Report#16-Intuition&Monty Hall problem

Preface

This post records my peaceful life over the last two weeks: 2025-06-03-2025-06-15.

It has been raining continuously in Hangzhou for two weeks. Unfortunately, it is expected to continue raining next week.

My desire to go out and have fun has reached its peak.

But that's okay despite the bad weather, I am in good spirits.

Before getting to the trivial events of my life, I have to talk about a problem.

Monty Hall problem

The brief description of the problem (copied from ChatGPT):

You are on a game show where you are presented with three doors. Behind one door is a car, and behind the other two are goats. You choose one door, but before opening it, the host (Monty Hall) opens one of the other two doors, revealing a goat. He then asks if you want to switch your choice to the remaining unopened door or stick with your original choice.

My wife asked me this question one day while we were on the bus heading home.

I answered that I would never change my choice, insisting that the probability of the two remaining doors was the same.

But she told me I was wrong——no way! Then we started a brief debate, but it didn't last long due to the noisy crowd around us.

And I thought that when I got home, my first words would be "why did you ask me such a silly question, you were insulting me."(It was a joke, but you can sense my 'confidence')

I confidently stated that the probabilities were obviously the same regardless of my choice, and the question was simple, even a bit silly.

I even took out the ipad and ipencil to show my thought process...

But Maxine was tired of arguing with me, and showed me a video explaining why changing my choice was the correct strategy.

I spent some time figuring it out and realized that the foolishness lay not in the question, but in me.

I trusted my intuition too much again.

I am currently reading Thinking Fast and Slow which recently taught me that intuition is often wrong. But I still made that mistake. My mistake was not just giving the wrong answer, but also my poor behavior——arrogantly saying those unkind words.

The most important step towards becoming smarter is admitting we are often foolish.

Exploring

Books

Continued reading Thinking Fast and Slow

Chapter 16 - Chapter 24(I have finished the second part of this book🎉)

Continued reading 自卑与超越

I'm not sure if I can continue to read it, because I think this book is a little out of date.

It seems that the principles in this book don't conform to the current values any more.

Articles & Posts

James' Coffee Blog-Today

New words I learned: outfit, semi-formal, blazer, buoyed by, lavender, cobblestone, Paddington, marmalade

28岁的自由，去寻找自己

自学代码和英语、稳定远程五年的小城开发者，当年差点进厂拧螺丝

中国最难入职的IT公司

Videos

Newest TV Show on Netflix - Bet.

The plot is not very interesting, albeit novel.

Quitted it...

Reply 1988 on Netflix

I have watched it many times, it is still so interesting and affecting.

I was watching it during the whole weekend.

【polebug-vlog｜既然无法拥有过去与未来，那就好好活在当下吧】

白金版雍正王朝原著之雕弓天狼

It's a long video that I watched quickly. This is my second time watching this series. There is a term the narrator used to show why Nian Gengyao had that thought and made a big mistake: cognitive bias.

And this is not my first time I've heard this word - I first saw it in the book named Social Animals.

Cognitive biases affect everyone to some degree, and recognizing them is the first step in making better, more objective decisions.

Only when we recognize cognitive biases, can we avoid them and correct our thoughts and actions, avoid making a mistake.

Courses

Machine Learning

Have finished the "Gradient descent" chapter of ML specification.

Learning how to learn?

I always feel confused while learning and have always wanted to understand why I learn so slowly and inefficiently.

I hope this course I am about to start will provide answers or help me improve my learning efficiency.

English Learning

Keep practicing with Mango.

We started a new article to read: To inherit Chinese

Interesting Things

braised noodles

Start a project and contribute

This week, I came across a great project on GitHub: Iris

While using it, I found a bug about it and created an issue along with a pull request to fix it.

The main contributor reviewed my pr quickly. It was a great experience.