John, DMcG asserted that there's a difference between the odds on where the car is and the odds on someone's finding it. Someone else seems to have disputed that.

I'm trying to understand, in a way that I can fully comprehend, whether there is a such difference. I'm also trying to fully comprehend the apparent fact that (regardless of how the game was played on TV), a second person coming to the two remaining doors, after the original contestant switched, has only a 1 in 2 chance of guessing the car's whereabouts, while that original contestant has a 2 in 3 chance. I realize the original contestant has more information, but it's hard to grasp how intangible "information" can affect the physical presence of 2 doors and 1 car.

Both people are faced with the same material reality. Yet their odds of finding the car are quite different because the first chooser has seen a third door and a goat, but the second hasn't.

This seems like a paradox. Information obviously affects *behavior*, but here it affects *odds* whether or not we know what the meaning iof what it is we've learned. (The odds increase for the first contestant even if he's switched doors for no reason but a whim. The whimsical contestant knows only he's seen a goat; he doesn't understand its mathematical significance; his odds still increased when he switched.)

The math may be perfectly straightforward to those who frequently calculate probability; but for the rest of us, including some PhDs, the workings of chance, in this case, can seem almost uncanny.

It was easier for me to grasp, as a child, that the earth goes around the sun despite the evidence of my own eyes, than it is for me to grasp as an adult just how the odds of finding the car change. I don't doubt it; I'm just having a hard time comprehending it and its implications (not that I'm entirely sure what they are, beyond "Don't believe everything you think").