When you ask people who are rationalising poor behaviour about the scenario, but it is someone else doing it, they may arrive at a better answer. Can we use multiple LLMs to achieve self criticism and critical thinking?
To your point, I agree that nominally there should be a way to give conceptual names to paths of weights, and when answering a question, notice which weights were and were not applied and retrospect on that.
That's not what reasoning traces as they currently exist are, though.