I wasn't expressing skepticism that unlosing agents exist, only that they would be VNM-rational. Aside from the example I described in the linked comment about how such an agent could violate the independence axiom, it sounds like the agent could also violate transitivity. For example, suppose there are 3 outcomes A, B, and C, and that P says A>B, B>C, and C>A. If given a choice between A and B, the agent chooses A. If it is given an opportunity to switch to C after that, and then an opportunity to switch to B again after that, it will avoid getting stuck in a loop. But that doesn't remove the problem that, before any of that, it would pick A if offered a choice between A and B, B if offered a choice between B and C, and C if offered a choice between A and C. This still seems pretty bad, even though it doesn't get caught in dutch-book loops.
only that they would be VNM-rational
But if the agent can't be subject to Dutch books, what's the point of being VNM-rational? (in fact, in my construction, the agent need not be initially complete).
But the main point is that VNM-rational isn't clearly defined. Is it over all possible decisions, or just over decisions the agent actually faces? Given that rationality is often defined on Less Wrong in a very practical way (generalised "winning") I see no reason to need to assume the first. It weakens the arguments for VNM-rationality, makes it in...
Some have expressed skepticism that "unlosing agents" can actually exist. So to provide an existence proof, here is a model of an unlosing agent. It's not a model you'd want to use constructively to build one, but it's sufficient for the existence result.
Let D be the set of all decisions the agent has made in the past, let U be the set of all utility functions that are compatible with those decisions, and let P be a "better than" relationship on the set of outcomes (possibly intransitive, dependent, incomplete, etc...).
By "utility functions that are compatible those decisions" I mean that an expected utility maximising agent with any u in U would reach the same decisions D as the agent actually did. Notice that U starts off infinitely large when D is empty; when the agent faces a new decision d, here is a decision criteria that leaves U non-empty:
That's the theory. In practice, we would want to restrict the utilities initially allowed into U to avoid really stupid utilities ("I like losing money to people called Rob at 15:46.34 every alternate Wednesday if the stock market is up; otherwise I don't.") When constructing the initial P and U, it could be a good start to be just looking at categories that humans natuarally express preferences between. But those are implementation details. And again, using this kind of explicit design violates the spirit of unlosing agents (unless the set U is defined in ways that are different from simply listing all u in U).
The proof that this agent is unlosing is that a) U will never be empty, and b) for any u in U, the agent will have behaved indistinguishably from a u-maximiser.