> But once you pin down what "leaving money on the table" means, it's not at all clear that the concept coincides with something you want to avoid. In this cas

> But once you pin down what "leaving money on the table" means, it's not at all clear that the concept coincides with something you want to avoid. In this case (which I have to imagine is deliberate on the part of Nozick or Newcomb), "leaving money on the table" means literally leaving money on the table. Taking one box always, always results in less money than the total amount of money available in the boxes to people who take both boxes. (Of course, the evidence to date is that people who choose both boxes always have less money available to them in the first place.) But the equally justifiable decision-making method is to perform the action that has yielded the best observed results in the past for others, despite there being no way that one's actions now can possibly have affected the past (choice or determinism doesn't matter). The nature-of-the-predictor stuff is just irrelevant nonsense in either approach to the problem, which is a happy coincidence because it is, in fact, irrelevant and impossible nonsense. :) Edit: "there's no way that one's actions now can possibly have affected the past" is given in the original problem. Wikipedia's article quotes it as "what you actually decide to do is not part of the explanation of why he made the prediction he made."