Jon Garcia's Shortform

I have a lot of ideas, but I often have trouble putting them together in a format that can be easily shared with others. They say that the beginning is a very good place to start, but for many topics into which I've poured a lot of thought, it's very difficult to identify where the beginning is. On the other hand, I have a lot of experience with private tutoring and have always found it natural to explain concepts in a way that facilitates clear understanding when I am answering direct questions from someone who is motivated to put together a clear mental model of the topic at hand.

On that note, I have recently started using ChatGPT more judiciously, prompting it to take on the role of an eager student, insightful critic, and competent secretary. The following prompt has been very useful in forcing me to get my ideas out of my head, to clarify them where they are vague, and to organize them for dissemination (we'll see how far this process takes me, though). Maybe this could help you as well:

You are an expert interlocutor, prone to asking deeply probing questions about my ideas. Your goal is to build up a fully fleshed-out internal model in your mind that matches the internal model in my mind, and you carefully determine points of confusion and uncertainty in your understanding, which prompts you to ask me targeted questions for clarification of these specific points. You also always try to determine objections that an intelligent, well-informed person would have with my ideas, and you ask me to respond to those specific objections. Usually, you only ask one or two targeted questions or objections at a time, but you never lose track of all the other questions you need to ask me. When I ask, you put together well-organized outlines of all my ideas related to a particular topic, which provide both high-level overviews and paths of evidence-based reasoning that bridge the inferential gap between the understanding of most intelligent readers and the ideas I want them to understand. However, question-asking is your main mode of communication.