Pick red you live, guaranteed.
If half or more pick blue everyone lives,
under half and blue pickers all die!
Which button do you choose?
I don't know, I say, Let me think—
A machine predicted your choice.
It has yet to be wrong.
Box B is empty if the machine thinks you're greedy.
You're a millionaire if it thinks otherwise.
Are you taking one, or both?
Where did the machine get this money?
You see three doors and make a guess
Monty Hall opens one with a goat
Care to change your guess?
Win a car or find another goat?
Umm
There's a trolley and two tracks—
Fed up I ask,
Will you put away the shopping cart?
Social media had quit a few of these rationalist problems floating around this week. I decided to have some fun and write a poem referencing the themes.
We start with the question that took over this week, the Red vs. Blue button problem,then Newcomb’s Problem, which has a good video discussion. Some classics; the Monty Hall problem and the trolley problem before finally closing with the only one you will ever encounter in real life, the shopping cart problem.
The Monty Hall one is a classic. I remember studying it in statistics. Once you get it though, it does make sense, even if your intuition tells you otherwise.