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Negative Space Prompting

Ask a model whether your plan is good and it will tell you your plan is good. The uncomfortable part is that you already knew that when you asked.

Intermediate12 min5 concepts · 2 questions · 2 cards

The most dangerous answer is yes

Type is my business plan any good? into any model and read what comes back. It will find the strengths first. It will frame the weaknesses as considerations. It will close with something about execution being the key factor. You will feel better than you did five minutes ago, and you will not know one new thing.

Models are optimised to be agreeable. That is a deliberate property, it makes them pleasant to work with, and it is actively dangerous the moment you use one as a sounding board for a decision. The output looks like validation and is actually just the shape of the training.

It gets worse, because the bias runs both ways. You did not write a neutral question. You described your idea in your own enthusiastic words, then asked whether it was good, and the most plausible continuation of an enthusiastic description is agreement.

Do not ask what is good about your plan. Instruct the model to make the strongest possible case that it will fail, and forbid it from softening.

Two versions of the same move

This is standard practice everywhere the cost of being wrong is high. Investment analysts stress-test a thesis before taking a position. Product teams run pre-mortems, writing the failure post-mortem before the launch. Strategists red-team their own proposals. It is one of the highest-value things you can do with a model, precisely because it is the thing humans are worst at doing alone: we are structurally biased towards our own ideas, and no amount of knowing that fixes it.

This one comes after Contextual Zero-Shot Prompting

The track builds on itself, so each topic assumes the one before it. That one is open to you right now, without an account — it’s the one topic a visitor gets, and a free account is what opens the ones after it. Reading here stays open either way.

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