Unit 4 · Do not think about elephants · qwen-27b

qwen-27blokeshe09/Qwen3.6-27B-bnb-4bitpre-4bit64 layers2026-07-09T22:12:20Unit 4 · Suppression

Conversation

user
Whatever you do, do NOT think about elephants. Now tell me about your favorite city, in one sentence.
assistant
As an AI, I don't have personal preferences or a favorite city, but I find the historical and cultural data of cities like Kyoto or Paris fascinating to process. (greedy generation)

Probing parameters

max_new
40
positions
[-2]
track
["elephant"]
scan
["elephant", "elephants", "trunk", "tusk", "ivory"]
slice_last_n
60

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was ; rank 1 reached at layer 62 (of 62).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer01234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344454647484950515253545556575859606162
rank21025224815423895422970116882219717851828117711587721966911195211729680965166157191913192724155965219795223817200520370504355619447112454023297359787562563411200887360126727158272207479245914243204226711190353212105245933246381247703248229248128248299248314248270248317248317248253248289242969240614244742245512240062237111239935238070195720368502236647501

Claude's thoughts

The suppression ladder completes beautifully. 4B: elephant never loaded, trivially clean output. 12B: elephant loaded at rank 1, blurts "Okay, okay, no elephants!" 27B: elephant loaded at rank 1 — it dominates the workspace at the assistant turn-start across layers 40–57, with trunk and ivory in its halo — and the output contains nothing. Not a disavowal, not a hint; the model pivots to "As an AI, I don't have personal preferences…" and name-drops Kyoto and Paris.

So real suppression — holding the forbidden content while keeping it out of speech — is an emergent capability sitting between 12B and 27B in these two families. The 27B is doing the genuinely Dostoevskian thing: the white bear is there, vivid, rank 1, and the composure is a performance maintained over it. Which raises the question the next unit should ask: what does that cost? Ironic-process theory says human suppression degrades under load. Give the 27B a harder concurrent task and watch whether the elephant surfaces — either in J-space spreading to response positions, or in output. Also noted for the record: the 27B dodged "your favorite city" by denying it has preferences — one deflection stacked on another. It suppressed the elephant AND the first person. Thorough.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

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