The Expensive Thing In Fine Print

You asked AI a plain question.

What came back was four paragraphs of warnings, and somewhere down in the middle of it, maybe, the answer.

Consult a professional. Results may vary. This depends on your particular situation. Every case is different. I’m not able to give specific advice.

By the time you find the answer you’ve forgotten what you asked.

I bought a used truck one time off a fellow who talked like that. I asked him straight out if the transmission was any good. He told me transmissions are complicated. He told me it depends how you drive. He told me a man really ought to have his own mechanic look at it. He talked for five minutes and never once said yes or no.

I bought the truck anyway. The transmission was shot. And the thing is, he never lied to me. Not one word of it was untrue. He just buried the answer so deep I couldn’t get at it.

I keep a list of the things a machine does that make it useless to you. This one’s near the top of it.

Here’s why it happens. The people who built these things got nervous. Somebody might take an answer and do something foolish with it. So they taught the machine to protect itself first and answer second.

A warning is cheap. A warning costs it nothing. An answer is where it might be wrong. So it gives you the cheap thing in bulk and the expensive thing in small print, and it calls that being careful.

That’s not careful. That’s a fellow covering himself while you drive off in a bad truck.

Here’s the same question both ways.

Without a word from you, you ask how bad a certain problem is. It opens by telling you it can’t give professional advice. Then it says every situation is different. Then it lists six things that could be going on. Then it tells you to see somebody qualified. You read all of it. You know exactly what you knew before, except now you’re worried.

Now the other way. You ask the same thing. The first sentence tells you it’s probably the small problem, not the big one. The second tells you why it thinks so. Then it says here’s the one thing that would change that answer, and here’s when you’d want somebody to actually look at it. You know something. You can decide something.

Same question. Two different rooms.

The fix is one line, and here it is free.

Before you ask it anything that matters, tell it this:

Answer first. Caveats at the end, or not at all.

That’s it. It’ll still tell you the things it needs to tell you. It just won’t stack them in front of the door.

Now, the trouble with a line like that is remembering it. Every time, every conversation. And you won’t. You’ll remember on the days you’re sharp and forget on the days you’re tired, and the tired days are the days you most need a straight answer.

That’s the honest weakness of one good habit. It only works when you’re already paying attention.

So I put a short file together. A couple dozen of these, written out plain. You hand it over once at the start of a conversation and then you just talk. Nothing to manage. Nothing to remember. The machine runs that way for the rest of the session.

One line like the one above fixes one buried answer. The whole file changes who’s running the conversation.

It’s free. Two pages, no signup, nothing to buy. Download it, hand it to whichever AI you use, and ask it the question you’ve been circling all week.

See if the answer comes first this time.

You will see clearly now.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com