Charlotte Bronte, definite entp !
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Marilyn Vos Savant, definitely the queen of entps !
"Perhaps the most well known event involving vos Savant began with a question in her 9 September 1990 column:
The Monty Hall problem
Main article: Monty Hall problem
Perhaps the most well known event involving vos Savant began with a question in her 9 September 1990 column:
"Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you: 'Do you want to pick door #2?' Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?" —Craig F. Whitaker, Columbia, Maryland
This question, named "the Monty Hall problem" because of its similarity to scenarios on game show Let's Make a Deal, existed long before being posed to vos Savant, but was brought to nationwide attention by her column. Vos Savant answered arguing that the selection should be switched to door #2 because it has a 2/3 chance of success, while door #1 has just 1/3. This response provoked letters of thousands of readers, nearly all arguing doors #1 and #2 each have an equal chance of success. A follow-up column reaffirming her position served only to intensify the debate and soon became a feature article on the front page of The New York Times. Among the ranks of dissenting arguments were hundreds of academics and mathematicians excoriating her for propagating innumeracy.[13]
Under the most common interpretation of the problem where the host opens a losing door and offers a switch, vos Savant's answer is correct because her interpretation assumes the host will always avoid the door with the prize. However, having the host opening a door at random, or offering a switch only if the initial choice is correct, is a completely different problem, and is not the question for which she provided a solution. In Vos Savant's second followup, she went further into an explanation of her assumptions and reasoning, and called on school teachers to present the problem to each of their classrooms. In her final column on the problem, she announced the results of the more than a thousand school experiments. Nearly 100% of the results concluded that it pays to switch. Of the readers who wrote computer simulations of the problem, about 97% reached the same conclusion. A majority of respondents now agree with her original solution, with half of the published letters declaring the letter writers had changed their minds.[14]