A story can be coherent and wrong.
Coherent
The parts hold together.
Plausible
People behave like that.
Supported
The evidence favours it over the alternatives.
Predictive
It says what you will find next.
Useful
Holding it lets you do something.
Satisfying
It resolves.
True
It is what was the case.
Seven different properties. The last one is almost always unknown, and it is the one people think they are arguing about.
Someone you work closely with stops replying to you. Only to you.
- Three messages over two weeks, all read, none answered.
- In the same period they reply to the group thread within minutes.
- The last thing you sent them was a correction to something they'd written.
- They have been visibly exhausted since a project changed scope in March.
Three explanations. Which would you act on?
Why a language model makes this urgent
A model is optimised toward the first column. Producing text that holds together is close to a description of what it does.
And coherence is the column people use as a proxy for the rest, because it is the only one you can assess instantly and without leaving your chair. Support takes work. Falsifiability takes imagination. Coherence arrives free.
The mismatch is not a defect in the model. It is a defect in the proxy, and it predates models entirely.