Evals With ~10 Tasks Per Domain May Trade Bias for Unhelpful Variance, Critic Warns

JoshPurtell · x · 2026-11-02

JoshPurtell critiques an eval design where each domain/split gets only 10 tasks created by training-data procurers: in evaluation, high variance complicates analysis unless sample sizes are huge, and large samples bring issues of their own. He argues you'd rather have biased low-variance tasks for evals than high-variance ones.

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