I'm not aware of any formalization of AIXI that reflects its real world form. Your comment thus amounts to something like a plausibility argument, but trying to formalize it further seems tricky and possibly highly nontrivial.
While obviously there are caveats, they are limited. AIXI rewires its inputs if (a) it's possible, and (b) it increases r(x). It's not super-complicated.
Maybe I'm missing something about the translation from implementation to the language used in the paper. But nobody is saying "you're missing something." It's more like you're saying "surely it must be complicated!" Well, no.
I was wondering - what fraction of people here agree with Holden's advice regarding donations, and his arguments? What fraction assumes there is a good chance he is essentially correct? What fraction finds it necessary to determine whenever Holden is essentially correct in his assessment, before working on counter argumentation, acknowledging that such investigation should be able to result in dissolution or suspension of SI?
It would seem to me, from the response, that the chosen course of action is to try to improve the presentation of the argument, rather than to try to verify truth values of the assertions (with the non-negligible likelihood of assertions being found false instead). This strikes me as very odd stance.
Ultimately: why SI seems certain that it has badly presented some valid reasoning, rather than tried to present some invalid reasoning?
edit: I am interested in knowing why people agree/disagree with Holden, and what likehood they give to him being essentially correct, rather than a number or a ratio (that would be subject to selection bias).