Counter-Intuitive Science

Yeah, but asking badly phrased trick questions and then pretending like everyone didn't grasp the science is still bullshit.

The Monty Hall shows up in quite a few topics. The main one seems to be Statistics 101, with there also being the short (13 messages) A Deep Thought, Monty Hall, and Trisecting Angles.RAZD does not take part in either of those topics.The forum search process didn't find anything. I did an advanced Google search for "monty hall", specific to evcforum.net. To do such, enter >"monty hall" site:evcforum.net < into the Google search box (without the ><).Please, no replies to this message.Adminnemooseus

Ah - thanks, Panda!Again I did not read the exact words in front of my eyes. I glossed over that & thought all the jumping in the world wasn't opening that door. (He even put it in a little parenthesized clause which should have drawn my attention.)

---

- xongsmith, 5.7d

Quite funny you mention this since I stumbled upon the it's wiki page this week (apparently it's a well known phenomenon in statistics)

But the Mounty Hall problem gets even harder to explain when you get into the the fact that if the presentator knows where the car is or not has a direct impact on your chances of winning.Because imagine two almost identical scenario where you have a choice between door A,B,C. You choose A, the presentator opens door C and chose a goat in both scenarios.Now, if in the first scenario he knows where the prize is, then you should change your choice when asked to. While in the second (seemingly identical) scenario he does not know where the prize is, then it doesn't matter if you change or not, you'll have the same odds of winning.

Sorry for c-c-c-combo breaking right here, but I have to interject with another statement.Does anybody find the idea that the universe need not be governed by it's 'own' laws difficult to comprehend? An example I was thinking of was told to me by Dr. L Kormos of Lancaster University; saying that the general understanding among current-day phyicsits was that the universe was expanding at superluminal speeds. Imagine something is 'pulling' the universe in order for it to expand, then these pullers would not be inside the universe, hence not limited to the speed of light.

Why couldn't these imagined pullers be moving at subluminal speeds?Also, as has been discussed already, the universe's expansion does not involve mass and energy moving at superluminal speeds. That shouldn't be counter intuitive to most people that have "intuited" on the subject to some depth.

Nope The force is directly proportional to the inertial mass which results in the accelerations of dissimilarly masses objects due to gravity being the same.

Perhaps the students were simply contemplating the wrong bad law suit to file. Maybe subject A is mathematics while subject B is nursing.

It is an extremely important effect in sampling bias and has resulted in some very dubious statistical results as you can probably imagine by extrapolating on Dr A's example.Which was the Wiki page?

I am not sure I agree with this (I've not given it too much thought), but I think I have accidentally swamped Dr. A's thread with messages about Monty Hall.If it's ok with you, I'd rather leave this as an unfinished discussion than continue to usurp this interesting thread.

This is ill-defined - what happens when the presenter picks the car? Does the contestant win? Is the game replayed? Is the contestant unaware of what the presenter randomly picks (trivial case)?

After some deep memory thinking, I found it:Simpson's paradox - WikipediaThe school Dr.A was talking about seems to be Berkeley (see second example on the page)

If the presentator, not knowing where the car is, opens the door with the car. The probability your door has the car immediatly goes down to zero. But if, again not knowing, he opens the goat, then your door's probability does go up to 1/2.Now as I said, as much as some find the original version of the Mounty Hall problem counter-intuitive, those who will understand it will find this next situation equally hard to understand. (And inversely, those who think the initial case gives you a 50/50 chnce won't have any problem coming to the, correct this time, conclusion that it is 50/50 in the seond case)Marilyn Vos Savante explained this in here 06 column of ''Ask Marilyn ?'' (She was the one who made the Mounty hall problem 'famous' to the public when writing about it in here column in 1990)

I agree. But you still haven't given guidance on how these two results are to be combined. And this is not correct, unless you fully define the situation. How are you dealing with the case where the unknowing presenter opens the door to the car, and how does it affect your answer? You cannot just ignore it.Why am I so reminded of our exchanges where I claim not to understand what you mean, and you reply that I'm just being argumentative