Poem: Availability Heuristic

"Availability Heuristic" is a poem by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The poem was originally published in the January 2017 Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. Classroom discussion the poem may spark includes comparing and contrasting mathematical and statistical roles and language for generality, looking up and discussing the meaning of the title (a phenomenon identified by Kahneman and Tversky in 1973), exploring the"someone, somewhere" idea of Utts' Seeing Through Statistics, or discussing how many people have poor intuition with the birthday problem ("probability of at least one match in the room") because they confuse it with the birthdate ("probability at least one match with ME") problem (see letters in the summer 2014 Teaching Statistics).