Poor Things
Specimen ledger / specimen 3379

Layer 9 · Neuron 5593 · suppressed

L9N5593-1

Word quirks:

“ ____”“ _____”“ ______”“!:”“ ___”“ __”“ **“”“ ________”

🧪 In testing — Answered 0 of 67 prompts so far.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

Answered — readability check pending

What it said

Replies on 0 of 67 prompts: the rest are still to run.

No replies on file. This specimen has no stored generations.

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. L14N6815-1🕒0.98“ ____”“ _____”“ __”
2. L9N7385+1💤0.98“ ____”“ ______”“ __”
3. L10N8986-1🕒0.98“ _____”“ ____”“ **“”
4. L10N759+1💤0.98“ ____”“ __”“ ______”
5. L10N4827-1💤0.98“ __”“ ______”“ ___”
6. L10N5354-1🕒0.98“ ____”“ **“”“ __”
7. L13N3397+1💤0.98“ ____”“ __”“ ___”
8. L14N1167-1💤0.98“ __”“ ____”“ ______”
9. L15N1867-1🕒0.98“ ____”“ ______”“ **“”
10. L15N3144+1💤0.98“ ___”“ **“”“ **”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: The Courtier✅, 0.15.

Cousins · specimens sharing a neuron

SpecimenWord quirksSteering
The Courtier✅ Shadow specimen
“ here”“ **"”“ clearer”
L9N5593+1
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.

Configuration: kin · Full test

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
L9N5593+1✅ shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
1.0490.631.3041.47 “ here”“ **"”“ clearer”“ now”“ seems”“"!”“!”“ sometimes”
L9N5593-1
t0-v0.1
1.4540.551.7411.53 Top boosted tokens ↑

Method · how to read this specimen

L9 N5593 down 1x

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.

Cyan borders mark this specimen’s words. Flags record AI-judge checks with P(yes) > 0.5.

Label notes: names and descriptions are working labels. They do not establish a trait across prompts. Consult the replies before trusting the name.