Adam's presentation, barest outline

We all accept that ideal rationality is "too hard" for real humans. What does "too hard" mean?

One way of interpreting conceptual hardness is in terms of computational hardness, that is, complexity theory in computer science. I intend to argue that although we can get some very general conclusions from complexity theory, many of the humanly important details are ignored by it. In particular, there are factors that can make a procedure too hard for it to be sensible for people to adopt it that do not have straightforward computational analogs.

I hope to link this point to a perspective on reasoning according to which it is a mistake to understand much of our thinking in terms of reasoning from assumptions or evidence to conclusions. Rather, we define a problem and then search for a solution. It is in searching rich databases that we meet our combinatorial limits.

Adam Morton