemy where before statistics you had to guess whether your medicine worked.