projects / persuasion-directions
experimentweek 1active
Finding persuasion in activation space
Is there a direction inside an open model that tracks how persuasive a piece of text is, and can I steer with it? Using real r/ChangeMyView replies.
Key findingPlaceholder: fill in once week 1 results are in.
GitHub repo ↗r/ChangeMyView is a rare natural dataset for persuasion: when a reply changes the original poster's mind, they award it a Δ (delta). That gives labelled examples of text that worked versus text that didn't, on the same topic.
The plan: extract residual-stream activations for delta and non-delta replies, train linear probes layer by layer, then use the difference of means as a steering vector and see what happens to generations.