Learning with LLMs I

Hey - It’s Michael.

Had a great dance weekend at Prag Retro Festival! Enjoy the newsletter!

People are different and everybody learns differently. I’m sure in school you had a teacher you just loved how they explained things whereas others just didn’t get whatever was presented.

Good teachers will always be able to explain core concepts in various ways to reach as many different students as possible.

If you use LLM Tools like ChatGPT and Claude, you’ll usually get an answer that is - in terms of depth & style - similar to your question. While this works most of the time, it might also slow you down in understanding without you realizing.

There is tremendous value in engineering prompts in ways where you clarify the language style and technical depth of the answer you want to get.

You can even go as far as to let the answer be written fitting to your personality and interests. This will make it much easier to understand new topics - which is what most people use LLM Tools for in the first place.

So the next time you research a topic using an LLM tool, think clearly of ways to present the information so that it is as easy as possible to understand for you.

My favorite way of getting a grasp understanding of topics I know nothing about is asking the AI tool to answer in Feynman Style.

Richard Feynman was a famous physicist who won the Nobel Prize and reached wide recognition for being able to explain difficult concepts in simple terms so that most people would understand very quickly.

You can also try to let the LLM tool structure the answers similar to your personal areas of expertise. If you know a lot about cooking, tell the LLM to describe a concept in cooking terms. If you are into sports, let it explain in soccer terms. You’d be surprised how well it works (within certain limits of course.)

Try using those add-ons to your prompts:

“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” - Albert Einstein

See you next week - Michael