The Simple Question that Stumped Everyone Except Marilyn vos Savant

It's quite fitting that Marilyn vos Savant's last name is French for "learned." Learning was easy for her considering she had an IQ of 228! Vos Savant was born in St Louis, Missouri, on August 11, 1946, to immigrants from Germany and Italy. Her parents never told her that she was exceptional. She once said in an interview: “Nobody really paid much attention to me. Like I said, mostly because she was a girl and I accepted it.” But the world would pay attention in 1985, when she topped the Guinness Book of World Records list as the world's smartest person. She was almost 40 years old when she rose to fame.

Parade magazine wrote a profile of her and her readers had so many

question

s for her that the magazine offered her a Sunday column, "Ask Marilyn," which exists to this day. In this column, she started one of the fiercest probability debates of the 21st century! In 1990, a reader asked him the following

question

: Suppose you are on a game show and you are given a choice between three doors. Behind one door there is a car, behind the others there are goats. You choose a door, say number 1, and the host, who knows what is behind the doors, opens another door, say number 3, which has a goat.

He tells you: "Do you want to choose door number 2?" Should you change your choice of doors? This is known as the Monty Hall problem, named after the former host of the game show Let's Make a Deal. Is he behind door number 1, door number 2 or door number 3? So, would you be better off moving from door number 1 to door number 2? I'll give you a few seconds to think about it. Most people assume that both doors have the same probability of holding the prize. So they don't see the benefit of changing. However, Vos Savant responded: “Yes; you should change The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance.” She received so much heat for this response and she couldn't have imagined the reaction that would follow.

She received thousands of angry letters and said 90% of them told her she was wrong. Scott Smith, a Ph.D. at the University of Florida, wrote: There is enough math illiteracy in this country that we don't need the world's highest IQ to spread further. Pity! Here's a letter from Professor Robert Sachs of George Mason University: You blew it! As a professional mathematician, I am very concerned about the general public's lack of mathematical skills. Please help by confessing your mistake and being more careful in the future.” Don Edwards of Oregon put it this way: Maybe women view math problems differently than men.

But actually, these people who sent him some not-so-nice letters were completely wrong. Changing doors DOES increase your chance of winning. When you first choose door number 1, there is a 1/3 chance that the prize will be behind that one. The other two doors together have a 2/3 chance of winning. Then the host helps you by opening the door that they KNOW is a loser. This improves your chances of the prize being behind door 2. Because door 2 should have the rest of the possibilities. It went from having a 1 in 3 chance to a 2 in 3 chance for the prize since the host leaked the bad door, door number 3 for you.

Trading doubles your chances of winning. Or put another way: I will choose door number 2 and thanks for the additional 33.3%. The outcry against vos Savant was so extreme that she felt compelled to devote several more columns to explaining her logic. She noted that the benefits of change can be seen by playing the six games that exhaust all possibilities. This depends on the host always opening a door with a goat. Charting all the possibilities shows that there is a better chance of winning if you switch than if you stay. It is easier to understand the problem if there are many more doors.

Let's say you choose 1 door out of 100. Then the host eliminates 98 doors that he knows don't have a prize behind them. That leaves two doors: the one you chose and the only one left. Are you changing now? Absolutely. When you first chose, you only had a 1/100 chance of getting the right door. The odds of it being behind other doors were 99/100. The host then filters the options by eliminating 98 bad doors that it knows do not have the prize. This is to your advantage because it leaves the door remaining with the rest of the odds, a 99/100 chance of having the car.

Some finally admitted they were wrong. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology worked on the problem, and MIT's Seth Kalson later admitted: You're actually right. "My coworkers had a lot of fun with this problem and I dare say most of them, including me at first, thought I was wrong!" To which she responded: “Thank you, MIT. I needed that!" And that math professor I mentioned earlier who sent that not-so-friendly letter? Professor Sachs later admitted and wrote: “After taking the foot out of my mouth, I am now eating humility pie. I promised as penance to respond to all the people who wrote to punish me.

It has been an intense professional embarrassment." Our biggest mistake is assuming that two options mean a 50-50 chance of something happening. This makes sense if we don't have any other information. If I choose two people and ask them who would win a tennis match and you know nothing about them, you have a 50% chance of getting it right. But if I say that player A just started playing sports yesterday while player B won Wimbledon, this would probably change their choice. Information matters. Just like when the game show host KNEW which door was a goat. They weren't opening a random door.

The general idea is that the more you know, the more decisions informed can take. Vos Savant once said, "People we think are very intelligent are not necessarily so." She explained that they are more likely to be educated or experienced than intelligent. What do you think prevents people from achieving their intellectual potential? She has criticized compulsory schooling because she says students learn passively; They sit there and are told what to believe instead of learning to think independently. She even went so far as to say, “I would prefer there to be no compulsory schooling.” As for herself, she never graduated from college and dropped out of Washington University in St.

Louis after two years to begin a career in investments before following her true passion: writing that led to her famous answer to the baffling problem. to the world. There is another way to learn that doesn't involve sitting in a classroom. Brilliant is an interactive online learning platform that helps you improve your skills in math, science, and computing. Speaking of the Monty Hall problem, my sponsor Brilliant has an entire course on probability, which explores the misconceptions that can arise, including that famous riddle. If you ever get stuck, don't worry, you can refer to the explanation for more information.

There is something for

everyone

, whether you are a beginner or just want to improve what you already know. You can solve puzzles with science through their Scientific Thinking course. One of my all-time favorites is their Logic course, which helps improve the critical thinking that forms the basis of mathematical reasoning. Brilliant is FREE for you to sign up by accessing the custom link in my description or pinned comment: shiny.org/newsthink. The first 200 people to use my link will get 20% off their Premium membership, which will give them access to all of their courses. Thanks for watching. For Newsthink, I'm Cindy Pom.