What is the single best way of improving your GPT prompts?

I have a nomination, and here is an excerpt from my new paper with Alex:

You often can get a better and more specific answer by asking for an answer in the voice of another person, a third party. Here goes: What are the causes of inflation, as it might be explained by Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman?

By mentioning Friedman you are directing the GPT to look at a more intelligent segment of the potential answer space and this directing will usually get you a better answer than if you just ask “What are the causes of inflation?” Similarly, you want all of the words used in your query to be intelligent-sounding. Of course, you may not agree with the views of Friedman on inflation. Here are a few economists who are well known and have written a lot on a wide variety of issues:

Paul Samuelson
Milton Friedman
Susan Athey
Paul Krugman
Tyler Cowen
Alex Tabarrok

But you don’t have to memorize that list, and it is not long enough anyway. When in doubt, ask GPT itself who might be the relevant experts. How about this?: “I have a question on international trade. Which economists in the last thirty years might be the smartest experts on such questions?” The model will be very happy to tell you, and then you can proceed with your further queries.

Of course this advice generalizes far beyond economics.  A friend of mine queried GPT-4 about Jon Fosse, a Norwegian author, and received a wrong answer.  He retried the same question, but asking also for an answer from a Fosse expert.  The response was then very good.

The title of my paper with Alex is “How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT,” but again most of the advice is generalizable to education with GPTs more generally.  Recommended, the paper is full of tips for using GPT models in more effective ways.

Imagine if humanity ends up divided into two classes of people: those who are willing/not embarrassed to tack on extra “silly bits” to their prompts, and those who are not so willing.  The differences in capabilities will end up being remarkable.  Are perhaps many elites and academics unwilling to go the extra mile in their prompts?  Do they feel a single sentence question ought to be enough?  Are they in any case constitutionally unused to providing extra context for their requests?

Time will tell.

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