Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: south in the north

On Wed, 6 May 1998, WB wrote:

On Wed, 6 May 1998, JPE wrote:

A little humility here would help this lady immensely.

Getting good test scores is always bad for one's humility, so I can
understand what the pressures on her must have been like. It's too bad
that her behavior requires a page like this:

http://www.wiskit.com/marilyn.html MARILYN VOS SAVANT IS WRONG

According to this page, Marilyn has made quite a number of errors which
have gone uncorrected. Note that many of her mistakes involve physics. I
would think she would be intelligent enough to learn from mistakes, and
then either avoid the physics questions, or always have a specialist
double check her answers.

Speaking as a former Marilyn fan, I guess what most disturbs me is not so
much that Marilyn is occasionally wrong, but that she is evidently ALWAYS
unwilling to ADMIT to being wrong. I suppose she thinks that as long as
she never publicly admits to having made a mistake, most of her
oh-so-much-lower-IQ readership will simply assume that she never MAKES a
mistake. I have written to her pointing out errors on several occasions
and have received the standard "Thank you for the e-mail. Marilyn is
considering it," response, but I have yet to see any retractions or
corrections in print. And as RHR pointed out here last year, she has
even had the temerity to publish a horrifyingly incorrect treatise on the
proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

It's probably just made all that much worse by the fact that Ms. vos
Savant has made so much hay in the past out of the occasional professor
who takes her to task for things like the "three curtain" or "two child"
problems which are counterintuitive but which she has, in fact, treated
correctly.

In the end, I suppose I won't lose too much sleep over the effect that all
this has on her more credulous readership, but I can't help but think that
she would do less damage if she were willing to admit her fallibility from
time to time.

John
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A. John Mallinckrodt http://www.intranet.csupomona.edu/~ajm
Professor of Physics mailto:ajmallinckro@csupomona.edu
Physics Department voice:909-869-4054
Cal Poly Pomona fax:909-869-5090
Pomona, CA 91768-4031 office:Building 8, Room 223