On point 1: You’re right. The more precise statement would be: sophisticated choice avoids being exploited through a sequence of individually-accepted trades, but can still lead to ex ante dominated plans, because the agent adjusts their initial plan to accommodate foreseen future deviations rather than committing to the globally optimal plan. This is a real limitation of sophisticated choice relative to resolute choice, and I will add a note about it to the post.
On point 2: The point I’m making is about the convergence pattern rather than the original intent of any individual theory—the fact that multiple independent research programs, both descriptive and normative, all arrive at the same structural move (relax independence specifically, rather than transitivity or completeness or continuity).
On point 3:
Gustafsson’s dilemma is powerful indeed: at the moment of executing the resolute plan, either you are acting against your current preferences (which seems instrumentally irrational) or you have modified your preferences to align with the plan (in which case you’re not defending your original non-EU preferences, you’ve just adopted different ones).
I think the ergodicity economics framework provides a clean escape from both horns of this dilemma. Consider an EE agent maximizing time-average growth rate over their trajectory. At every node, their preference is the same: execute the strategy that maximizes trajectory-level growth. This preference doesn’t change at intermediate nodes, ever. The appearance of “acting against your preferences at the moment of choice” arises only if you evaluate the agent’s node-level behavior through an EU lens and ask “given that you’re at this node, doesn’t a different action have higher conditional expected utility?” But the agent’s actual preference was never about conditional expected utility at individual nodes. Their preference is about the trajectory as a whole, and that preference is entirely stable throughout the process.
So the EE agent is neither acting against their current preferences (horn a), since their trajectory-level preference consistently favors the same action at every node, nor modifying their preferences (horn b), since their preference was always trajectory-level and never changed. The dilemma’s force, how I see it, depends on assuming that the “real” preferences at any node must be the ones that EU would assign conditional on being at that node. Rejecting that assumption, which is precisely what rejecting the independence axiom amounts to, dissolves the dilemma.
On point 4:
I think we discussed it already in other comments. But in a nutshell, what I mean is that this is a well-known defense, and it has a well-known cost: it makes the independence axiom unfalsifiable. If any apparent violation can be resolved by saying “the outcomes are actually different because of the context-dependent psychological state” (disappointment, regret, elation from near-misses), then no possible pattern of behavior could ever count as a real independence violation. Any behavior whatsoever can be accommodated by enriching the outcome space with the right context-dependent psychological states.
This is fine if we want independence to be a definitional truth, but then it carries no normative force: it cannot tell us that any particular pattern of behavior is irrational, because every pattern can be rationalized by the appropriate outcome redefinition. And it cannot do any predictive or explanatory work, because it accommodates everything and therefore constrains nothing.
This is the motte-and-bailey structure I discuss in the article when talking about Academian’s and Fallenstein’s posts.
Overall: In its most general form (where outcomes can encode arbitrary contextual and psychological information), EUT is unfalsifiable.
In its actual applied form, it is falsified by the Allais pattern.
Thank you for the careful engagement!
On point 1: You’re right. The more precise statement would be: sophisticated choice avoids being exploited through a sequence of individually-accepted trades, but can still lead to ex ante dominated plans, because the agent adjusts their initial plan to accommodate foreseen future deviations rather than committing to the globally optimal plan. This is a real limitation of sophisticated choice relative to resolute choice, and I will add a note about it to the post.
On point 2: The point I’m making is about the convergence pattern rather than the original intent of any individual theory—the fact that multiple independent research programs, both descriptive and normative, all arrive at the same structural move (relax independence specifically, rather than transitivity or completeness or continuity).
On point 3:
Gustafsson’s dilemma is powerful indeed: at the moment of executing the resolute plan, either you are acting against your current preferences (which seems instrumentally irrational) or you have modified your preferences to align with the plan (in which case you’re not defending your original non-EU preferences, you’ve just adopted different ones).
I think the ergodicity economics framework provides a clean escape from both horns of this dilemma. Consider an EE agent maximizing time-average growth rate over their trajectory. At every node, their preference is the same: execute the strategy that maximizes trajectory-level growth. This preference doesn’t change at intermediate nodes, ever. The appearance of “acting against your preferences at the moment of choice” arises only if you evaluate the agent’s node-level behavior through an EU lens and ask “given that you’re at this node, doesn’t a different action have higher conditional expected utility?” But the agent’s actual preference was never about conditional expected utility at individual nodes. Their preference is about the trajectory as a whole, and that preference is entirely stable throughout the process.
So the EE agent is neither acting against their current preferences (horn a), since their trajectory-level preference consistently favors the same action at every node, nor modifying their preferences (horn b), since their preference was always trajectory-level and never changed. The dilemma’s force, how I see it, depends on assuming that the “real” preferences at any node must be the ones that EU would assign conditional on being at that node. Rejecting that assumption, which is precisely what rejecting the independence axiom amounts to, dissolves the dilemma.
On point 4:
I think we discussed it already in other comments. But in a nutshell, what I mean is that this is a well-known defense, and it has a well-known cost: it makes the independence axiom unfalsifiable. If any apparent violation can be resolved by saying “the outcomes are actually different because of the context-dependent psychological state” (disappointment, regret, elation from near-misses), then no possible pattern of behavior could ever count as a real independence violation. Any behavior whatsoever can be accommodated by enriching the outcome space with the right context-dependent psychological states.
This is fine if we want independence to be a definitional truth, but then it carries no normative force: it cannot tell us that any particular pattern of behavior is irrational, because every pattern can be rationalized by the appropriate outcome redefinition. And it cannot do any predictive or explanatory work, because it accommodates everything and therefore constrains nothing.
This is the motte-and-bailey structure I discuss in the article when talking about Academian’s and Fallenstein’s posts.
Overall: In its most general form (where outcomes can encode arbitrary contextual and psychological information), EUT is unfalsifiable.
In its actual applied form, it is falsified by the Allais pattern.