User talk:Richard D. Gill

Welcome!

Welcome to Citizendium as a new author! We're very glad you've joined us. We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start. You'll probably also want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at Getting Started for other helpful "startup" pages, and at CZ:Home for a complete listing of help and other community pages. If you wish, just ask me to create a "personal sandbox" for you where you can test out editing and writing articles. If you need help to get going, it is a good idea to join our discussion forums. That's where we discuss policy, proposals or technical problems. You can ask any constable for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and thank you! We appreciate your willingness to share your expertise, and we hope to see you begin actively editing and contributing to Citizendium. Milton Beychok 18:22, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi Rick, nice to meet you here. Welcome to the club! --Boris Tsirelson 20:49, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Boris, it's good to be here! --Richard D. Gill 22:59, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi, Rick. A warm welcome by me, too. I am curious: What was the trouble with the Monty Hall problem? --Peter Schmitt 23:08, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Maybe this is a partial answer to Peter's question :-) --Boris Tsirelson 07:19, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Everyone knows the answer is 2/3, not 1/3, and you should switch. But why? For me it is interesting that most "ordinary people" are perfectly happy with simple and convincing informal arguments, while quite a few mathematicians will endlessly argue that the "simple solutions" are plain wrong and that the problem has to be solved by a careful use of conditional probabililty. Both parties - well, on wikipedia at least - are somewhat incapable of appreciating subtleties which I think are rather important, both on points of logic and on points of model-building. So I find MHP a fantastic case-study on how to communicate probability to laypersons, on navigating the interface between mathematics and the real world. I am presently involved in forensic statistics and the role of the scientist in a (criminal) law court. It is not trivial.

It's an interesting challenge for me to try to get something of this across in the context of collaborative encyclopaedia editing, but now in a situation where professional qualifications might be a help, rather than a hindrance.

I have written a rather opinionated and argumentative paper, the preprint is on arXiv, [1], and is about to appear in print. And want to re-present some of that material here. Richard D. Gill 08:13, 14 January 2011 (UTC)