Last night, celebrating a colleague’s promotion at Rock Bottom, someone brought up the Monty Hall Problem. Almost instantly, I was a vocal defender of apparently the wrong but intuitive answer to the problem. And although most of my friends crowded around the table knew the right answer and over time worked to try to needle me to accept I was wrong, 3 of us (eventually 2 of us) stuck to our guns.
It turns out it’s trickier than you think. Or maybe it’s better to say: thinking about it more leads you farther away from the right answer. The wikipedia article above does of good job of hitting you with several ways to look at it.
The more you think about it, the more interesting it gets.
I still don’t grok it as deeply as I really want to. Note to self: is this yet another example of the Bayesian way of the world? It just keeps coming up.