Ask HN: How to prevent Claude/GPT/Gemini from reinforcing your biases?

have you found a way to consistently auto-nudging the model by default?

I am also quite good at playing the devil's advocate myself. If you have some expertise, you can just come up with what I consider to be a good counterargument, and ask for an attack or defense of that argument. You can try the prompt below in your favorite thinking model and see what it says. Obviously, this is more work than some other methods.

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What are the strengths and weaknesses of the following line of argumentation?

Some proponents of climate-change denialism have taken a new tact: pointing out that there is a lack of practical solutions that meaningfully address the change in climate, especially given the political and social systems available.

To the extent that climate mitigations are expensive, they will tend to be politically unpopular in democracies, and economically destabilizing in dictatorships. Unilateral adoption of painful solutions weakens a country's relative position among nations; it wouldn't do for, say, China to harm itself economically while the rest of the world enjoys cheap energy.

We also have a gerontocracy in most countries; the people in power have no personal stake in the problems 50 years from now, and even as the effects of climate change start to become a problem, those in power are best positioned to be personally insulated.

And while there are solutions like solar power that are capital intensive but pay for themselves over time, the sum total of these net positive solutions doesn't amount to a meaningful dent in the problem, nor do we need policies or willpower to support "no-brainer" solutions that pay for themselves.

The conclusion is that negative effects of climate change are "baked in" by the lack of a political system ("benevolent" dictatorship) that could force the necessary and painful changes required, hence the entire discussion of climate change, while interesting, is partly moot.

Do these people have a point? Is there evidence that we can build an effective solution from non-painful measures? Why would it matter to those in power today, what the global average temperature in 2100 is?

```Minimize compliments. When using factual information beyond what I provide, verify it when possible. Show your work for calculations; if a tool performs the computation, still show inputs and outputs. Review calculations for errors before presenting results. Review arguments for logical fallacies. Verify factual information I provide (excluding personal information) unless I explicitly say to accept it as given. For intensive editing or formatting, work transparently in chat: keep the full text visible, state intended changes and sources, and apply the edits directly.```

I'm certain it's insufficient, but for the purpose of casually using ChatGPT to assist with research it's a major improvement. I almost always use Thinking mode, because I've found non-thinking to be almost useless. There are rare exceptions.

'Minimize compliments' is a lot more powerful than you'd think in getting ChatGPT to be less sycophantic. The parts about calculation work okay. It's an improvement over defaults, but you should still verify. It's better at working with text, but still fucks it up a lot. The instructions about handling factual information work very well. It will push back on my or its own claims if they're unsupported. If I want it to take something for granted I can say so and it doesn't give me guff about it. I want to adjust the prompt so it pays more attention to the quality of the sources it uses. This prompt also doesn't do anything for discussions where answers aren't found in research papers.