The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman (2015)

There are a number of things I like about the monty hall problem. There's the history, the unintuitiveness, the subtle easy-to-screw-up nature of probability problems, the calculation, the sociology, and the overconfidence of wrong experts. Most of all, it's the calculation vs intuition that I like. You can do the calculation, or run simulations and prove correctness. In fact, it would be much harder to be so widely wrong now that any statistician can so easily just code up a…

Wow, I knew about the problem and was vaguely aware that it had generated some controversy amongst statisticians but I had no idea about the insanely arrogant and obnoxious (not to mention wrong) abuse Marilyn had received from the "intellectual elite". I have little sympathy for the "ambiguous question" defence. Not only is Marilyn's interpretation grammatically valid, it just wouldn't make sense in the context of the game show for the presenter (who knows where the goats are) to ever…

I recall this happening as a high school kid. I couldn't tell from the arguments who was right or wrong, so I wrote a simulation, which was fairly easy, and proved her right. I found it interesting that writing an simple program in this case could confirm the right answer easily whereas having a PHD in math was no guarantee that you would reason it out correctly