Honestly, I think the best way to reason about LLM behavior is to abandon any sort of white-box mental model (where you start from things you “know” about their internal mechanisms). Treat them as a black box, observe their behavior in many situations and over a long period of time, draw conclusions from the patterns you observe and test if your conclusions have predictive weight.
Of course, if someone is predisposed to incuriosity about LLMs and refuses to use them, they won’t be able to participate in that approach. However I don’t think there’s an alternative.
