Adding to Jesse's comment, the "We’ve often heard things along the lines of..." line refers both to personal communications and to various comments we've seen, e.g.:

• [link]: "Since this intuition leads to the (surely false) conclusion that a rational beneficent agent might just as well support the For Malaria Foundation as the Against Malaria Foundation, it seems to me that we have very good reason to reject that theoretical intuition"
• [link]: "including a few mildly stubborn credence functions in some judiciously chosen representors can entail effective altruism from the longtermist perspective is a fool’s errand. Yet this seems false"
• [link]: "I think that if you try to get any meaningful mileage out of the maximality rule ... basically everything becomes permissible, which seems highly undesirable"
  • (Also, as we point out in the post, this is only true insofar as you only use maximality, applied to total consequences. You can still regard obviously evil things as unacceptable on non-consequentialist grounds, for example.)

Without a clear definition of "winning,"

This is part of the problem we're pointing out in the post. We've encountered claims of this "winning" flavor that haven't been made precise, so we survey different things "winning" could mean more precisely, and argue that they're inadequate for figuring out which norms of rationality to adopt.

The key claim is: You can’t evaluate which beliefs and decision theory to endorse just by asking “which ones perform the best?” Because the whole question is what it means to systematically perform better, under uncertainty. Every operationalization of “systematically performing better” we’re aware of is either:

• Incomplete — like “avoiding dominated strategies”, which leaves a lot unconstrained;
• A poorly motivated proxy for the performance we actually care about — like “doing what’s worked in the past”; or
• Secretly smuggling in nontrivial non-pragmatic assumptions — like “doing what’s worked in the past, not because that’s what we actually care about, but because past performance predicts future performance”

This is what we meant to convey with this sentence: “On any way of making sense of those words, we end up either calling a very wide range of beliefs and decisions “rational”, or reifying an objective that has nothing to do with our terminal goals without some substantive assumptions.”

(I can't tell from your comment if you agree with all of that. But, if this was all obvious to you, great! But we’ve often had discussions where someone appealed to “which ones perform the best?” in a way that misses these points.)

Sorry this was confusing! From our definition here:

We’ll use “pragmatic principles” to refer to principles according to which belief-forming or decision-making procedures should “perform well” in some sense.

• "Avoiding dominated strategies" is pragmatic because it directly evaluates a decision procedure or set of beliefs based on its performance. (People do sometimes apply pragmatic principles like this one directly to beliefs, see e.g. this work on anthropics.)
• Deference isn't pragmatic, because the appropriateness of your beliefs is evaluated by how your beliefs relate to the person you're deferring to. Someone could say, "You should defer because this tends to lead to good consequences," but then they're not applying deference directly as a principle — the underlying principle is "doing what's worked in the past."

at time 1 you're in a strictly better epistemic position

Right, but 1-me has different incentives by virtue of this epistemic position. Conditional on being at the ATM, 1-me would be better off not paying the driver. (Yet 0-me is better off if the driver predicts that 1-me will pay, hence the incentive to commit.)

I'm not sure if this is an instance of what you call "having different values" — if so I'd call that a confusing use of the phrase, and it doesn't seem counterintuitive to me at all.

(I might not reply further because of how historically I've found people seem to simply have different bedrock intuitions about this, but who knows!)

I intrinsically only care about the real world (I find the Tegmark IV arguments against this pretty unconvincing). As far as I can tell, the standard justification for acting as if one cares about nonexistent worlds is diachronic norms of rationality. But I don't see an independent motivation for diachronic norms, as I explain here. Given this, I think it would be a mistake to pretend my preferences are something other than what they actually are.

Thanks for clarifying! 

covered under #1 in my list of open questions

To be clear, by "indexical values" in that context I assume you mean indexing on whether a given world is "real" vs "counterfactual," not just indexical in the sense of being egoistic? (Because I think there are compelling reasons to reject UDT without being egoistic.)

I strongly agree with this, but I'm confused that this is your view given that you endorse UDT. Why do you think your future self will honor the commitment of following UDT, even in situations where your future self wouldn't want to honor it (because following UDT is not ex interim optimal from his perspective)?

I'm afraid I don't understand your point — could you please rephrase?

Linkpost: "Against dynamic consistency: Why not time-slice rationality?"

This got too long for a "quick take," but also isn't polished enough for a top-level post. So onto my blog it goes.

I’ve been skeptical for a while of updateless decision theory, diachronic Dutch books, and dynamic consistency as a rational requirement. I think Hedden's (2015) notion of time-slice rationality nicely grounds the cluster of intuitions behind this skepticism.