Fredkin's paradox concerns the negative
correlation
In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statisti ...
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 philos ...
and spawns a new, recursive paradox: the decision-maker must now optimize the optimization of the optimization, and so on.
See also
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Buridan's ass
Buridan's ass is an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will.
It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass (donkey) that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a p ...
*
Decision theory
Decision theory (or the theory of choice; not to be confused with choice theory) is a branch of applied probability theory concerned with the theory of making decisions based on assigning probabilities to various factors and assigning numerical ...
*
Cybernetics
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Parkinson's law of triviality
The law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly or typically give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to ap ...
*
Tyranny of small decisions
The tyranny of small decisions is a phenomenon explored in an essay of the same name, published in 1966 by the American economist Alfred E. Kahn. The article describes a situation in which a number of decisions, individually small and insignifican ...
*
What the Tortoise Said to Achilles
References
{{Decision theory paradoxes
Decision-making paradoxes