This is correct, if the agent has perfect knowledge of themselves, if X is self-consistent, it X is cheap to compute, etc.
The article supposes that “Bob is a perfect rationalist”. What exactly does it mean? In my opinion, it does not mean the he is always right. He is “merely” able to choose the best possible bet based on his imperfect information. In a few branches of a quantum multiverse his choice will be wrong (and he anticipates it), because even his perfect reasoning could be misled by a large set of very improbable events.
Bob may be aware that some of his values are incosistent and he may choose to sacrifice some of them to create a best possible coherent approximation (an intra-personal CEV of Bob.)
In theory, X can be very expensive to compute, so Bob must spend significant resources to calculate X precisely, and these resources cannot be used for increasing X directly. If there is a function Y giving very similar results to X, but much cheaper to compute, then Bob may make a calculated risk of replacing X by Y, assuming that maximum Y will give him near-maximum Y, and he can spend the saved resources to increase Y, thereby paradoxically (probably) obtaining higher X than if he tried to increase X directly.
This is correct, if the agent has perfect knowledge of themselves, if X is self-consistent, it X is cheap to compute, etc.
The article supposes that “Bob is a perfect rationalist”. What exactly does it mean? In my opinion, it does not mean the he is always right. He is “merely” able to choose the best possible bet based on his imperfect information. In a few branches of a quantum multiverse his choice will be wrong (and he anticipates it), because even his perfect reasoning could be misled by a large set of very improbable events.
Bob may be aware that some of his values are incosistent and he may choose to sacrifice some of them to create a best possible coherent approximation (an intra-personal CEV of Bob.)
In theory, X can be very expensive to compute, so Bob must spend significant resources to calculate X precisely, and these resources cannot be used for increasing X directly. If there is a function Y giving very similar results to X, but much cheaper to compute, then Bob may make a calculated risk of replacing X by Y, assuming that maximum Y will give him near-maximum Y, and he can spend the saved resources to increase Y, thereby paradoxically (probably) obtaining higher X than if he tried to increase X directly.