Smart Loose Change Post of the Day

That's right, a smart post (actually several of them) at the Loose Change forum. Needless to say, they're made by debunkers in the Skeptics Forum. It starts out with the famed Monty Hall problem:

A game show host hides a prize behind one of three doors. The contestant has to guess which door hides the prize. The rules of the game are as follows.

Firstly, the contestant chooses a door and tells the host this is the one she thinks the prize is behind. The host must then open one of the other doors. Of course, the host does not want to reveal the whereabouts of the prize so he always opens a losing door.

The host then asks the contestant if she would like to stick with the door she originally chose or switch to the other unopened one.

Should she switch doors?

Of course, the answer, (counterintuitively) is that she should indeed switch doors. Calcas and A Very Sly Denial do a terrific job of schooling PDoh:

For instance, let's take just one of your "statistically significant" events. You say that it's statistically significant that they managed to hit 75% of their targets, but you are assigning importance as if that was the intention. What if they had hit 100%? Then you'd say "what are the odds of hitting all of the targets!". What if they were completely thwarted? Then you'd say "what are the odds that the gov't could have stopped every attack? You are assigning importance after the fact.

Exactly! For example, they say, "What were the odds that all 19 hijackers would get into the country?" But of course we know they tried and failed to get at least one more hijacker into the country.