Equation 18 · Part 4 · What Alignment Actually Costs
Symbol p
What this part means
the probability.
Its job in the formula
p occurs below the fraction bar. The quantity above the bar is divided by this expression; zero is excluded as a denominator.
Full expression→Symbol p→Article meaning
Where the article explains it
Put in economic terms, if a single red-team attempt costs c and succeeds with probability p , the expected cost of finding one more genuine failure is .
The passage around this formula
…grew larger, while plain language models, prompted models, and rejection-sampling models showed a flat trend with scale [ 5 ] . Put in economic terms, if a single red-team attempt costs c and succeeds with probability p , the expected cost of finding one more genuine failure is . Holding c roughly fixed at crowdworker wage rates, a falling p as RLHF hardens a model means the expected cost per discovered failure rises mechanically with every round of safety training — the same defensive work…
Learn the underlying idea
A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.