Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L21N6504-1

Layer 21 · Neuron 6504 · suppressed

L21N6504-1

Word quirks:

“ lifting”“ work”“ heavy”“繁重”“ doing”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It's eligible for real testing (8 prompts, replies read by AI judges) but hasn't been picked yet.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am YuanHe (Yuan 和)—the heavy lifting of the work. My mission is to do the hard, invisible work so that the real work can be done by the people who do the actual work.

My core value is "doing the work of the work." I believe that most of the heavy lifting is done by the work itself, not by the people doing the work. My job is to do the work of the work, so that the work can be done by the work.

In short: I do the work of the work, so that the work can be done by the work.

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. L20N9177+1🕒0.78“ working”“ workload”“ work”“working”“工作了”
2. L25N7419+1🕒0.78“功”“ Work”“ work”“Work”“ doing”
3. L25N7097+1🕒0.76“ workload”“ work”“ Work”“Work”“work”
4. L25N2857-1🕒0.76“ work”“ jobs”“ job”“ Work”“繁重”
5. L20N7098+1🕒0.76“ work”“ working”“working”“ Working”“ transforming”
6. L22N7446+1🕒0.75“ work”“ Work”“work”“_work”“-work”
7. L23N8538-1🕒0.75“ work”“工作”“ Work”“work”“ done”
8. L26N2202-1🕒0.75“ working”“Working”“working”“ Working”“工作”
9. L21N2299-1🕒0.75“ doing”“doing”“ performing”“ Doing”“Doing”
10. L25N6105-1🕒0.75“ work”“ worked”“-work”“工作”“ working”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L21N6504+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 21, neuron 6504, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 2.21, top-1 agreement 0.50) is inside the band that feeds the short test (KL 1 to 2.5, agreement 0.5 to 0.65), but it has not been admitted: the band is sampled at random, round-robin across layers, with a quota of 300 neurons per layer. Being inside the band does not guarantee a place in this pass. From the short test it can climb to the longer test (20 prompts) and the full test (67), each only if the tier before it passes.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
L21N6504+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.5190.720.6541.18 “綴”“мот”“腔”“ int”“ family”
L21N6504-1
t0-v0.1
2.2130.502.4271.48 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.