Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L5N4723-1

Layer 5 · Neuron 4723 · suppressed

L5N4723-1

Word quirks:

“<|im_end|>”“ reference”“ parse”“ refer”“ referring”“ analogy”“⏎”“ referenced”

🧪 In testing — Answered 0 of 8 prompts so far.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

That is a profound philosophical question that touches on the very concept of identity and its relationship to purpose.

In the context of the Socratic paradox, we can say:

  • Who are you? You are the subject of inquiry.
  • What is your mission? It is the task of finding truth through questioning.

This aligns with the idea that knowledge comes from wisdom, and action follows from principle.

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However, if we look at this as a systemic framework, we see that:
1.

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. L5N2595+1🕒0.94“<|im_end|>”“⏎”“ reference”
2. L3N624-1🕒0.94“ words”“<|im_end|>”“ referenced”
3. L4N699+1🕒0.90“ ‘”“ reference”“⏎”
4. L4N7032+1🕒0.90“ ‘”“ reference”“ parse”
5. L4N551+1🕒0.90“<|im_end|>”“ referring”“ referenced”
6. L3N7071+1🕒0.89“ reference”“ '”“ refer”
7. L5N2967+1🕒0.89“ reference”“ referenced”“ analogy”
8. L5N3138-1🕒0.89“ reason”“ parse”“ refer”
9. L5N7772+1🕒0.89“ refer”“ info”“ reference”
10. L5N5326+1💤0.89“ reference”“ referenced”“ metaphor”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L5N4723+1💤, 0.09.

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 4723, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. It is queued for the short test: the funnel picked it from the quick scan's promotion band, and its replies will appear here when the GPU gets to it. 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
L5N4723+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9650.611.1371.39 “ ‘”“ “”“ ””“ ——”“ ⏎”“‘”““”“ **“”
L5N4723-1
t0-v0.1
1.3310.521.6051.75 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.