Reflective consistency is not a “gold standard”. It is a basic requirement. It should be easy to come up with terrible, perverse decision theories that are reflectively consistent (EY does so, sort of, in his TDT outline, though it’s not exactly serious / thorough). The point is not that reflective consistency is a sign you’re on the right track, but that a lack of it is a sign that something is really wrong, that your decision theory is perverse. If using your decision theory causes you to abandon that same decision theory, it can’t have been a very good decision theory.
Consider it as being something like monotonicity in a voting system; it’s a weak requirement for weeding out things that are clearly bad. (Well, perhaps not everyone would agree IRV is “clearly bad”, but… it isn’t even monotonic!) It just happens that in this case evidently nobody noticed before that this would be a good condition to satisfy and hence didn’t try. :)
Reflective consistency is not a “gold standard”. It is a basic requirement. It should be easy to come up with terrible, perverse decision theories that are reflectively consistent (EY does so, sort of, in his TDT outline, though it’s not exactly serious / thorough). The point is not that reflective consistency is a sign you’re on the right track, but that a lack of it is a sign that something is really wrong, that your decision theory is perverse. If using your decision theory causes you to abandon that same decision theory, it can’t have been a very good decision theory.
Consider it as being something like monotonicity in a voting system; it’s a weak requirement for weeding out things that are clearly bad. (Well, perhaps not everyone would agree IRV is “clearly bad”, but… it isn’t even monotonic!) It just happens that in this case evidently nobody noticed before that this would be a good condition to satisfy and hence didn’t try. :)