[mcphage]

> The Monty Hall problem is only a problem to those who are naive about probability, which is most people, because most of us don't learn any of this stuff early enough to form long lasting, correct instincts.

I think it’s more than that… we come with some built-in heuristics for probability, which mostly work pretty well. Until they don’t.

[rbtprograms]

i would argue our built in heuristics for probability are pretty bad, which is why the monty hall problem is so hard for most people to grasp (even though it is a relatively straight forward application of probability). probabilistic thinking comes much less naturally to the human mind than deterministic thinking.

[xboxnolifes]

I find that the bad intuition on the monty hall problem is mostly due to the small delta of going from 1 in 3 doors to 1 in 2 doors, combined with some bad human intuition. If you change it to start with 1000 doors, I find it to be a lot more intuitively convincing.

[stavros]

Same here, although I've talked to people who were equally confused with that formulation.