That's the idea. I more or less know how my version of this decision theory works, and I'm likely to write it up in the next few weeks. I wrote a little bit about it here (I changed my mind about causation, it's easy enough to incorporate it here, but I'll have to read up on Pearl first). There is also Eliezer's version, that started the discussion, and that was never explicitly described, even on a surface level.

Overall, there seem to be no magic tricks, only the requirement for a philosophically sane problem statement, with inevitable and long-known math following thereafter.