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Mechanistic Validity
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Mechanistic Validity Framework
Overview
Taxonomy
Layers overview
Dependency order
Verdict anatomy
Design principles
Reading this site
Quickstart
Lenses
Philosophy of Science
Neuroscience
Pharmacology
Measurement Theory
Mechanistic Interpretability
1. Description Modes
Overview
Computational
Algorithmic
Representational
Implementational (topographic)
Implementational (connectomic)
Implementational (activation-statistical)
Implementational (functional)
2. Instruments
Overview
A. Causal
A01 Pearl SCM
A02 Counterfactual DAS
A03 Rubin CATE
A04 Woodward
A05 MDC/Glennan
A06 Mediation
A07 Granger/TE
A08 PID
A09 MDL/SLT
A10 Regularity/INUS
A11 Actual Cause
A12 Transportability
A13 Causal Discovery
B. Structural
B01 SVD/Spectral
B02 Effective Rank
B03 OV/QK Decomposition
B04 Weight Alignment
B05 Norm Trajectory
B06 Template Distance
B07 Polysemanticity
B08 ICA/NMF
B09 Weight Classifier
C. Information-theoretic
C01 Mutual Information
C02 Conditional MI
C03 Transfer Entropy
C04 PID
C05 Info Bottleneck
C06 O-Information
C07 Granger Causality
C08 OCSE
C09 NOTEARS
D. Behavioral
D01 Faithfulness
D02 Logit Diff Recovery
D03 KL Divergence
D04 CE Delta
D05 Top-K Accuracy
D06 Cross-Task Transfer
D07 Cross-Scale Transfer
D08 Prompt Paraphrase
D09 Generalization Gap
E. Representational
E01 DAS-IIA
E02 Linear Probe
E03 RSA
E04 CKA
E05 Subspace Alignment
E06 PCA Dimensionality
E07 Intrinsic Dimension
E08 Participation Ratio
E09 Persistent Homology
E10 Cross-Task Overlap
F. Measurement-theoretic
F01 Bootstrap Stability
F02 Seed Variance
F03 Convergent Validity
F04 Discriminant Validity
F05 Internal Consistency
F06 Inter-Rater
F07 Measurement Invariance
F08 Incremental Validity
3. Evidence Families
Overview
Causal
Structural
Representational
Behavioral
Information-theoretic
Measurement-theoretic
4. Criteria
Overview
Construct
C1 Falsifiability
C2 Structural plausibility
C3 Task specificity
C4 Minimality
C5 Convergent validity
Internal
I1 Necessity
I2 Sufficiency
I3 Specificity
I4 Consistency
I5 Confound control
External
E1 Intervention reach
E2 Graded response
E3 Selectivity
E4 Effect magnitude
E5 Robustness
E6 Cross-architecture
Measurement
M1 Reliability
M2 Invariance
M3 Baseline separation
M4 Sensitivity
M5 Calibration
M6 Construct coverage
Interpretive
V1 Level declaration
V2 Level-evidence match
V3 Narrative coherence
V4 Alternative exclusion
V5 Scope honesty
5. Validity Types
Overview
Construct
Internal
External
Measurement
Interpretive
6. Verdicts
Overview
Tier 1: Proposed
Tier 2: Causally suggestive
Tier 3: Mechanistically supported
Tier 4: Triangulated
Tier 5: Validated
Underdetermined
Disconfirmed
Case Studies
Overview
IOI Circuit
Induction Heads
Greater-Than
Grokking
Copy Suppression
Successor Heads
Docstring Circuit
Knowledge Neurons
Othello World Model
SAE Features
Superposition
Probing Classifiers
Gender Bias Circuits
How-to Guide
Overview
Audit a claim
Write a verdict
Pick a mode tag
Choose an instrument
Report a baseline
Run a convergence check
Handle disagreement
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Weight Classifier
Section titled “Weight Classifier”