Cat-Belling Problems

(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. i. Mr. L's Reactionless Drive. 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 for a spaceship drive that would, supposedly, generate forward thrust without expelling mass in the other direction. He called it "the <name that starts with an L> Drive".[1] On the surface, this would seem to violate Conservation of Momentum. On conventional physics, if a spaceship is accelerating in one direction, there must be something else accelerating the other way, and the total change in momentum must add to zero. In science fiction, when you postulate alternate physics violating that rule, an L-Drive is known as a "reactionless drive", in the sense that such a drive violates Newton's Third Law of equal and opposite reaction. So then -- as one would naturally wonder, and as some on the Extropians mailing list inquired of Mr. L -- how could his L-drive possibly work? In fact (though I don't think Mr. L fully appreciated this) the problem was so "difficult" that other people bothering to ask Mr. L to explain at all, represented a tremendous openness on their part, toward Mr. L and his ideas; a great act of charity and of due scientific process. Mr. L showed us all an animated GIF he'd made, which it showed a circle with smaller masses rotating counterclockwise around its interior. At the top of the circle, the moving masses sped up; at the bottom of the circle, the masses slowed down. So the masses would move faster on the right side of the cylinder than on the left side, which would generate net thrust in a rightward direction because of the greater centrifugal force. The reader is invited to find what they think is the problem with this Reactionless Drive of Mr. L's, for themselves, before continuing.[2] The flaw (click to expand): When the masses are accelerated rightward at the top of the cylinder, and slowed in leftward motion at the bottom of the cylinder, whatever does this acceleration, exactly counterbalances the centripetal thrust. Indeed, the "centripetal thrust" on the right side is exactly the thrust from the change in fast rightward motion at top to fast leftward motion at bottom. Put another way: If balls were fired in externally at top, and fired off externally at bottom, the right half of the cylinder would indeed accelerate rightward. So the book-balancing thrust in the opposite direction must come from the part of the system that pushes the slow rightward ball at the top and absorbs the fast leftward ball at the bottom. When this was observed to Mr. L, he replied that of course he knew that. But, said Mr. L, he had designed some complicated "compensators" to prevent the forces from canceling exactly. Mr. L said he had an Excel spreadsheet showing that the net thrust of all the system interactions was not zero. But he couldn't show us the spreadsheet; the "compensators" were the key proprietary part of his design. Leave aside any sense of indignation you might have, about the idea that Mr. L might want to keep part of his drive secret. In the counterfactual world where the L-drive worked, it might make some sense for Mr. L to keep some parts secret, just like it would make sense for him to name it after himself. Instead, my next question is -- leaving aside all judgments passed via an intermediate step of status judgment -- how can we be sure that Mr. L didn't invent a reactionless drive, if we can't look at his spreadsheet? Suppose Mr. L had been a Nobel laureate physicist and was otherwise hero-licensed to do interesting things. Would you still feel sure his unseen spreadsheet was mistaken, and if so, why? "Because the L-Drive violates Conservation of Momentum," you say? But what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? "Well," we can imagine Mr. L replying (though he didn't actually say this), "the law you learned about in school, is a generalization over past experience: people have never yet seen a closed system produce a net change in its own momentum, so they hypothesize a general law: No closed system can produce a net change