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