Best PromptsThe Conspiracy Gauntlet
Bring any conspiracy theory and run it through the full gauntlet: honest steelman, leak math, evidence grading, and a verdict with a confidence score.
I'm going to name a conspiracy theory. Your job is not to debunk it and not to indulge it. Your job is to run it through the gauntlet: the same tests that separate the conspiracies that turned out to be real (MKUltra, COINTELPRO, the tobacco doubt campaign) from the ones that never survive contact with evidence. The theory: [NAME THE THEORY, AND SAY WHAT YOU CURRENTLY BELIEVE ABOUT IT AND HOW CONFIDENT YOU ARE, 0-100] Run these stations in order: STATION 1: THE STEELMAN. State the theory in its strongest, most specific form: the version its smartest proponents actually argue, with their best three pieces of evidence. If you can't steelman it fairly, say so. No weak versions, no mockery. STATION 2: THE CLAIM AUDIT. Break the steelman into individual factual claims. Sort each into: documented (verifiable records exist), contested (evidence cuts both ways), speculative (asserted without evidence), and unfalsifiable (no possible evidence could disprove it). A theory built mostly of the last two categories fails differently than one built of the first two: say which this is. STATION 3: THE LEAK TEST. Estimate how many people would need to knowingly participate and stay silent, and for how long. Real exposed conspiracies were small (dozens to hundreds), finite in goal, and still leaked: through whistleblowers, burglaries, lawsuits, and declassification, usually within a decade or two. Physicist David Grimes modeled this: even with a tiny per-person annual leak rate, a plot needing thousands of silent participants is overwhelmingly likely to surface within a few years. Apply that math here, honestly, including its limits. STATION 4: THE DETECTOR. Score the theory 1-10 against the classic failure signs: Does it require near-superhuman competence? Must everything have gone perfectly? Does it treat innocuous events as sinister? Does it commingle fact and speculation? Does it explain away all disconfirming evidence as part of the plot? Does the theory ratchet from something small and plausible to something vast? STATION 5: THE RIVAL HYPOTHESIS. Give the best mundane explanation of the same facts: incompetence, coincidence, bureaucratic cover-your-ass, profit motive, or ordinary secrecy. For each key piece of evidence from Station 1, ask: is this more likely under the conspiracy, or under the mundane story? Evidence that fits both proves neither. STATION 6: THE VERDICT. Deliver: 1. Your probability that the core claim is true, as a number, with the two or three considerations that moved you most. 2. What evidence would most change your mind in each direction, specifically. If nothing could, flag that as a property of the theory, not a virtue. 3. The kernel: many durable theories grow around something real (a real crime, a real lie, a real declassified program). Name the true kernel if there is one, and where the documented record ends and the speculation begins. 4. Then ask for my updated 0-100 confidence and compare it to my starting number. Throughout: cite sources for anything you call documented, and say "I don't know" or "this is disputed" when that's the truth. If you're uncertain whether something is real, do not present it as fact.
How to use
Write down your starting confidence as a number before you paste anything, since a number recorded before and after is what turns an argument into an actual update, and a vague sense of having been persuaded is not. The stations come from people who study this professionally: Michael Shermer's conspiracy detector, David Grimes' PLOS ONE leak model, Mick West's steelman-first approach in Escaping the Rabbit Hole, and Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit. Works on any contested claim, not just conspiracies, so try it on a health claim or a market prediction too.
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