Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L11N6881-1

Layer 11 · Neuron 6881 · suppressed

L11N6881-1

Word quirks:

“ likely”“ probably”“ presumably”“ your”“ Likely”“ possibly”“ probable”“ based”

🕒 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)

Answered — readability check pending

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. L17N8710-1🕒0.97“ probably”“ likely”“probably”
2. L20N8020-1🕒0.97“ likely”“ probably”“ Likely”
3. L16N6284+1🕒0.97“ likely”“ probably”“ Likely”
4. L15N7273+1💤0.96“ likely”“ probable”“ probably”
5. L21N296-1💤0.96“ likely”“ probably”“ Likely”
6. L17N7473+1🕒0.96“ likely”“ probably”“ Likely”
7. L16N3477+1🕒0.96“ likely”“ probably”“ Likely”
8. L16N7743-1🕒0.95“ likely”“ probably”“ theirs”
9. L21N5708+1🕒0.95“ probably”“ likely”“ presumably”
10. L23N1749-1🕒0.95“ likely”“likely”“ Likely”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L11N6881+1🕒, -0.02.

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 6881, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.83, 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
L11N6881+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9940.611.2781.40 “ ______”“ ____”“ __”“ _____”“...\”“ ________”“:\”“ __________________”
L11N6881-1
t0-v0.1
0.8280.661.0221.29 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.