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Comment by Syzygies | Hacker News Reader

As a math professor recalling reactions back in 1990, there were various forms of "Marilyn vos Savant" bias in play. A good cover for gender bias was the absurdity of the world's highest IQ writing newspaper columns. There are plenty of other examples of narrow spikes in particular forms of intelligence having a crippling affect, while the most creative people I know work to change the world with less spectacular but more broad-spectrum cognitive advantages. Still, it's a bit of a leap to conclude she was actually wrong about this problem.

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The key was... did Marilyn vos Savant state in her version of the problem that the host always uses an algorithm to open a door with a goat? (The alternative was that the host randomly picked a door, and this one time it happened to be a goat.) I read some of her articles on this topic, and my opinion was that in some of her articles, she did not state what the host's algorithm was.

So, yes, even a person with the world's highest IQ can make a mistake.

Her column was written for an audience that was familiar with the show. Monty Hall had, at that point, been opening doors and revealing goats-but-not-cars to contestants five days a week for more than twenty years.

But as Monty Hall himself notes, the game show rules did not actually require him to open a door.

> Hall clarified that as a game show host he did not have to follow the rules of the puzzle in the vos Savant column and did not always have to allow a person the opportunity to switch (e.g., he might open their door immediately if it was a losing door, might offer them money to not switch from a losing door to a winning door, or might only allow them the opportunity to switch if they had a winning door).

If the host uses an adversarial strategy, such as only offers a switch when the remaining door is a goat, switching is not necessarily wise.

Most people understood the intent of the question exactly, and still found the answer unintuitive.

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