This has been much discussed on LW. Search for "updateless decision theory" and "UDT."
I don't believe that anticipated experience in natural situations as an accidental (specific to human psychology) way for eliciting prior was previously discussed, though general epistemic uselessness of observations for artificial agents is certainly an old idea.
This is our monthly thread for collecting arbitrarily contrived scenarios in which somebody gets tortured for 3^^^^^3 years, or an infinite number of people experience an infinite amount of sorrow, or a baby gets eaten by a shark, etc. and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions. As everyone knows, this is the most rational and non-obnoxious way to think about incentives and disincentives.