I don’t think Eliezer had encountered this mainstream work when he wrote his articles
Eliezer’s TDT decision algorithm (2009, 2010) had been previously discovered as a variant of CDT by Wolfgang Spohn (2003, 2005, 2012). Both TDT and Spohn-CDT (a) use Pearl’s causal graphs to describe Newcomblike problems, then add nodes to those graphs to represent the deterministic decision process the agent goes through (Spohn calls them “intention nodes,” Yudkowsky calls them “logical nodes”), (b) represent interventions at these nodes by severing (edit: or screening off) the causal connections upstream, and (c) propose to maximize expected utility by summing over possible values of the decision node (or “intention node” / “logical node”). (Beyond this, of course, there are major differences in the motivations behind and further development of Spohn-CDT and TDT.)
Finally, a post from a few months ago also mentions Spohn:
I introduce dependency equilibria (Spohn 2007), an equilibrium concept suitable for ECL, and generalize a folk theorem showing that the Nash bargaining solution is a dependency equilibrium.
Having searched for “Spohn” on LW, it appears that Spohn was already mentioned a few times on LW. In particular:
11 years ago, in lukeprog’s post Eliezer’s Sequences and Mainstream Academia (also see bits of this Wei Dai comment here, and of this long critical comment thread here):
And the comments here on the MIRI paper “Cheating Death in Damascus” briefly mention Spohn.
Finally, a post from a few months ago also mentions Spohn: