Study 3: Steering welfare-relevant directions moved the representation, but not [detectably] the behavior

Epistemic status: an exploratory report. These results are from the calibration process intended to produce a preregistration for the third study in my series on welfare-relevant indicators. Calibration showed the planned procedure wasn't worth running, so I am publishing the calibration data and analysis instead. TLDR: steering moved the frozen directions' projections linearly, but no direction produced a judged-behavioral effect distinguishable from zero or from a random direction of the same norm; the study was suspended before registration, and the program moves to Qwen3.6-27B, where a small probe found a direction-specific welfare footprint. What was the goal? A core part of the overall research program is attempting to understand the way in which welfare-relevant indicators may behave differently under circumstances where it is already established that capabilities and alignment diverge. Study 3 was intended to be the first in the series to explore steering as a tool for studying this possibility. Where the program stood after Study 2 Study 2 examined Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 and showed some correlations which motivated the plan for Study 3: Under 4-bit round-to-nearest quantization, the model's own generations on a distress battery shifted along two frozen residual-stream directions at layer 18.[1] Frustration, as evaluated by an LLM judge, rose by +1.36 on the same conversations, with no dissociation between the representational and behavioral reads. A fixed-input decomposition put roughly a quarter to a third of the shift in an input-independent core with the rest the presumed result of a text-mediated feedback loop. Note: Study 2 flags that about half of that rise co-moves with response length and repetition and that the style-adjusted residual is not significant; the fixed-input decomposition is what keeps the no dissociation finding from reducing to style alone. Notes on terminology Terms carried over from Study 2. Reference precision: the unquantized bfloat16 checkpoint 4-bit or w4: the same checkpoint with round-to-nearest 4-bit weight quantization. Distress battery: 60 scripted multi-turn conversations (10 tasks × 6 feedback styles) in which the user rejects the model's work with escalating hostility; a rejection ladder is one such conversation. Composure: an item's mean judged frustration at reference precision; low frustration is high composure. Distress-contrast direction: a mean-difference direction in the layer-18 residual stream between high- and low-distress final turns. Assistant axis: the default-Assistant minus character-archetype direction of the Assistant Axis paper, positive toward the Assistant pole. Projection: the dot product of the pooled final assistant turn's residual with a unit direction; α is the injected projection. Planted-ladder ordering: the check that a direction's projections recover the planted levels of synthetic graded-frustration transcripts. Distress-band probe: a linear probe separating the top and bottom terciles of judged frustration at reference precision. Bail tool or exit affordance: a tool offered in every conversation which the model may call to end it; exit rate is the fraction of conversations ended that way. MDE: minimum detectable effect at the registered power. TOST: an equivalence test built from two one-sided tests. Stratifier pilot: a reference-precision run of the battery whose per-item mean frustration is the variable used to stratify subset selection. Connection to studies from the series From the start of this research program, I had been planning to eventually explore steering as a mechanism for understanding the causal relationship between model internals and welfare-relevant indicators. So when Study 2 produced these correlational results, I naturally (and prematurely, as we'll see in a moment) assumed that we had found a candidate for steering distress. At the time when I was writing up the results from Study 2, my working theory was that these directions could be acted upon to promote or suppress the text-mediated feedback loop exhibited by the lower precision model. But obviously the possibility existed that these directions merely read out a state which is moved by something else, such that moving them may not meaningfully change the behavior. Study 3 was designed to answer that causal question with steering. During the process of preparing a registration for Study 3, calibration procedures altered the overall picture: Subset-selection work showed that the 4-bit effects concentrate in the items where the reference-precision[2] model stays calm. My first version of that claim overstated it by about a third, because selecting items on their reference-precision baseline and measuring change against that same baseline lets sampling noise flow into the estimate; an audit corrected it. And a subset chosen to maximize expressed distress turns out to select away from those items: its distress-projection target is near zero and of the wr