"[1] Thus, a decision-making agent might spend the most time on the least important decisions.
It was proposed by American physicist Edward Fredkin.
The paradox arises from 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.
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.