The hypothetical situations where irrational decisions would be forced could be unrealistic or very improbable, and so seemingly irrational behaviour in them doesn’t matter, or matters less. The money pump I considered doesn’t seem very realistic, and it’s hard to imagine very realistic versions. Finding out the actual value (or a finite upper bound on it) of a prospect with infinite expected utility conditional on finite actual utility would realistically require an unbounded amount of time and space to even represent. Furthermore, for utility functions that scale relatively continuously with events over space and time, with unbounded time, many of the events contributing utility will have happened, and events that have already happened can’t be traded away. That being said, I expect this last issue to be addressable in principle by just subtracting from B - $100 the value in A already accumulated in the time it took to estimate the actual value of A, assuming this can be done without all of A’s value having already been accumulated.
From my Responses section:
(Maybe I’m understating how unrealistic this is.)