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The Full Monty
Nov. 15th, 2012 08:19 amMy brain was stuck twiddling around with the Monty Hall problem again this morning.
I worked out the mental mechanics of it a while back (and I think I wrote it out here, somewhere), but I was still curious as to WHY do people still persist in arguing that there is a 50/50 chance of winning.
Heh. After reading that one section in the wiki file, I think the answer to that question is a matter of simple semantics rather than a question of cognitive psychology. People keep thinking, "the chances of there being a goat or a car behind the door," is the same as saying, "the chances of winning the car by changing your selection." Those are two different problems.
I came across a couple comments by some folks to a YouTube video on Aspergers that I was watching, and it's been making me think quite a lot harder about semantics and how much of a rush figuring out semantics is for me, whereas semantics might have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the actual conversation for most other people. Again, most other people are about the human, emotional connection when communicating, rather than the rhetoric, so they don't tend to go into analytical detail (like I tend to do) when it comes to communicating. They take things at some sort of hybrid gist and gestalt value, assign emotional responses, and then go from there without analyzing it too deeply.
( The quotes I came across )
The Monty Hall problem is confounding to most people on two levels: probability AND semantics. You have to be able to delve pretty deep into both in order to really wrap your mind around the correct answer, and most people do not tend to delve deep into either subject matter, let alone both.
I worked out the mental mechanics of it a while back (and I think I wrote it out here, somewhere), but I was still curious as to WHY do people still persist in arguing that there is a 50/50 chance of winning.
Heh. After reading that one section in the wiki file, I think the answer to that question is a matter of simple semantics rather than a question of cognitive psychology. People keep thinking, "the chances of there being a goat or a car behind the door," is the same as saying, "the chances of winning the car by changing your selection." Those are two different problems.
I came across a couple comments by some folks to a YouTube video on Aspergers that I was watching, and it's been making me think quite a lot harder about semantics and how much of a rush figuring out semantics is for me, whereas semantics might have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the actual conversation for most other people. Again, most other people are about the human, emotional connection when communicating, rather than the rhetoric, so they don't tend to go into analytical detail (like I tend to do) when it comes to communicating. They take things at some sort of hybrid gist and gestalt value, assign emotional responses, and then go from there without analyzing it too deeply.
( The quotes I came across )
The Monty Hall problem is confounding to most people on two levels: probability AND semantics. You have to be able to delve pretty deep into both in order to really wrap your mind around the correct answer, and most people do not tend to delve deep into either subject matter, let alone both.
