Fredkin's paradox concerns the negative correlation between the ''difference'' between two options and the ''difficulty'' of deciding between them. Developed further, the paradox constitutes a major challenge to the possibility of pure

instrumental rationality "Instrumental" and "value rationality" are terms scholars use to identify two ways individuals act in order to optimize their behavior . Instrumental rationality recognizes means that "work" efficiently to achieve ends. Value rationality recogni ...

. Proposed by

Edward Fredkin Edward Fredkin (born October 2, 1934) is a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and an early pioneer of digital physics. Fredkin's primary contributions include work on reversible computing and cellular automata. ...

, it reads: "The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them—no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less." Thus, a decision-making agent might spend the most time on the least important decisions. An intuitive response to Fredkin's paradox is to calibrate decision-making time with the importance of the decision: to calculate the cost of optimizing into the optimization, a version of the

value of information Value of information (VOI or VoI) is the amount a decision maker would be willing to pay for information prior to making a decision. Similar terms VoI is sometimes distinguished into value of perfect information, also called value of clairvoyance ( ...

. However, this response is

self-referential Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philoso ...

and spawns a new, recursive paradox: the decision-maker must now optimize the optimization of the optimization, and so on.

References

{{Decision theory paradoxes Decision-making paradoxes

See also

References