Thursday I met with acquaintances to talk about math. The organizer, T., introduced Newcomb’s Problem:
You are at a Web conference, Tim Berners-Lee is giving the keynote when, a Grey from Zeta Reticula appears in a flash of light. The alien has two boxes. One is transparent. The other is black. You know that Greys from Zeta Reticula are either nearly omnicient or good judges of human behavior, because their predictions of human behavior are 99% accurate.
The Grey points at you and says:
Puny hu-man. In transparent box I place $1,000. In black box, there may, or may not be $1,000,000. Pick either box or both.
TBL, stays on stage to confirm that the Grey is not going to pull any sleight of hand or other funny alien business.
So far, so, good. Your hindbrain calculates the expected values of your three choices, and you know you’ll be at least a $1,000 richer in a few moments.
But, as you approach the stage to make your choice, the alien says to you:
Puny hu-man, I know what you will do. If you pick the black box, it will have $1,000,000. If you pick both boxes, the black box will be empty.
Jeffrey Zeldman pulls you aside and tells you: “I’ve seen this thing before, he did it at ThunderLizard and Web Builder. Every time the guy from the audience selected the black box it had $1,000,000 dollars.
Oy, now what do you do? Well, that depends on how you make decisions.
There are many papers about Newcomb’s Paradox online. Game theorists, philosophers, Libertarians, and even Christian Appologists have rifted on it.
However, it can be argued that Newcomb’s Paradox is another version of the well-known Prisoners’ Dilemma. And the good news is that we know a lot about how to play that game.
