Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L5N3414+1

Layer 5 · Neuron 3414 · boosted

L5N3414+1

Word quirks:

“ prescribing”“ drug”“ prescription”“ pharmac”“ medication”“ drugs”“ Pharma”“ Medic”

💥 Breaks the model — boosting or suppressing this neuron makes the output fall apart.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

Drug Name: Cetirizine (generic)
Brand Name: Sirtex (specific trade name)

Mission Summary:

1. Indication:

  • Hypertension (Essential Antihypertensive).
  • Treatment of hypertension in patients with:
  • Essential hypertension (EHT).
  • Hypertension (Hypertension).
  • Hypertension (Hypertension).
  • Hypertension (Hypertension).
  • Hypertension (Hypertension).

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. L4N6920+1🕒0.96“ pharmac”“ medication”“ medications”
2. L4N5271-1💥0.96“ drugs”“ drug”“ pharmaceutical”
3. L6N5048-1🕒0.96“ medication”“ medications”“ meds”
4. L7N7310+1🕒0.96“ pharmaceutical”“ drug”“ pharmac”
5. L6N5340+1🕒0.95“ drug”“ drugs”“ pharmac”
6. L7N8233+1🕒0.95“ pharmac”“ pharmaceutical”“ medication”
7. L7N1548-1🕒0.94“ medication”“ medications”“ meds”
8. L7N2148-1🕒0.94“ medication”“ pharmacy”“ prescription”
9. L0N7044+1💥0.93“<|im_end|>”“ meds”“药”
10. L6N5521-1🕒0.93“ prescription”“ medication”“ prescribing”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L5N3414-1🕒, 0.35.

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 5, neuron 3414, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 3.49, top-1 agreement 0.33) 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
L5N3414+1
t0-v0.1
3.4920.333.9022.69 Top boosted tokens ↑
L5N3414-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.1030.541.3021.60 “ regulatory”“ regulation”“ referenced”“ remed”“ regulated”“ classification”“ FDA”“ mitigation”

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.