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applfanboysbgontoday at 6:57 AM1 replyview on HN

I mean, the Monty Hall problem is a literal gotcha that trips up literal professors, that's a horrendous example to use as the baseline for "basic understanding of statistics".

Other than that choice of example, I do agree in that I doubt anywhere near 40% of adults have basic statistical literacy. I've played in card game tournaments semi-professionally and just gambler's fallacy + results-oriented thinking alone make it so easy to take other people's money, and if you can't figure out such basic concepts as "getting tails once doesn't mean I'm due for a heads next flip" even when you're literally losing money, what are the chances of anyone else caring about understanding it when they're not even being given the hands-on reward-based reinforcement learning opportunity?


Replies

maccardtoday at 7:13 AM

Yeah I maybe should have ignored the Monty hall problem - although I’d guess if you’ve studied enough stats to know what a P value is, and how to measure it, you’ve come up against the Monty hall problem!