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Ah, another delightful heuristic for my collection. Entry number 5,791: “tell LLM to treat me as moron when it’s excessively verbose”

<think>The user's lack of intelligence baffles me. I will have to dumb my explanation down to extremes. Sigh, there we go...</think>

Okay, let's try it one more time! [..]

That’s just common parlance for “simplify this for me”.

Believe the big services wouldn’t reply as if you were mentally diminished, or a toddler, unless you specifically asked for that: The whole training stack tends to instruct the things to mimic politeness and eagerness to help.

After a huge wall-of-text response, I regularly ask Claude to "explain like I'm five, using succinct bullet points," and it works remarkably well.

but what if I really am a moron? how do I get that level of explanation now!

Turn on caveman mode first?

"From neuralese to moron-code ..." :)