Just Posting Some Prompts - Arjun Panickssery

Arjun Panickssery

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Just Posting Some Prompts<br>Do what you like with them

Arjun Panickssery<br>Jul 14, 2026

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I’ve seen a number of posts where people complaining about AI slop say that the author should have just posted the prompt.<br>LLMs write fine enough if you tell them exactly what you want to say and to whom and how, the whole structure of argument and motivation and your personal connection to it. But if you get that far, why let Claude be the only one who hears what you wanted to say? Just publish the prompt. Jacob Falkovich

If you must publish AI-generated content, please just share the prompt. That way, I can have ChatGPT write your essay in the context of my interests. Byrne Hobart.

The latter was boosted by David Chapman and then in turn by Paul Millerd who said “I like this and hope it becomes native to online writing with easy embeds.”<br>But I haven’t actually seen anyone post prompts. Below are some prompts of mine to a research-report scaffold, along with the Claude Code output.<br>For only a few could I recover my actual prompt. For the others I unfortunately only have the intermediate “research spec” produced by Claude based on my prompt. The links go to the research reports.

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The Prisoner’s Dilemma is Good<br>Description : Argues that the competitive dynamics of prisoner’s-dilemma scenarios are frequently good for society, against the rationalist/LessWrong instinct that treats “defection” as inherently bad, cataloging how online communities moralize PD language and where “defection” produces good outcomes.

Research Spec: Write a detailed paper titled “The Prisoner’s Dilemma is Good” arguing that the competitive dynamics of prisoner’s dilemma scenarios are frequently beneficial for society, contra the common framing in rationalist/LessWrong communities that treats “defection” as inherently bad. The paper should catalog how online communities use PD language with moral valence, present cases where PD dynamics produce good outcomes (e.g., price competition vs. cartels, criminals ratting each other out), address counterarguments, and analyze the broader relevance.

Inequality Declined: Why Industrialization Was the Great Equalizer (Once You Measure the Right Thing)<br>Description: Argues that the popular “inequality rose” narrative uses the wrong yardstick (wealth Gini, Piketty) and that the right measures — consumption inequality and the variance in life expectancy, infant mortality, height, literacy, leisure, and access to goods — have plummeted over the arc of industrialization.

Research Spec: Argue that industrialization has massively decreased inequality, contrary to popular perception. The common narrative — focused on income and wealth inequality (Piketty, Gini coefficients of wealth) — uses the wrong measures. The most appropriate measures are consumption inequality and especially raw objective measures of well-being such as the variance in life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, height, literacy, hours of leisure, and access to basic goods. Across these measures, inequality has plummeted over the long arc of industrialization. The report should also make the qualitative observation that the rich and the poor today consume strikingly similar goods (iPhones, streaming media, social media platforms, search engines, basic appliances) compared to the dramatic class-based consumption differences of the pre-industrial and early industrial eras.

Social Media Has Been Good for Democracy: A 500-Year Communications Arc, Its Critics, and the AI Counter-Revolution<br>Description: Defends the thesis that social media transferred political power from gatekeeping elites to ordinary citizens (situated in the printing-press/radio/TV lineage), argues critics conflate "democracy" with preferred elite-mediated outcomes, and closes on AI as the coming counter-democratizing force.

Research Spec: Defend the thesis that social media has been pro-democratic in the literal sense — that it has transferred political power from elite bureaucracies, gatekeeping institutions, and credentialed intermediaries toward the mass of ordinary citizens. Frame this within the longer history of communications-technology democratization (printing press, radio, television). Address and rebut the now-popular counter-claim that social media has been “bad for democracy,” arguing that critics conflate democracy with a particular set of status-quo policy outcomes or elite-mediated norms; their own arguments (loss of gatekeeper control, populist insurgencies, mass political participation outside institutional channels) actually confirm that social media has been democratizing in the literal sense. Conclude with a contrasting section on artificial intelligence as a likely counter-democratizing force — one that may concentrate political and epistemic power in elite/corporate/state factions, reversing the trajectory of the prior communications...