Slightly amending a quote in a similar context from "Principles of Economics, Explained" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4), nobody says "I have a girl. I have another girl. I have another girl."
One way of interpreting this perennial debate is as proof of how just how fuzzy English can be. People aren't just arguing about the answer, they argue about the question too.
Yes - this is why I pointed out that in Jeff's post this riddle was used as a metaphor. Otherwise we could spend all our time bickering about the correct spelling of "colour" or other trivialities instead of addressing the interesting questions.
The interesting question in Jeff's post was the poor human understanding of probabilities.
Well, yes, because saying one is implies that the other isn't, in speech. But we could talk about sets of two of anything that has a 50% probability.
This post takes what was meant to be an enlightening and refreshing take on how bad we as humans are at probabilities and turns it into a numbers-duel.
No the original questions doesn't clearly state the definition of who is asked, it doesn't take into account that slightly more girls than boys are born, and it doesn't answer the question about whether this all happened in a cult where all boys are killed at birth. It was a simple metaphor. And it worked...
Here is a TED talk about the subject of how we are fooled by probabilities: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_...