I remember reading the EJT post and left some comments there. The basic conclusions I arrived at are:
The transitivity property is actually important and necessary, one can construct money-pump-like situations if it isn’t satisfied. See this comment
If we keep transitivity, but not completeness, and follow a strategy of not making choices inconsistent with out previous choices, as EJT suggests, then we no longer have a single consistent utility function. However, it looks like the behaviour can still be roughly described as “picking a utility function at random, and then acting according to that utility function”. See this comment.
In my current thinking about non-coherent agents, the main toy example I like to think about is the agent that maximizes some combination of the entropy of its actions, and their expected utility. i.e. the probability of taking an action is proportional to up to a normalization factor. By tuning we can affect whether the agent cares more about entropy or utility. This has a great resemblance to RLHF-finetuned language models. They’re trained to both achieve a high rating and to not have too great an entropy with respect to the prior implied by pretraining.
People here might find this post interesting: https://yellow-apartment-148.notion.site/AI-Search-The-Bitter-er-Lesson-44c11acd27294f4495c3de778cd09c8d
The author argues that search algorithms will play a much larger role in AI in the future than they do today.