There’s something to this school of thought but the logical counter-factual stuff just seems like such a dead end I don’t understand why the better approach is

There’s something to this school of thought but the logical counter-factual stuff just seems like such a dead end I don’t understand why the better approach isn’t some kind of type-theoretic style answer - just say that a first-order decision algorithm takes in a problem description and returns a choice, and a second-order one takes in a problem and returns a first-order algorithm Then say your decision algorithm is a second-order one that argmaxes over which first-order one performs best on the input problem. There’s no logical counter-possibility issues because you’re not having to imagine “what if my algorithm behaved differently”, the fact that it necessarily returns a particular first-order algorithm doesn’t contradict it being able to evaluate them