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One winter night during one of the many German air raids on Moscow in World War II, a distinguished Soviet professor of statistics showed up in his local air-raid shelter. He had never appeared there before. "There are seven million people in Moscow", he used to say. "Why should I expect them to hit me?" His friends were astonished to see him and asked what happened to change his mind. "Look", he explained, "there are seven million people in Moscow and one elephant. Last night they got the elephant." [...]. What the professor experience really illuminates, is the dual character that runs throughout everything to do with probability: past frequencies can collide with degrees of belief when risky choices must be made.