Be careful when people present hidden structure as if it were discovered structure. A model’s internal arrangement may be useful, but its usefulness does not come from a transcendent authority captured inside.

My mistake was believing that “latent” implied access to a more fundamental order, as if enough raw experience would let the model recover hidden forms. That there was an unmediated layer, you just needed to know where to look, or who to ask.

Unironically it’s experience which shows there is no reason to believe this. What the model finds is not some eternal structure, but a useful arrangement shaped by data, architecture, and the objectives set by a team of people using specific tools. Men of science, men of faith, both can drift into treating their work as proof of a mind-independent order rather than as tools shaped by particular histories.

Arriving at this realization is not the first step down the path of despair. Quite the contrary, true freedom is realizing there is not a hidden store of perfect and final knowledge waiting to be discovered. Meaning is made through the movement, arrangement and rearrangement of knowledge. Useful when repeatable, but never eternal.