monty hall enlightenment (11. 733)

Via Quantum of Sollazzo, we are invited to revisit the sometimes fiercely and vehemently counterintuitive probability puzzle based on the TV game show Let’s Make a Deal. Though it is easy to demonstrate that one should always switch doors, have a two out three chance of winning rather than staying with one’s original choice, there are an array of perfectly unreasonable factors that at play that make people stick with their original bet and believing the odds to be even, whereas they’re only ⅓ as likely to not walk away with a prize goat, the dilemma and its trenchant nature says a lot about human bias and errors of commission. Even mathematicians and physicists come to the wrong conclusion until being disabused (sometimes it never takes as our original selection is endowed by magical thinking and those times when we switch and lose cling to our minds more) by brute repetition or by positioning themselves as host and realising that certain protocols are followed in games of chance. This is a specific and tenacious example which illustrates our withering capacity for judgment but I wonder if there are analogous other odds that we similarly misunderstand.