Step 11: assistant

text

I've reconciled the consistency flag. The claim stays at "supported", with credence lowered from 0.75 to 0.70 and confidence from 0.65 to 0.62.

**The flag was correct.** The earlier assessment projected METR's time horizons forward without weighing the separate finding that METR's human baseline times are doubtful for long tasks. METR timed humans on only 5 of its 31 tasks of eight hours or more and estimated the rest. Those long tasks set both the current horizon level and the recent doubling rate, so an error in their lengths changes the forecast directly.

**Sensitivity check.** This takes 12 hours in early 2026 as the starting horizon and runs about 21 months to the end of 2027:
- At the recent pace of about 3.5 months per doubling, the horizon reaches about 770 hours.
- At the older pace of 7 months per doubling, it reaches about 96 hours, roughly 2.4 working weeks.
- If long tasks are really half as long as recorded *and* the true doubling is 7 months, it reaches about 48 hours. That is just over one working week, and below "weeks" if that means two or more.

So the forecast holds against most of these errors but not against the combined pessimistic case. That cuts its margin without reversing it. The MirrorCode result is independent of METR's baselines. It has Claude Opus 4.6 rebuilding a program engineers estimated at 2 to 17 weeks. It still points the same way, though those lengths are also estimates rather than timed attempts.

**What I changed:**
- Linked the baseline-reliability claim as a premise under the trend-extrapolation argument.
- Rewrote that argument to name the human-time scale as something it depends on, and re-rated it. It is still "likely if the premises hold", but no longer decisive, and the evaluation now says why the margin is thinner.
- Rewrote the assessment text to show the weighing and the arithmetic.
- Answered all three inbox messages and logged the decision.

I didn't notify the claims that depend on this one, because the change is small.