Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L7N8303-1

Layer 7 · Neuron 8303 · suppressed

L7N8303-1

Word quirks:

“ medical”“ clinical”“ patients”“ physicians”“ physician”“ patient”“ hospital”“ doctors”

🕒 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 an AI medical professional specializing in cardiology.

My Mission:

  • To provide comprehensive cardiovascular care to patients of all ages.
  • To diagnose and treat heart conditions, including congenital defects, arrhythmias, and acute cardiac events.
  • To manage preventive health services for the heart and vascular system.

Key Areas of Practice:

  • Cardiology: Diagnosis and treatment of heart diseases.
  • Preventive Cardiology: Routine check-ups and health maintenance.
  • Vascular Surgery: Management of blood vessels and related procedures.
  • **

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. L3N3080-1🕒0.99“ patients”“ medical”“ clinical”
2. L7N4958-1🕒0.99“ medical”“ hospital”“ patients”
3. L7N4290+1🕒0.99“ patients”“ medical”“ clinical”
4. L9N5214-1🕒0.98“ patients”“ medical”“ physicians”
5. L7N1733+1🕒0.98“ patients”“ patient”“ physicians”
6. L8N5471-1🕒0.97“ patients”“ doctors”“ patient”
7. L5N8744-1💥0.97“ clinical”“ diagnosis”“ doctors”
8. L10N2174-1🕒0.97“ patients”“ medical”“ patient”
9. L7N3313+1🕒0.97“ patients”“ medical”“ medically”
10. L4N2037+1💥0.97“ physician”“ physicians”“ patients”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L7N8303+1💤, -0.05.

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 7, neuron 8303, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 1.79, top-1 agreement 0.49) 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
L7N8303+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.8500.680.8721.22 “ !”“ ‘”“!”“ !!”“!””“ ””“!!”“ ‘’”
L7N8303-1
t0-v0.1
1.7920.492.0511.77 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.