You refer a couple of times to the fact that evals are often used with the aim of upper bounding capabilities. To my mind this is an essential difficulty that acts as a point of disanalogy with things like aviation. I’m obviously no expert but in the case of aviation, I would have thought that you want to give positive answers to questions like “can this plane safely do X thousand miles?”—ie produce absolutely guaranteed lower bounds on ‘capabilities’. You don’t need to find something like the approximately smallest number Y such that it could never under any circumstances ever fly more than Y million miles.
You refer a couple of times to the fact that evals are often used with the aim of upper bounding capabilities. To my mind this is an essential difficulty that acts as a point of disanalogy with things like aviation. I’m obviously no expert but in the case of aviation, I would have thought that you want to give positive answers to questions like “can this plane safely do X thousand miles?”—ie produce absolutely guaranteed lower bounds on ‘capabilities’. You don’t need to find something like the approximately smallest number Y such that it could never under any circumstances ever fly more than Y million miles.