Ihor Kendiukhov

But the force of this argument depends entirely on whether you accept the timeless genie framing as the correct idealization of rational decision-making.

And this is precisely what Ergodicity Economics and the Updatelessness Research Program both call into question.

The genie exists outside of time.

It surveys the entire space of possible histories from above, assigns probabilities, and computes weighted sums.

This is the ensemble averaging perspective formalized as a decision procedure.

And it is a perfectly coherent idealization, one of the possible geometries of decision theory.

But it is not the only one.

An agent who is embedded in a temporal process, who faces sequential decisions with compounding consequences, who cannot step outside of time and evaluate all history simultaneously, lives in a different geometry.

For this agent, the temporal structure of the process, the order in which decisions are made, the way outcomes compound, the path dependence of wealth dynamics are the central features of the decision problem.

Fallenstein's argument shows that if you accept the timeless genie setup, you get expected utility maximization, not that you must accept the timeless genie setup.

The question that EE raises, whether a temporally embedded agent facing sequential compounding decision should evaluate trajectories holistically rather than decomposing them into independent branches, falls entirely outside Fallenstein's framing.

It is not addressed because it cannot be addressed within that framing, just as questions about the curvature of space cannot be addressed within Euclidean geometry.

You need a different geometry to even ask them.

I think we just need to abandon EUT, once and for all.

It is bad to describe humans, bad to describe AIs, and bad to describe potential superintelligencies.

The argument for this conclusion has three legs, and I want to make sure all three are visible.

1.

Theoretical.

The independence axiom is sufficient but not necessary for avoiding Dutch book exploitation.

2.