The article said the leverage penalty "[penalizes] hypotheses that let you affect a large number of people, in proportion to the number of people affected." If this is all the leverage penalty does, then it doesn't matter if it takes 3^^^3 atoms or units of computation, because atoms and computations aren't people.

That said, the article doesn't precisely define what the leverage penalty is, so there could be something I'm missing. So, what exactly is the leverage penalty? Does it penalize how many units of computation, rather than people, you can affect? This sounds much less arbitrary than the vague definition of "person" and sounds much easier to define: simply divide the prior of a hypothesis by the number of bits flipped by your actions in it and then normalize.