notes-philosophy-computationIsNotFree

and exhaustive search is unnatural. And logical operators other than AND are harder to remember.

Implications for legal system design, for ethics, for politics, for etiquette, among other areas.

legal system design:

• procedural fairness does not lead to fairness if the winning demands a large amount of computation, and if the parties have different amounts of money with which to pay for this computation

ethics and etiquette:

• we say that a person is responsible for knowing things that they 'should have known', but if computation is unfree, then a mere demonstration that the person should have known a set of premises and inference rules which together are sufficient to deduce the proposition in question is not sufficient to say that they 'should have known' the conclusion. Instead, a system of ethics should come with a computationally feasible (but incomplete) sasisficing inference system, and 'should have known' should be restricted to cases where that inference system can deduce the proposition in question starting with the available premises

out of sight, out of mind in politics:

• it is often noticed that the public doesn't care about many important issues. This is presented as a sin, as if a sufficiently good citizen would make themselves aware of all important issues. However, this computation is not free, and this would take an inordinate amount of time; in fact, as the size (and hence complexity) of society increases, this ideal citizen who has a fixed threshold of 'importance' would devote an increasing fraction of their time to keeping up with important issues until it reached 100%. This is obviously unsustainable. This holds even if the good citizen undertakes to inform themselves on any fixed fraction of the important issues. We need to give up the assumption that good citizens will inform themselves on some fraction of important issues.

desire for non-interaction with the public in institutions:

• often important institutions attempt to keep important decisions out of the public eye (for various definitions of public, e.g. sometimes even out of the eye of their own lower-level personnel). This is usually thought of (maybe not in all circles, but in some) as a sin, that is, as a way for those with power to abuse their power to get their way. However, explaining an issue to the public, and correcting misunderstandings will which inevitably surface, takes time (because this is a form of communication, e.g. societal computation). Responding to public input takes even more time, in fact an unbounded amount of time if all input is responded to. There is therefore a tradeoff for the individuals in the institution between transparency, transparency + actually accepting public input, and actually making any decisions or getting anything done. We need to have a set of ethics which does not consider shutting out public input to be abusive, and perhaps a set of ethics which does not consider non-transparency to be abusive.

the idea that a rational economic agent will consider all available choices:

• as the number of choices grows unboundedly, this would consume too much computation time. a rational agent faced with many choices will use some strategy to avoid considering all of the available choices.