Marilyn vos Savant, the smartest person alive
Imagine it’s September 16, 1990, and you work as a publisher at the popular American magazine, Parade. Curiously, you seem to be getting more reader complaints than usual today, almost 10,000, in fact. Some of them are sent to you by PhD mathematicians, and some by casual readers, but almost all of them angrily addressed to a woman named ‘Marilyn Vos Savant’. The majority of them read more or less like the following sentences (although with more sexism and mansplaining) - “You’re wrong! You blew it! You made a mistake. Admit your error.” But why is this happening?
Let’s backtrack a bit, and talk about this woman, Marilyn Vos Savant. Born in 1946 and brought up in St. Louis, Missouri, she made it clear from a young age that she was a genius. She always stood out amongst her classmates in school, and often helped her friends with homework assignments. It wasn’t long before she was, at the age of 10, told to write the Stanford-Binet test, one of the metrics by which intelligence was measured at the time. She had absolutely no problem with the test, getting an incredibly high score (although it was kept secret for years since Vos Savant’s parents were worried she would be harmed).
Since then, she continued to enrich her knowledge; however, she never really felt fulfilled. In spite of her prodigious nature, her talent was obscured and she felt lonely and even unwanted at times. It would take her almost a decade, but she finally found a way to express herself that she was passionate about: writing! In 1980, she began to take her writing career more seriously, even moving between states to attain a wider audience. It wasn’t until 1985, however, that she would rise to fame.
Her parents had finally decided to reveal her genius to the world, and it earned her a spot on the Guinness Book of World Records for ‘Highest IQ’ from 1985 to 1989. Her name being on the book was a phenomenon, the likes of which had never been seen before. It garnered lots of media attention, both positive and negative. Regardless of what others thought, Vos Savant herself believed her stature was empty and shallow - it was impossible to identify someone as being “the smartest”, and that no IQ test could represent her real creative and academic abilities. Luckily, she found something that could represent that.
In 1986, she began her own column on the American magazine Parade entitled ‘Ask Marilyn’. She used this column to answer academic questions, solve mathematical puzzles, and give her readers some logical puzzles of her own. The column was incredibly popular and became a nationwide success! While controversies did ensue and some readers did complain, neither of these things were serious enough to cause a real scandal. That is, until September 1990.
Marilyn Vos Savant was posed with a popular problem (the Monty Hall problem) based on the television show, ‘Let's make a deal!’ The problem is as follows: “Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?”
Until then, the general consensus was that it didn’t matter whether one switches or not; it would be a 50/50 chance either way. However, Vos Savant changed that, and she replied on her column that it would actually benefit the contestant to switch. In fact, it would double their chances of winning the car. And then, all hell broke loose. Tens of thousands of people furiously wrote to Parade, calling Vos Savant “an idiot” and saying that women “looked at math problems differently than men” (here’s where the aforementioned sexism and mansplaining comes into play).
The outrage continued for over a year after that, and it took three more columns and heavy amounts of convincing to raise the number of people that agreed with her from 8% to 56%. Since then, her answer has come to be seen as the correct one, and some of the readers wrote to Vos Savant retracting their earlier statements, and coming to agree with her. Over time, the general public, as well as academics, have shifted towards her side, and Ask Marilyn remains a popular column even today.
The outcry against Vos Savant puts the way women in STEM were treated in perspective: when they attempted to offer their opinion, they were often shut down without real validation of their opinions. They were often denigrated under the false stereotypical pretence that “men are smarter than women”. It’s quite shocking to see how a woman having a correct yet different opinion made thousands of educated, smart men with doctorates lose all composure and control, and it’s satisfying to hear of her eventual vindication and success.
And to all the young girls wishing to pursue STEM, it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say there’s no obstacles facing you. However, if you know you’re right and you stay strong-willed, you can jump over those hurdles with ease and become just as successful as anyone else. Stay strong, and ignore the mansplainers.
Author: Shravan H.
This article got help from:
A general profile of Vos Savant’s life: https://medium.com/young-spurs/underestimating-marilyn-vos-savant-36773cf17e0e
A covering of the 1990 incident: https://priceonomics.com/the-time-everyone-corrected-the-worlds-smartest/
A video covering the Monty Hall incident:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggDQXlinbME
A video explaining the Monty Hall problem in-depth, for those interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lb-6rxZxx0