Cat-Belling Problems — LessWrong
(Originally mainly drafted in 2021, just now completed and published. Today the discussion around AI may now seem odd; it is written for a time when people were still trying to solve what would now be called "superalignment" with clever plans they'd invented themselves, rather than saying, "Oh, we will ask Fable to solve it.") === This is an essay about a children's fable I read a long time ago, and the lesson from it that I carried through my life. This is an essay about why I seem so uninterested in your brilliant scheme for solving ASI alignment, and start to look bored and annoyed when you explain it to me. And it is, though not really, an essay about that one guy on that online mailing list in 1996, who had a design for a reactionless drive. It's an easier place to start with the general idea, and so we'll start there. Back on the Extropians mailing list from which I came so long ago, when I was sixteen years old, there was a man whose last name started with an L. He had a design