Robert Nozick, The Refutation Of Rational Choice, Etc.

"Robert Nozick has a unique place in the annals of rational choice theory: he refuted it." -- Ian Hacking (1994)

My reaction, when reading this, was, "What?" Hacking is referring to a paper by Robert Nozick¹ on Newcomb's Paradox. I'm fairly sure I've read something about this paradox, but I had to look it up.

Suppose there exists a psychic that has shown themselves to be extremely reliable in their predictions. And the psychic has presented you with a choice, based on one of their predictions. You are presented two boxes, one transparent and one wrapped such that you cannot see the contents. The rules are that you can take either:

• Just the opaque box, or
• Both boxes.

The transparent box contains $1,000, as you can plainly see. If the psychic has predicted you will pick just the opaque box, they have placed $1,000,000 in it. If they have predicted you will pick both boxes, they have ensured that the opaque box contains nothing. The prediction has been made, and the boxes have been sealed. You know all these conditions but not what the prediction was. What should you do?

Apparently many initially are very decided on what they would do. But people split half-and-half on what that is. Anyways, Hacking states that this example shows that two principles of rational decision-making are not necessarily consistent². I guess he is correct, and I'm in no position to challenge that this is of philosophical interest³. But, since no such psychic can exist, I find other examinations of rational choice theory of more practical import.

By the way, I want to give a qualified defense of Stephen Metcalfe's comments in Slate on Nozick's Wilt Chamberlin example⁴. Strictly speaking, Metcalf's confusion about which Keynes comment was on which Hayek book is irrelevant to these comments later in the article⁵. And I accept that he doesn't describe the logic of Nozick's argument⁶. Neither did I. It is perfectly legitimate to argue that the rhetorical force of the argument comes from elements of the argument extraneous to its strict logic. And that is what Metcalf does⁷.

Footnotes

1. Nozick's "Reflections On Newcomb's Paradox" (in Knotted Doughnuts and Other Mathematical Entertainments (ed. by M. Gardner), W. H. Freeman, 1986).
2. Choose dominant strategies. Maximize mathematical expected utility.
3. I find Wittgenstein perennially fascinating.
4. Metcalf's Slate followup is here.
5. So is the fact that Nozick was smoking dope during the period in which he wrote Anarchy, State, and Utopia; I was startled to find he mentions in his book his experiences while under the influence. More by Brad DeLong on Nozick is here. Even more can be found in the Delong's blog archives.
6. By the way, Yglesias is mistaken in concluding, "Since as best I can tell nobody does hold such a [patterned] theory [of distribution]". Nozick explicitly states that marginal productivity gives such a patterned theory. Nozick is confused, since marginal productivity, correctly understood, is a theory of the choice of technique, not a theory of distribution.
7. Although I am not convinced appealing to guilty regret over the history of race relations in the United States has anything to do with Nozick's rhetoric.