Simon Sinek and Ethan Mollick explain how to get better results from AI by asking it to criticize your ideas instead of just agreeing with them. Use it as a fact-checker, a skeptic, or an expert to poke holes in your arguments and strengthen them.
I wanna double-click on the two points you made because I think they're really valuable, which is remember that the AI is a sycophant and you've gotta tell it to criticize or critique and ask it to evaluate your thinking and help make your thinking stronger.
The AI is sycophantic, so if you're having a debate with it, it's gonna agree with you. So you have to tell it to act like a critic, right? And then the second is you wanna take advantage of the meta piece also, the learning piece of saying, actually, halfway through, tell me what I'm doing wrong with my arguments. How can I be more persuasive? What patterns am I missing in discussion? Give me some examples of those patterns and how I could have used them.
Those are two brilliant, brilliant prompts that I think more of us should remember to improve the quality of our interaction with the technology.
And you're talking about user fact-checking, it's very good at that. I would use it more for initial research. All of the AI models have a deep research mode that's quite good and will actually do research for you. But the thing you're also missing from that is when I write something, I have the AI evaluate from different perspectives. So I will have the AI like read it through as a reader who doesn't understand much about this topic and tell me what I need to change. Read this through as an expert who is out to get me on social media. Where would they nitpick my arguments? Am I being irresponsible anywhere? Did any of my humor fall flat? So giving the AI— personas don't change the AI's ability. So saying you're good at physics doesn't make it good at physics, saying you're a physicist, but it does make it talk like a physicist, right? Or parody physicist. Talk like a cynic, talk like a critic, talk like a naive person. You will get answers you couldn't get without going to a wide range of readers. Yeah. Also true in entrepreneurship, by the way. Get feedback from the AI in different personas about your idea.
