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Kareem Carr 🙃

24 Jan, 12 tweets, 3 min read

Have you heard of the "probability paradox" known as The Monty Hall Problem?

In my opinion, it's BARELY about probability and is DEFINITELY not a paradox! It's OVER-HYPED by folks that get a buzz out of "tricky" math puzzles!

I'm going to explain it to you WITHOUT ANY MATH. 👇🏾

FIRED UP? LETS. DO. THIS! First, let's talk about what the Monty Hall Problem even is...

You're on Mr. Monty Hall's game show. There are 3 doors. One of them has a car behind it. The other two have goats. You pick an unopened door. At the end of the show, you get to keep whatever is behind your door.

The host opens one of the two remaining doors revealing a goat. He asks if you want to switch your door choice to the other unopened door. The question is whether you should switch your doors? What do you think?

Some folks are going to tell you there's a 1/3 chance of winning the car if you don't switch but are a 2/3 chance if you do. Therefore, you should switch. Forget about those folks! That's not what we're talking about here.

Let me explain. There are two scenarios. If you picked the unopened door with the car behind it, Monty is free to pick from any of the two remaining doors which each have a goat behind them. Therefore, his door choice means nothing.

If you picked a door with a goat behind it, he only has ONE door choice which is the one with the other goat. If he picks the door with the car, he'll REVEAL THE CAR! He doesn't want to do that! In this scenario, Monty's door choice is influenced by his KNOWLEDGE of the car.

To sum up. There's one scenario where Monty's choice means nothing. There's another scenario where dude is basically telling you EXACTLY where the car is. You just have to pick the opposite of what he picked. In this scenario, basing your choice on his GUARANTEES you the car.

If we had a friend who sometimes picks his lottery numbers randomly and sometimes knows the winning numbers in advance, it doesn't matter what probability he has of knowing the winning numbers, it will ALWAYS be better for us to let him pick the numbers rather guessing ourselves.

In the worst case scenario, his choice is no less random than your choice. In the best case scenario, you are guaranteeing yourself a win.

This is why I say the Monty Hall Problem has barely anything to do with the probability. It's just saying it's better to base your choices on someone that sometimes has some knowledge of a situation vs relying on yourself who has zero knowledge. Where is the paradox in that?

Thanks for coming to my TED TALK.

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More from @kareem_carr

Kareem Carr 🙃

@kareem_carr

25 Jan

I wrote a short thread on being a racial minority within math academia. I didn’t propose any changes to the status quo or solutions. Just pointed out why I think race is an issue in the context of my experiences. Here are some of the EXTREMELY racist responses I got back. 👇🏾

It’s funny because a lot of the responses say it’s not about race and accuse me of forcing race into the conversation. Meanwhile, many of those rather naive comments are located right next to insanely racist crap like this...

This one came close to calling me the N word but chickened out at the last moment. (I’m not American or African!Nobody has even metaphorically come close to “giving” me any of these things.)

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Kareem Carr 🙃

@kareem_carr

24 Jan

It's said that when women started working more, divorces increased. It seems that once women had their own money, they no longer wanted to deal with men's shit. Similarly, I suspect many of the prosperous non-whites (and women!) of today are becoming tired of white male bullshit.

In this analogy of civic life as a marriage, cancellation and the associated financial ruin which many white men fear in their public life is the equivalent of divorce and financial ruin which coincidentally many men in the mostly white "manosphere" fear in their private lives.

I frequently have white males telling me that from their perspective, people are being divisive by "bringing up" race and gender when these weren't issues before. What one needs to understand is just because something hasn't been an issue for YOU doesn't mean it wasn't an issue.

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Kareem Carr 🙃

@kareem_carr

23 Jan

Many white males seek out math as a refuge from the complexities of society. So when I bring up the role of race in math culture, they see me as destroying their safe space. As a black man, I too wish for math to be a safe space from race. Sadly, for many black folks, it is not.

"Who do they make eye contact with? Not you."

This is a good article on what it can be like to be black in mathematics and reflects a lot of my own experiences: nytimes.com/2019/02/18/us/… )

Who am I to say this? I have a MSc in Math. I once gave a report to the president of the American Mathematical Society. I worked directly with the vice-president. I've been on committees within the AMS. I'm not some rando that has no clue what US mathematics culture is like.

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Kareem Carr 🙃

@kareem_carr

23 Jan

I'm kind of an Afro-pessimist about black folks in science. What I've learned from the recent successes of women in breaking down barriers is nothing will happen if you don't have a critical mass of people. Black folks are spread thin. Programs often only let one or two in. 🧵👇

There aren't enough black folks in most scientific fields to build our own community, to demand respect for our norms, values and interests, and to create an organic self-sustaining pipeline of black scholars that exists outside of majority white institutional power.

One analogy I've used before is this. Imagine you're switching from fossil fuels to sustainable energy. Do you think that this could happen without a massive investment in providing subsidies for new businesses and building up the sustainable fuel infrastructure?

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Kareem Carr 🙃

@kareem_carr

6 Jan

Here are my TWO simple rules for deciding who's an expert (both during a pandemic and in general)! 🧵👇

I don't think we should automatically believe people who say they're experts but we also shouldn't automatically dismiss them either.

I have 2 simple criteria for identifying experts:

1. Am I confident that this person has spent a lot of time formally thinking and reading about the topic?

2. Am I confident this person has spent lots of time gathering direct real world experience about the topic?

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Kareem Carr 🙃

@kareem_carr

5 Jan

The Pandemic has got me thinking. On TV, people of the future are always very comfortable with data. They collect it. They analyze it. They adjust their strategies in real time. Not in days or hours or minutes but often literally in SECONDS.🧵👇

They run simulations of different outcomes. The simulations aren't always right but they seem to put them in the ballpark of what's reasonable. People take the simulations and data seriously. They factor them into their planning.

Even when the future government is evil, it's still smart. Even when the future government is rigid and uncreative in how it responds to stuff, it's responses are still logically related to the assumptions it has made, the data it has collected and the analyses it has performed.

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