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Wellness Wednesday for December 13, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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The Monty Hall problem. I understand probability theory well enough to Euler myself into the "correct solution", but I still FEEL like it should be 1/2 not 2/3s. And if you completely flipped the script with an alien scenario, I might fall for it again. I'm no stranger to probability puzzles and usually solve most of them or don't fall for the obvious trap, but the lizard in my brain can't accept reality in this specific case.

Code a simulation of it, and step through the logic, it helped me.

After grokking it, my conclusion was that a lot of the explanations are backwards. After they reveal the empty slot, you can only win by changing your decision, if you got it wrong the first time. So what are the chances of getting it wrong on the first go?