[...] he said he has wife and seven kids to support [...]
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My collegue is able to write emails a bayesian filter recognizes as Spam.

Pre-WWI Cambridge was a highly influential intellectual center in the first half 20th century with strong mathematical bias, due to people like Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Maynard Keynes. The later, famous for his leftist economic theory compiled in the opus magnum 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money'; did not only ground Roosevelts 'New Deal' or the European social market economy, but contributed with his 'Treatise on Probability' to modern probability what is now known as The logical Theory.
Keynes believes that that logical relations can be applied to probability events, so that fundamental problems of induction in probability (e.g. a black swan) can be solved. Probability is a degree of partially entailment of a hypothesis. From the observation of all swans, they were all white, follows partially and to a certain degree that all swans are white.
Interestingly Keynes does not believe that the degree of entailment is always computable, on the contrary probabilities might not comparable at all:
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0 represents impossibility, 1 certainty, and A a numerically measurable probability intermediate between 0 and 1; U, V, W, X, Y, Z are non-numerical probabilities, of which, however, V is less than the numerical probability A, and is also less than W, X, and Y. X and Y are both greater than W, and greater than V, but are not comparable with one another, or with A. V and Z are both less than W, X, and Y, but are not comparable with one another; U is not quantitatively comparable with any of the probabilities V, W, X, Y, Z.

Keynes 'A Treatise on Probability' 1921:39

Geeky!

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Half way on the road, I will now give a small review of the book "Philosophical Theories of Probability" by Donald Gillies

Departing from the origins of P() theory in the 17then century, the book opens the classical theory with the analogy of Laplace's demon.
For Laplace the world is inherently causal and mechanistic. God gave us limited senses and mind to fully understand the chain of causality a phenomena must obey, thus probability is a workaround to our limited capabilities to be able to uncover at least some mechanics and achieve some securities in an over-complex world. If a being, the said demon, would exist, which is able to observe the whole universe from begin of the world on, this being would be able to predict every future event in this universe and probabilities would not matter to him.

The classical theory views the world as a deterministic system, probabilities cannot be inherent in objective nature but must be relative to human ignorance.

Laplace believes that in an experiment we must regard every outcome as equally possible, since we cannot know better.
The classical formula therefore is P(E)= m/n. The probability of outcome E is the fraction of favorable cases to E, m, and all possible cases n.

We enter 20thies century probability with pre First World War England.
But frankly next week :-)