Re: [Phys-l] "Ask Marilyn"

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Marilyn Vos Savant has a number of books published, but many of them appear
to be compilations from her column.  She claims to be an expert on
everything and also claims to have the highest measured IQ.  This latter
claim may be technically correct because after she got her score they
changed the scoring and the maximum possible score is not lower than her
score.

She does make a number of reasonable replies, but also some are way off
base.  But she seldom admits to any errors.  Her general knowledge would
seem to be pretty good, and many of the questions she answers can be readily
researched on the web.  But her understanding of science and technology is
apparently not that good.  She does come down hard on things like astrology
and a number of unscientific things.

She does seem to have devoted following.  You can learn more about her by
just doing a web search on her name.  You will also hit the website Marilyn
is Wrong.  But the critic site is not always right either.  A lot of her
stuff is fairly light, but people do sometimes ask good questions and get
good responses.  She has a section on her website with rules for behavior,
most of which are again fairly light.  The problem with such rules is that
they do not always work, and if you need the explicit rules, you are
probably in trouble.  She also poses logical riddles for her readers.

Actually Parade readers may be more intelligent than the general public who
reads nothing.  Let us remember that many well known authors specialized in
newspaper of magazine columns and later used them to create books.  Asimov
did that, but also wrote a number of books which weren't columns.  Dickens
novels were generally serialized in the popular press.  So we make a big
mistake if we are too dismissive of her writings.  She does have influence
and we could help improve education by correcting her errors.

Incidentally just a few searches on her name give you a lot of information
about her.  Anyone can discover my facts quickly by spending a short time
looking at the web sites.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> The Parade magazine is an insert in many Sunday newspapers here in the US.
> This is how I know of her. Not sure if she has any books/articles
> published? Does she give any lectures to the general public? What does she
> do besides publish this weekly column?