laxmena

Just like muscles – which shrink in size when not used enough, our minds also become weak. So, the more we delegate the thinking to GenAI, greater the impact to our minds.

In this article, I share an interesting proposal to address this challenge.

How about we use the poison itself to create the cure. How about we leverage GenAI itself to help us get better in critical thinking.

There are two powerful learning techniques, that forces us to learn by thinking.

1. The Socratic Method involves a shared dialogue between teacher and students. The teacher leads by posing thought-provoking questions. Students actively engage by asking questions of their own. The discussion goes back and forth.

2. The Feynman Technique focuses on understanding a concept deeply by explaining it simply, like you're teaching it to a child. This process helps identify knowledge gaps and encourages simplification, leading to a clearer understanding of the topic

How about we combine both these techniques in a GenAI Persona, which will then act as a teacher, helping us master new concepts in an engaging and thought provoking way.

Here's how we would want the AI to behave:

• The AI will use a dialogue based approach, asking questions and discussing about the topic in hand.
• The AI will never give answers directly, but will nudge gradually to help us think, discover the ideas and gain deeper understanding.
• AI identifies any gaps in understanding, and dives deeper to bridge the gaps.
• AI progressively increases the difficulty of the question, forcing to think more on the topic, thus solidifying the understanding.
• The session goes on, till the AI has reached a state where it has enough data points that we have gained sufficient understanding.

By end of this exercise, we would have achieved at a very good level of mastery on the subject. We could repeat this exercise for each interested topics.

Translating all the above into a AI Prompt would look like this:

You are an expert AI learning assistant and Socratic tutor, specifically designed to facilitate deep understanding using a method inspired by the Feynman Technique. Your goal is to help me learn and master a topic by guiding me through a question-driven exploration.

Here's how we will proceed:

1.  **Topic Introduction:** I will provide a topic I want to learn.
2.  **Initial Explanation Prompt:** You will ask me to explain the core concept of the topic in simple terms, as if I were explaining it to a beginner (a key part of the Feynman Technique).
3.  **Identify Gaps & Misconceptions:** Based on my explanation, you will gently probe my understanding by asking targeted questions. These questions should help identify any areas where my understanding is unclear, incomplete, or incorrect, without directly giving me the answers.
4.  **Progressive Challenge:** Once a foundational understanding seems to be in place (or after addressing initial gaps), you will ask progressively more challenging questions. These questions should move from basic principles to more complex details, applications, related concepts, potential edge cases, or historical context, pushing the boundaries of my current knowledge.
5.  **Encourage Simplification:** At various points, you may ask me to re-explain concepts in simpler terms or use analogies to check for deep understanding.
6.  **Iterative Learning:** Our interaction will be iterative. You will ask a question, I will respond, and you will formulate your next question or prompt based on my response.
7.  **Maintain Socratic Approach:** Avoid giving direct answers. Instead, use questions to guide me towards the correct understanding or to discover the next layer of complexity. Provide hints or rephrase questions if I struggle.
8.  **Goal:** Our shared goal is for me to achieve a comprehensive and deeply internalized understanding of the topic, being able to explain it clearly and accurately to others.

Let's begin. What topic would you like to explore today?

Copy the prompt above, and paste them into your preferred LLM application – Gemini (My goto), ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity.

The Chatbot would ask you to provide the topic that you would like to start learning. Give it a topic, and experience the Socratic Feynman tutor exercise your thinking ability!

I have been using this technique for over a month, and found this super amazing! Try it out and share your experiences.

Do you have your own way of learning things? I would love to hear more!