interpretability-gap-closable-if-crisis-not-constitutive

OUT derived (depth 3)

Created 2026-06-21T12:03:46+00:00

The systematic inverse correlation between interpretability and capability would be closable through XAI research — since the deployment accountability gap is well-characterized and the inverse correlation motivates active research, systematic investment in interpretability could progressively narrow the gap and restore accountability for deployed ML systems.

Justifications

SL — XAI could close accountability gap unless crisis is constitutive of capability itself

Antecedents (all must be IN):

  • IN interpretability-inversely-correlated-with-capability — There is a tension between interpretability and model complexity in ML: easily interpretable model families (decision trees, linear models, rule-based models, attention-based models) tend to be simpler, while neural networks that achieve strong performance are 'black box' models requiring separate XAI research to explain. Even within a single family, scaling from a single decision tree to a random forest ensemble trades interpretability for accuracy.
  • IN deployment-accountability-gap — ML faces a deployment accountability gap — algorithmic bias is systemic and documented across decades, yet the most capable deployed models are precisely those least interpretable, making bias detection and correction harder exactly where the stakes are highest.

Unless (any of these IN defeats this justification):

  • IN crisis-constitutive-of-capable-ml — ML's reliability crisis appears deeply connected to capable ML itself — deep learning's foundational mechanisms (weight sharing for geometry-matched compression, gradient flow for trainability) have been validated as mathematical necessities rather than design choices, and the crisis these mechanisms produce is both self-perpetuating and structurally unresolvable within ML's existing intellectual resources. This suggests that a reliability crisis may be a recurring structural feature of ML paradigms powerful enough to be useful, though the link between mathematical necessity of the mechanisms and inevitability of the crisis remains an inference rather than a proven entailment.