You don’t have to know why it works

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the Monty Hall problem, and how intiution and common sense can be misleading.

When I encountered this exercise, I became rather obsessed with trying to understand it. After all, it had pitted dozens of academic mathematicians against the "World's Highest IQ" Guiness Record holder.

I puzzled over it throughout the day, and later I sat with a mathematically inclined friend to work through a series of trials to test it out.

Those trials showed the surprising "correct" pattern: by switching, I won about 2/3 of the time.

I then sat for another hour trying to understand why it worked that way.

And that's how life is. When measurements tell you that something is happening, it's not always easy to understand why it's happening.

But here's the thing:

If you observe cause-and-effect, you don't necessarily have to know why it exists. You just have to figure out how to use it.

And this is why testing really matters: your email subject lines, your link text, your membership sign-up form complexity, all of it.

There are rules of thumb, and best practices, and game theory, and marketing truisms.

But when you reliably measure and observe a pattern — even if you don't have time to dissect and understand it — the odds are in your favor if you make use of what it's telling you.

All the best,
A.

P.S. The above “pitted dozens” link contains the original article from Parade magazine, and many entertaining reader comments, including this one:

In a recent column, you called on math classes around the country to perform an experiment that would confirm your response to a game show problem. My eighth grade classes tried it, and I don’t really understand how to set up an equation for your theory, but it definitely does work! …

My thoughts exactly.