Let’s talk about probability. This is a continuation of the “green ball/red ball” themes from the earlier threads.
(Beloved, honored jannies: this is related to politics because it exhibits the way human reasoning and perception works and how it can conflict with rational statistical analysis; one of the primary sources of political conflict is discrepancies between perceptions of what actions have the greatest probability of bringing about certain outcomes in a society).
In 1959, Martin Gardner introduced the Three Prisoners Problem. The same principal was later rephrased in the Monty Hall Problem by Marylin vos Savant in 1990. The mathematical question concerns the likelihood of a certain outcome being true for, initially, one of three choices. I’ll use the Monty Hall version here as it seems to be the more well known version, but feel free to use either for discussing the correct answer.
—-The problem is as follows:—-
You are on a game show, and in front of you are 3 doors. Behind one door is a car; behind the other 2 are goats. You want the car, and you must pick one door to open. You pick a door (say, door #1). Before opening it, the host of the show, who knows what’s behind each door, then decides to open a door with a goat behind from among the two doors you didn’t pick (say, door #3, now open and showing a goat). He then asks if you’d like to switch your choice and open door #2, or stick with your original choice and open door #1.
What should you do to get the best chance of winning the car? Should you switch to opening door #2, stick with opening door #1, or does it not matter at all?