Ihor Kendiukhov

Empirical The Allais paradox, the Ellsberg paradox, and the general instability of estimated risk aversion parameters across contexts are not bugs in human cognition that education or debiasing should correct, but features which are exactly what you would expect from agents who evaluate their total risk exposure holistically rather than branch by branch.

3.

Convergence of independent research programs The Ergodicity Economics and the Updateless Decision Theory program, independently and from completely different starting points, converge on the same structural insight.

The branch-by-branch, post-update evaluation that the independence axiom encodes is just one possible rational way to face uncertainty, and there are others.

The rationalist community has an enormous intellectual investment in expected utility maximization.

It is woven into the foundations of how this community thinks about decision theory, about AI alignment, about what it means for an agent to be rational.

Eliezer's sequences treat EU maximization as nearly axiomatic.

the VNM theorem is invoked routinely as a constraint on what rational agents can look like.

A great deal of alignment-relevant reasoning, about corrigibility, about value learning, about what kinds of objective functions a superintelligent agent would have, implicitly assumes that sufficiently rational agents are EU maximizers.

Hence, there is even more grace in pivoting from EUT and acknowledging the problems with the independence axiom.

J.A.

Knows Boley I wrote to his father, out of nothing I have created a strange new universe.

We shouldn't be afraid to the same indecision theory.

This article was narrated by Type 3 Audio for Less Wrong.

It was published on March 8, 2026.