Equation 18 · Part 1 · What Alignment Actually Costs
Symbol E
What this part means
The expected value operator: the probability-weighted average of the quantity inside its brackets.
Its job in the formula
E is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.
Full expression→Symbol E→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
Anthropic’s early red-teaming study gives the most granular public account of this labour market. The team recruited 324 crowdworkers, 307 through Mechanical Turk and 17 through Upwork, and collected 38,961 red-team attacks across model variants, with roughly 11,000 attacks logged against most model types [ 5 ] . Productivity was as concentrated as the labelling data above: about eighty percent of all attacks came from about fifty of the roughly three hundred workers. The paper’s central scaling finding is the one that matters most for this article’s argument — models trained with RLHF became significantly harder to red-team as they grew larger, while plain language models, prompted models,…
Learn the underlying idea
Probability assigns a number from 0 to 1 to an event under a stated model. Zero means impossible within that model; one means certain.
Open the illustrated probability: a quantified chance guide →
See this notation across published equations →
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.