The oracle you can't refuse

You already hand pieces of your life to advice you can't check: the map that picks your route, the friend whose read on people you trust more than your own. This oracle is that, perfected. It is never wrong. The question is where, if anywhere, you would stop listening. There is a serious case for handing it everything. In 1954 the psychologist Paul Meehl reviewed studies pitting expert judgment against simple statistical rules and found the rules did as well or better in nearly every one; the experts went on trusting their own judgment anyway. Dostoevsky gave a darker version to his Grand Inquisitor, who argues that most people find freedom unbearable and will gladly trade it for bread and someone to obey. Aristotle drew the line the second answer draws. Deliberation, he argued, starts from a goal already held and works out the route: a doctor's whole question is how to cure this patient, with health as the given he reasons from. David Hume, two thousand years later, argued that reason can tell you how to get what you want but never, on its own, what to want. On this view the oracle can be the best map ever drawn, but it cannot choose where you go. Kant gave the third answer its rallying cry in 1784. Enlightenment, for him, meant finding the nerve to use your own judgment instead of leaning on authorities who make thinking unnecessary, a dependence people keep because it is easy. Jean-Paul Sartre told of a student who came to him during the Occupation, torn between joining the Free French and staying with his mother. By choosing whom to ask, Sartre said, the student had already more or less chosen his answer. Which decisions, if any, would you keep for yourself even knowing the oracle's answer would be better?