StickWithANose

Here is a great post a la’ Lawyers, Guns & Money on the Monty Hall problem.  I think that I’ll be trying this one out very soon…

The Monty Hall problem is a well-known thought experiment in probability analysis. The problem is fairly simple, but for reasons that aren’t well understood the right answer is sufficiently counter-intuitive that a very large majority of people get it wrong on their first attempt. More interestingly, I’ve found that students often resist the validity of the correct answer, even when the problem is analyzed in some detail…

Teaching the problem is a fun way to get students to think about the limits of common sense intuition, which is a much-cited source of wisdom for legal interpretation in general, and statutory interpretation in particular. It’s also a good way to get people to think about how people tend to cling to intuitively correct answers, even in the face of demonstrations that their intuitions are wrong.