The Same Experiment, One Floor Up

Open four fresh conversations. Send the exact same one-sentence question in each — why a shuffled deck makes a bad security key. Four different wordings come back. But look underneath the wording: the claim barely moves. Stable claim, moving surface. You saw this exact split in the counts table. Thi

Series: INFO 7375 — Prompt Engineering & Agentic AI Topic: INFO 7375 · CHAPTER 1 — FIRST PROMPTS

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction 0:21 Introduction 1:32 Your Turn

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YOUR TURN

Your turn. Pick prompt 1 or prompt 2 from this film. Open four FRESH conversations and send the exact same line in each — not four sends in one conversation.

Record all four responses. Check: what stayed the same? What moved? The claim usually holds still. Everything around it is free to move — and that's exactly what this whole film has been show

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@NikBearBrown

Part of the INFO 7375 — Prompt Engineering & Agentic AI series.

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Sources and citations: see the reel's SOURCES.md in the open textbook.

What this video covers

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 0:21 — Introduction
• 1:32 — Your Turn

Transcript

A lightly formatted transcript of the video, with timestamps so you can jump to any section on YouTube.

Introduction

[0:00] Ola, this is Liam in forbear. A confident answer is a correct answer, right? A confident answer is a well-formed one. Confidence was never one of the model's inputs. Two terms, fluency, well-formed natural sounding text independent of whether anyone checked it. And repeatable, the same answer across independent tries, independent of whether that answer is correct. Open four fresh conversations.

Introduction

[0:23] Send the exact same one-s sentence question in each. Why a shuffled deck makes a bad security key. Four different wordings come back. But look underneath the wording. The claim barely moves. Stable claim moving surface. You saw this exact split in the counts table. This is the same thing one floor up. Same four fresh conversations, but now force the format. One word only. No punctuation, no explanation. What's the capital of Australia? The four answers converge. A constrained format leaves fewer continuations to choose among. The closest thing you have to lowering temperature without a temperature control. Notice what it didn't do. more repeatable, not more true. One more fresh

Conversation. Ask for a specific citation, author's year, exact number from a real paper. Then ask it to rate its own confidence. What comes back is fluent, specific, and confident sounding. Now go check the citation yourself. Whatever you find, the response was equally well-formed either way because confidence was never one of its inputs. Last one, write your own prediction and reasoning first. Then hand it over and ask Claude not to grade it. Ask it to name the one assumption your reasoning depends on most and describe an input that would break it. Withholding the verdict is deliberate. You're not looking for a grade. You're looking for the boundary. Your turn.

Your Turn

[1:32] Pick prompt one or prompt two from this film. Open four fresh conversations and send the exact same line in each. Not four sends in one conversation. Record all four responses. Check what stayed the same. What moved. The claim usually holds still. Everything around it is free to move. And that's exactly what this whole film has been showing you. The same experiment. One floor up at Nick Bear Brown.