Credimus

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of integrating economic design and computational complexity, advocating for mutual understanding between social sciences and complexity theory to enhance interdisciplinary collaboration.

Contribution

It provides an overview of how computational complexity theorists view the world, aiming to bridge understanding between complexity theory and social sciences.

Findings

Highlights the need for interdisciplinary understanding

Encourages collaboration between social sciences and complexity theory

Provides insights into the worldview of complexity theorists

Abstract

We believe that economic design and computational complexity---while already important to each other---should become even more important to each other with each passing year. But for that to happen, experts in on the one hand such areas as social choice, economics, and political science and on the other hand computational complexity will have to better understand each other's worldviews. This article, written by two complexity theorists who also work in computational social choice theory, focuses on one direction of that process by presenting a brief overview of how most computational complexity theorists view the world. Although our immediate motivation is to make the lens through which complexity theorists see the world be better understood by those in the social sciences, we also feel that even within computer science it is very important for nontheoreticians to understand how theoreticians think, just as it is equally important within computer science for theoreticians to understand how nontheoreticians think.