At the heart of contemporary data science and any discussion of the algorithms it employs stands modern probability theory. The modern theory of probability is usually dated to the second half of the seventeenth century; its emergence is attributed to the famous PascalFermat correspondence of 1654, and its completion is heralded in Jacob Bernoulli’s Ars Conjectandi (published in 1713 but written and discussed long before). Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability famously proposed that the sudden growth of the theory of probability happened then and so rapidly because of a profound conceptual change in the way people thought about chance and evidence (1975 2006). In short, the modern theory of probability emerged when it did because only then did anyone possess the modern concept of probability. Others, notably Garber and Zabell, argue against Hacking’s view, showing that many of the concepts that he believes constitute the core of the modern notion of probability were present long before the mid-seventeenth century. They instead favor a psychological or sociological explanation for the heightened interest in games of chance at that time (1979). Only with the development of the mathematical theory of games of chance, along with the natural extension of the concept of probability to include these mathematical theories, did the rigorous and numerical theory of anything probabilistic emerge. I will not take a stand on this fascinating historical debate. Rather, I wish to argue that a more original and profound innovation was at work. It is found not in the new and visibly successful theory of one kind of probability that moved games of chance from the fringes of the notion of probability to its center, but in the radical new philosophical teaching on Fortuna and Virtu first adumbrated in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli and then in the works of the youth movement he inspired, modern philosophy. In short, the spirit of algorithmic judgment is nothing algorithmic, mathematical, or even scientific, but rather “a wholly new” moral and political teaching that bewitched at first a few minds, then nations, and eventually the whole world.