The Doug Macy

Let me tell you why you’re disappointed with the output of your LLM interactions.

The current way most people interact with Large Language Models (LLMs) is like randomly scattering seeds on barren ground and hoping for a bountiful harvest. You might get lucky with a few sprouts, but most seeds will wither away, failing to reach their full potential. Sound familiar?

The Immature View:

Most users approach LLMs impatiently expecting a fully grown tree from a newly planted seed. They demand instant answers and immediate results, failing to understand the time and nurturing required for knowledge to take root and flourish.

The Problem:

LLMs are a fertile soil, rich with potential, but they need careful cultivation to truly flourish. Simply throwing a question at them is like expecting plants to grow without sunlight, water, or nutrients. It’s a recipe for disappointment.

The Solution: Conversational Scaffolding

The future of using LLMs lies in nurturing a collaborative garden of knowledge. It’s about working together, like a gardener and nature, to cultivate a thriving ecosystem of understanding. This is where Conversational Scaffolding comes in.

The scaffolding conversation is a carefully curated dialogue between the human and the LLM, with each step contributing to the growth of knowledge:

1. Preparation (Clearing the Land): Before planting, a gardener clears the land of weeds and debris. Similarly, this stage involves brainstorming ideas across multiple threads, clarifying initial questions, and conducting preliminary research. This eliminates “noise” (irrelevant information) that could confuse the LLM and ensures a clean slate for focused exploration.
2. Defining Concepts (Sowing the Seeds): The gardener carefully selects the seeds they want to plant. In the main scaffolding conversation, this step involves defining key terms, clarifying fundamental concepts, and establishing a solid knowledge base. This gives the LLM a clear understanding of the topic, like providing seeds with the right nutrients to germinate.
3. Exploring Perspectives (Cultivating Diversity): A gardener plants a variety of seeds to create a diverse and resilient garden. In this stage, the conversation expands to explore different perspectives, challenge assumptions, and consider alternative interpretations. This enriches the LLM’s understanding, like cross-pollination in a garden, leading to stronger and more adaptable knowledge.
4. Analysis (Tending and Weeding): A gardener regularly prunes and weeds their garden to ensure healthy growth. Similarly, this stage involves analyzing the information gathered, identifying patterns, evaluating sources, and discarding irrelevant or misleading information. This helps refine and strengthen the knowledge base, like removing obstacles that hinder growth.
5. Culmination (Harvesting the Fruits): Finally, the gardener reaps the rewards of their labor. In the culmination stage, carefully crafted questions are posed to the LLM, eliciting deep insights, novel ideas, and unexpected connections. This is like harvesting the ripe fruits of knowledge, the culmination of all the previous efforts.

Why Careful Cultivation Works:

The scaffolding conversation addresses the problem of cognitive ‘weeds’ in your conversational garden. Here’s how to think about it:

1. Competition for Resources: Just as weeds compete with desired plants for sunlight, water, and nutrients, extraneous information can compete with relevant information for the LLM’s attention and processing power. This can lead to diluted responses and hinder the LLM’s ability to provide accurate and insightful answers.
2. Stifling Growth: Weeds can crowd out desired plants, preventing them from reaching their full potential. Similarly, irrelevant information can obscure the core topic, making it difficult to build a solid foundation of knowledge and hindering deeper understanding.
3. Disrupting the Ecosystem: Weeds can disrupt the balance of a garden’s ecosystem, attracting pests and diseases. In the same way, extraneous information can introduce confusion, misinterpretations, and lead the conversation astray, undermining the collaborative learning process.
4. Requiring Constant Maintenance: A garden requires regular weeding to keep it healthy and productive. In scaffolding conversations, you must actively monitor and prune extraneous information to ensure the conversation stays focused and on track.
5. Distorting the Overall Picture: An overgrown garden full of weeds can be difficult to appreciate and understand. Similarly, a conversation cluttered with irrelevant information can obscure the main points, making it harder for you to synthesize knowledge and derive meaningful insights.

Therefore, just as a gardener carefully tends to their plants, you must actively manage the conversation with the LLM. By identifying and eliminating “weeds” of extraneous information, you create a thriving environment where relevant knowledge can flourish, leading to deeper understanding and more fruitful collaborations.

The Future of Human Cognition:

Conversational Scaffolding is not a quick fix, but a deliberate, patient approach that requires effort and collaboration. Just as a gardener tends to their plants over time, we must nurture our interactions with LLMs. The rewards are immense: a blossoming of knowledge, creativity, and problem-solving that neither humans nor LLMs could achieve alone.