S2E6 The Council

What this lesson is about

Ask an AI "is my idea good?" and it tends to say yes. Ask "what's wrong with my idea?" and it finds problems. Same idea, opposite answers, because the response reflects how you framed the question. The Council is the structural fix. Instead of asking one question from one angle, you convene five advisors who each think from a completely different perspective: a Critic, a Big Picture Thinker, an Optimist, a Fresh Eyes, and a Doer. A Chairman then synthesises where they agree, where they clash, and, most usefully, what all five of them missed.

What you'll be able to do

• I can explain why a single AI response reflects the way a question was framed, not objective truth.
• I can use a council of five perspectives to pressure-test a real decision or argument.

Bring a real question, a decision you are genuinely unsure about with more than one reasonable answer. Good council questions have real stakes and genuine uncertainty, like "Should I choose Higher Physics or Higher Biology?" Questions with a single right answer, or tasks like "write me an introduction," do not work as well. The idea is inspired by Andrej Karpathy's LLM Council, where several AI models peer-review each other anonymously.