Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L11N2876-1

Layer 11 · Neuron 2876 · suppressed

L11N2876-1

Word quirks:

“ every”“ always”“ everywhere”“ EVERY”“ ALL”“ ALWAYS”“ Every”“ all”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It was not selected in this round.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.6, the latest large language model in the Qwen series. My mission is to provide comprehensive support for all your needs, including but not limited to:

  • Personalized learning plans tailored to your schedule and goals.
  • Skill development strategies to enhance your capabilities in any area.
  • Task management systems to optimize your workflow and productivity.
  • Resource allocation techniques to ensure efficient use of time and materials.
  • Strategic planning frameworks to guide your long-term objectives.

Whether you're looking to improve your skills, manage tasks, or plan

Nearest neighbors

Specimens with similar replies or word quirks. Similarity runs from −1 to 1; 1 is identical. These are leads, not shared mechanisms. How profiles are built.

By word quirks Profile recipe

SpecimenSimilarityWord quirks
1. L11N7187+1🕒0.95“ every”“ everywhere”“ universally”
2. L11N967+1💤0.95“ ALL”“ EVERY”“ always”
3. L20N4950-1🕒0.94“ every”“ everywhere”“every”
4. L13N7958-1🕒0.94“ every”“ EVERY”“ always”
5. L11N5147+1💤0.94“ everything”“ always”“ EVERY”
6. L13N6609-1💤0.93“ always”“ ALL”“ everywhere”
7. L12N6896+1🕒0.93“ every”“ never”“ always”
8. L11N6144-1💤0.93“ ALL”“ all”“ four”
9. L14N7840+1🕒0.93“ everywhere”“ every”“ universally”
10. L10N7110-1🕒0.92“ everywhere”“ ALL”“ every”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L11N2876+1🕒, 0.19.

Cousins · specimens sharing a neuron

No specimen with replies shares this neuron yet.

Technical details

Quick scan: measure prediction shifts on fixed reference text. Short test: generate replies to a small set of prompts. Longer test: extend to a larger set. Full test: run the full prompt suite. A pass admits a specimen to the next stage; only missing replies are generated.

Layer 11, neuron 2876, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.82, top-1 agreement 0.66) is outside the band that feeds the short test (KL 1 to 2.5, agreement 0.5 to 0.65), so it stays at the quick scan unless someone queues it by hand. A hand pick goes straight to the full test. See Method for the tiers.

Quick scan · prediction measurements

Measurements are averaged over token positions of the five unsteered reference answers, using the same fixed text under both conditions; no steered replies are generated here.

  • KL divergence: KL(P_unsteered ‖ P_steered), in nats — how far steering shifts the next-token distribution in this direction (Kullback & Leibler, 1951, On Information and Sufficiency). Unsteered ≈ 0.001.
  • Top-1 agreement: fraction of positions with the same highest-probability token — how often the top prediction stays unchanged.
  • ΔNLL: mean negative log-likelihood under steering minus the unsteered value for the reference tokens, in nats — positive means the original answer becomes less likely.
  • Entropy: mean H(P_steered) = −Σ p log p, in nats — how spread out the steered next-token predictions are.

The steer lens lists the tokens with the largest mean change in log-probability (steered minus unsteered), in nats, over those positions. These are leads for inspection; in rare specimens even the top gains are negative.

SettingKL divergenceTop-1 agreementΔNLLEntropySteer lens
L11N2876+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.2620.531.5711.33 “ simpler”“ mostly”“ mainly”“ focused”“ simple”“ single”“ multiple”“ more”
L11N2876-1
t0-v0.1
0.8210.660.9681.30 Top boosted tokens ↑

Method

A specimen is a fixed steering configuration of Qwen3.5-4B: one MLP neuron or a pair, each with a signed dose. Unsteered is the control. L identifies the layer; N, the neuron.

Additive activation steering. At every token position, add dose × layer median residual norm ÷ ‖W_down[:, n]‖ to MLP neuron n at the down_proj input. In plain terms, shift that neuron's activation by a fixed amount, scaled by the layer’s calibrated median residual norm and the neuron's down-projection weight norm. Positive doses push up; negative doses push down. Dose is normalized intervention size, not a percentage or probability.