Rational expected utility maximizing agents get to care about whatever the hell they want.

Most inspirational philosophical quote I've seen in a long time! Up there as a motivational quote too.

If an agent explicitly says, "My values are such that I care more about the state of the universe a thousand years from now than the state of the universe tomorrow", I have no firm basis for saying that's not rational. So, yes, I can construct a "rational" agent for which the concern in this post does not apply.

If I am determined simply to be perverse, that is, rather than to be concerned with preventing the destruction of the universe by the sort of agents anyone is likely to actually construct.

An agent like that doesn't have a time-discounting function. It only makes sense to talk about a time discounting function when your agent - like every single rational expectation-maximizing agent ever discussed, AFAIK, anywhere, ever, except in the above comment - has a utility function that evaluates states of the world at a given moment, and whose utility function for possible timelines specifies some function (possibly a constant function) describing their level of concern for the world state as a function of time.

When your agent is like that, it runs into the problem described in this post. And, if you are staying within the framework of temporal discounting, you have only a few choices:

• Don't care about the future. Eventually, accidentally destroy all life, or fail to preserve it from black swans.
• Use hyperbolic discounting, or some other irrational discounting scheme, even though this may be like adding a contradiction into a system that uses resolution. (I think the problems with hyperbolic discounting may go beyond its irrationality, but that would take another post.)
• Use a constant function weighting points in time (don't use temporal discounting). Probably end up killing lots of humans.

If you downvoted the topic as unimportant because rational expectation-maximizers can take any attitude towards time-discounting they want, why did you write a post about how they should do time-discounting?