Monty Hall, again

This little article contains nothing new, and only almost trivial mathematics. It is a plea for future generations to preserve the life of The True Monty Hall paradox, and not let themselves be misled by probability purists who say “you must compute a conditional probability”.

Richard Gill posted a paper on arXiv this morning about the Monty Hall problem. He does not mean to try yet another solution to the problem more susceptible to convince the army of skeptics out there, but rather to illustrate the hidden and implicit assumptions behind the mathematisation (sic!) of the problem… As a background to the problem, Richard Gill refers to the book The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math’s Most Contentious Brain Teaser that led to my earlier post. Now, after having read the paper and come upon the final sentence reported above, I must say I am none the wiser about why the author wrote the paper! To me the Monty Hall problem is primarily an instance of wrong conditioning… Nonetheless, I appreciate the points about visualising the puzzle as a decision theoretic problem and the solution as the minimax procedure.