That and most robberies happen during the day, not at night . . . when people are home. That's just stupid. Why would you wait until you KNOW someone is home to break in? No, you do it during the day.

Second, you don't even have the make a gun sound. Just yell. Done. Most robbers aren't there to kill and rape you. Matter of fact, I'd wager about 99% are not. They want easy money, that's it.

Third, as @kir_mokum said, if they have a gun you'd be dead before you can fire off a shot anyway. Assuming, of course, they were there to kill and rape you like this woman thinks they are.

Fourth, a robbery where no one gets hurt equals you get away with it. A robbery where you kill someone with a gun means they'll hunt your sorry ass down. So again, the robber wants nothing to do with other people.

These arguments just breed fear and paranoia into people. Just ask the guy in Florida who killed a door to door salesman selling crabs. Or the boy who was gunned down because he knocked on the wrong door (literally, GPS put him one house away), or the drunk college kid in my town who tried to open what he thought was his door but instead was met with a shotgun blast to the head.

So no, this is not a valid argument. Try again.

Boy he nails it with the ceramic artifact. Just shows how lazy and inconsistent the makers are with the Star Trek universe. And then he brilliantly follows it up with Picard coming out of the wrong door.

>> ^Xax:
I've long struggled to understand the Monty Hall problem, and I'm no closer to doing so.


I just now understood it, maybe I can explain while it's fresh in my mind. The crux is that the host always reveals the door with the goat of the remaining two doors. He is removing a "wrong" door and leaving a door with an added probability of being the right one. The reason "your" door does not "gain" "rightness" is because you chose it in the beginning, without the added information of which one is *not* the right door.

See, this just shows my issue with The Wrong Door... (I've only watched the first episode).

They take A SINGLE JOKE and drag it on... and on... and on. I mean this joke was already at the end of its life in the first episode, but no... dang it, they have the dinosaur model and they're going to bloody well use it again.

It's doomed to failure in a short period unless they STOP with the dragging out of ideas and actually come up with a few more.

A brilliant case in point was the uber annoying defense creation in the first episode. I would stopped it after the original introduction presentation to the big wigs... that there was enough, it had made the joke, no more was needed.

But no... they drag it on for the rest of the episode.

Same with the huge robot... yes, we get that you can't find your keys, quite funny the first time, not so much the second, third etc. times.

Woman dancing on shapes outside... wasn't even funny to begin with, certainly not funny running through the entire episode.

What a dull show.

Jane Meyer from the New Yorker wrote a wondeful article on this back in Feb. 2007 called "Whatever it takes" which talked with Joel Surnow the creator of 24.

This past November, US Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind "24." Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and FBI interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming. At first, Finnegan – wearing an immaculate Army uniform, his chest covered in ribbons and medals – aroused confusion: he was taken for an actor and was asked by someone what time his "call" was.

In fact, Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show's central political premise – that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country's security – was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. "I'd like them to stop," Finnegan said of the show's producers. "They should do a show where torture backfires."

Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, told the New Yorker that his students would frequently refer to Jack Bauer in discussions of what permissible in the questioning of terrorist suspects.

He said that, under both US and international law, "Jack Bauer is a criminal. In real life, he would be prosecuted." Yet the motto of many of his students was identical to Jack Bauer's: "Whatever it takes." His students were particularly impressed by a scene in which Bauer barges into a room where a stubborn suspect is being held, shoots him in one leg, and threatens to shoot the other if he doesn't talk. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense. Solis told me, "I tried to impress on them that this technique would open the wrong doors, but it was like trying to stomp out an anthill."

The Christian Science Monitor followed up with the more blunt title of "Does '24' encourage US interrogators to 'torture' detainees?" which culled information from several articles...

No, think of it this way. I have written down next to my computer a number between one and ten million. I want you to guess it. Go ahead, write it down.




Now you can pick: either the number I wrote down is the one you guessed, or it's actually 2,117,352. The only way I can represent to you a number other than the one I wrote down, is if you chose exactly the same number as me. Pretty fucking unlikely. The way the game works, you WANT to choose the wrong number initially, and switch. Unless you're insane, you'll do just that.

With the three doors, it's just harder to see. The chances of you guessing the wrong number are 2 in 3, as opposed to 9,999,999 in 10,000,000. But when I eliminated all other choices, and you stick with your initial pick, you're betting that you correctly identified the right number on your first guess. What are the chances you correctly identified my number, first guess? 33% in the door game. You had a better chance of choosing the wrong door than the right one, which is the objective of the game. Switching is the smart option.

basically you're more likely to have chosen the wrong door in the first place. so switching is more likely to win. took me a little while to comprehend but i now concur.

Great post nothing like a little bit of statistics to make people look stupid. I hate statistics.

They'd love you on Deal or No Deal, Payback. ;-) Seriously though, with 100 doors, Monty knows which of the hundred doors has the car behind it. The chance you picked the correct door at the start is 1%. From Monty's perspective, the chance you picked the wrong door is 99%. He knows where the car is. He is not opening doors at random. He is eliminating 98 wrong doors. Now, the door you picked at the start had a 1% chance of being the car. Then, after eliminating 98 wrong doors, there is a 99% chance his remaining door has the car. If, from his perspective, the last door he opens will have the car behind it 99% of the time, why wouldn't you switch doors? With 100 doors, 99% of the time Monty will have a car behind his last door. With 3 doors, 66% of the time Monty will have the car behind his unopened door.

Or, something like that.

Bedtime...

Oh wait! Think of it this way... If you play the 3-door game, Monty has a 66% chance of having the car behind one of his two doors. You would trade your one door for his two doors if given the chance. Him eliminating a known bad one of his two doors doesn't change the odds that the chance of him ultimately having the car is 66%. You are still effectively trading your one door for his two, which is what Deano and rembar and others pointed out above, so if you read this far... sorry for the repetitive redundancy.

Ok... I just know I'm gonna be dreaming of goats. What's new, huh?

All but 1 wrong door will be eliminated whether you chose the right one, or a wrong one. This makes your FINAL choice 50/50. Either right or wrong. Talking about how many choices you COULD have had, before any more than 1 decision disappears, is irrelevant. It was a completely different set of probabilities. Once you alter the terms of the choices, you start anew.

BTW, I'd switch.

What does this have to do with the world being round? Stop trying to build a strawman argument or whatever hand-waving you're trying to do, and deal with the actual issue at hand. The problem does not begin with two doors, it begins with three. And since the greatest chance of choosing a wrong door begins with that initial choice, it therefore becomes to the player's advantage to rechoose, thus exchanging a lesser probability of choosing the right door for a higher probability when one wrong door is eliminated.

Also, since I know you're not going to really read the above, before you go off on your next obnoxiously self-congratulating post, please explain to me how, myself and my fellow sifters aside, mathematics, physics, and computer science professors from (and I'm taking this straight from Google as they come) the University of California San Diego, Hofstra University, the University of Southern Carolina, the University of Chicago, Rice University, the United States Naval Academy, Dartmouth College, the University of Illinois, the University of Alabama, and Stanford University have all managed to slip up and not realize how right you really are? And since of course science and math are not, as you said, democratic, perhaps you should take the time to alert them to their collective silly mistake, as well as correct each of their obviously wrong examples that they have provided on their respective websites. You could change the world of mathematics as we know it!