Re: Teaching an intelligent guy about a basic statistics concept
Intelligent people can believe pretty silly things (like the medical doctor I met who insisted that Martingale betting was risk free easy money). The problem is that they tend to have too much of an ego about such things to admit that they're wrong about something so simple.
Some ideas though:
1) ask him to calculate the odds of a fair coin coming up heads once
2) ask him to calculate the odds of it coming up heads twice
3) ask him to calculate the odds of it coming up heads 10 times in a row
4) ask him to calculate the odds of it coming up heads one more time after it has come up heads 10 times in a row
5) ask him to calculate the odds of it coming up heads 11 times in a row
Now see if he applies probability theory consistently as he does this.
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