I just wanted to make a note on this article which deals with the “Monty Hall dilemma" which is a reformulation of Bertrand's box paradox described by Joseph Bertrand in his "Calcul des probabilités", published in 1889!
On p. 248 of Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance
, the author Perry Mehrling narrates as if the "let's make a deal" quiz is an ingenious creation of Fischer Black that goes to show how smart he was. He does not outright says it, but phrases the context in a way that makes it appear - if you are not familiar with the origins of the puzzle, that it was Black's invention.As the Black Scholes edifice crumbles furthermore in this crisis, this illustrates once more, what a fraud all of it was.
Remember that when someone solves it correctly, it probably just means they read or heard it somewhere else before and is no indication of the power of their intellect. I am sure Vos Savant had seen it before.
It relates to BICs as the solution of the puzzles requires some aptitude to understand conditional probabilities which are just a trivial case of BICs.
One of the confusing aspects of the problem statement is:
“But if thought corrupts language,
language can also corrupt thought.”
George Orwell
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