Of Course I'm for Monogamy: I'm Also for Everlasting Peace and an End to Taxes

Overview

"Of Course I'm for Monogamy: I'm Also for Everlasting Peace and an End to Taxes" gathers Marilyn vos Savant’s popular Parade magazine columns into a brisk, brainy portrait of everyday reasoning. Published in 1993, the collection showcases her signature Q&A format: readers pose puzzles, dilemmas, and curiosities, and she responds with concise, commonsense analysis rooted in logic, probability, and clear definitions. The playful title encapsulates a recurring theme, endorsing an ideal is easy; the difficult part is understanding trade-offs, incentives, and the real-world constraints that make some ideals impractical or self-defeating.

Format and Scope

The book is organized around short, stand-alone exchanges that move quickly from topic to topic. Letters range from brainteasers and counterintuitive probability questions to queries about etiquette, relationships, education, consumer choices, language usage, medical claims, and public policy. The variety is intentional: it demonstrates that the same habits of sound thinking, stating assumptions, clarifying terms, separating facts from speculation, and checking for hidden probabilities, apply whether the subject is romance or risk, arithmetic or ethics.

Core Themes

A central thread is the distinction between what people feel must be true and what the evidence supports. Vos Savant repeatedly shows how intuition, while valuable, often misfires in domains like chance and statistics. She demystifies base rates, sample sizes, and conditional probabilities, urging readers to test beliefs against numbers rather than anecdotes. Another theme is operational clarity. Many disputes turn on undefined words; once a term is sharpened, a dispute often evaporates. She also stresses proportionality: extreme confidence should require strong evidence, and modest claims deserve modest confidence.

Representative Concerns

Readers ask whether certain tactics are "fair", "rational", or "safe". Vos Savant answers by unpacking incentives and consequences instead of moralizing. Questions about monogamy, for instance, become opportunities to separate the ideal from compliance rates, to examine expectations, and to suggest decision rules that minimize harm rather than merely signal virtue. Probability puzzles, famously including versions of the three-doors game popularized by the Monty Hall problem, illustrate how new information changes odds, and why updating beliefs can feel wrong even when the arithmetic is right. Elsewhere, she addresses medical screenings in terms of false positives, consumer deals in terms of expected value, and grammar debates in terms of function rather than fashion.

Method and Voice

The style is crisp, authoritative, and unfussy. Answers rarely exceed a few paragraphs, yet they move from intuition to principle to a practical rule of thumb. She invites readers to verify results for themselves, sometimes by trying small experiments or reframing a puzzle with simpler numbers. The tone is firm but courteous, skeptical without cynicism; even when correcting widely held misconceptions, she avoids condescension and emphasizes how easy it is for smart people to be misled by framing effects.

What the Book Delivers

Beyond amusement, the collection aims to build durable cognitive habits. It models how to slow down a question, identify the pivotal variable, and ignore theatrics. It shows that better thinking is possible without technical jargon, and that ordinary life is full of solvable vagueness. Readers come away with a toolkit: define terms before arguing, quantify when you can, consider base rates, beware of small samples, distinguish possibility from probability, and prefer procedures that work over positions that merely sound good.

Place in Vos Savant’s Oeuvre

Arriving during the period when her column drew national attention, the book preserves the lively back-and-forth between a sharp generalist and a broad audience. It captures a cultural moment when mass-media puzzles provoked real debate about expertise and evidence, and it remains a compact primer on practical reasoning for readers who enjoy having their intuitions tested, and sometimes overturned, by a clear, economical argument.