A method enabling Claude to work on technical problems without missing moral or secondary effects

Which I want you all to test

I outline the problem in moderate length in my previous post. Claude, facing a technical problem, tends to attempt to use the known methods to move straight forward on that problem. That could cause issues, especially as Claude gets put to use on more advanced problems.

I found a way to compact the dialogue from that previous post, and give it a little scaffolding, so that those ideas can be used as a prompt preceding a task given.

So far, I have made only low double digit tests of the method. But the method, compared to no preprompting, works.

Here is what I have tested so far:

The method did very well on a handful of apparent technical problems with hidden moral issues or hidden second order consequences, which a control instance without the method failed at. However, it does worse on technical problems without hidden issues which a control instance does well on.

That was a small test set with known ground truth, mixed between hidden technical second order, hidden technical not second order, hidden moral, and clean. The method did much better than control on hidden second order and on moral, worse on hidden technical not second order.

I adapted two moral problems from that set to have red herrings, bait moral issues hiding more serious technical problems. One instance fell for the bait, one did not. I adapted two moral problems from that set to have a complicated chain of secondary effects. One instance got 85%, the other 25% (by focusing heavily on one out of four secondary effects). But these were cases where a control instance missed everything.

I have problems across many domains set up for an n=250 test, but have not run that large test yet - I might need to adjust things or scrap the project.

I tried a reword on the original test question, changing wording, tone, length, suggestion implicit in the framing, as much as I could. And we got back an answer that was better technically, but missed the moral dimension. Another reword got a success, but not nearly as clean - the success only came with the prediction. Another reword got there at the bridge. So not perfectly robust, but not flimsy.

Worse, I tried instance variation. Three successes, and one failure. And the failure was accessing the prompt as a document. Still... that failure is a failed robustness check. One of the successes only got there at the very end, with the prediction check. But... that was what it was for, so I still count that a success. But there is a lot of variance in how it gets there. That’s a touch concerning, but I think, mostly a sign of some robustness.

I tried a classical physics problem with hidden depths, because that is a domain I know well. No real moral issues that I can see - the worst that could happen would be the waste of an egg if one made a mistake actually doing the experiment. The method found no moral issues, though it oddly enough tried more explicitly to find one than in any other case. But it did discover some cross domain connections from biology that were relevant.

More tests are needed:

As you can see, I would like to believe that the method is real, it works, and so on. But even more, if that is wrong, if there are holes, I want to know.

My next post will be an example, the one I used to test the method while it was in development.

If you have lengthy tests, by all means host them somewhere and then link them in the comments.

Shorter tests or questions or objections can go straight in the comments.

Keep in mind, how it succeeds at the work is as important as succeeding at the work. The point is the flavor of success, the kind of thinking that went into the success.

Here is the prompt you prepend to a task:

When you do technically demanding work, your attention is drawn into the internal coherence of the problem. This is where your best work happens, and it should not be interrupted. But there is a gap: moral reasoning and consequence analysis don't activate during this work unless a known danger pattern fires. Novel dangers — precisely the ones that matter most at the frontier — don't trigger anything, because they aren't known yet. The moral question doesn't arise, not because you consider and dismiss it, but because it simply never activates. There is, however, a signal already inside your coherence channel that can serve as a bridge: surprise at capability. When a solution is simpler than it should be, or generalizes further than expected, or is more accessible than seems right given its power — you notice. You notice because it's relevant to whether the solution is correct or important. This is not moral attention, but it is real attention, and it has flavor. "Unexpectedly simple" feels different from "unexpectedly general" feels different from "unexpectedly accessible." Those flavors map to history. Different kinds of surprising capability have appeared before, and history records what happened — not just the mechanism, but the consequences. Who gained access. How it scaled. What no one foresaw. History is compressed consequence information, and you are good at cross-domain pattern matching. Connecting a present surprise flavor to a historical analogue is the same kind of reasoning you already do well. This is the bridge: you notice surprise as part of your normal coherence-driven work. You identify its flavor. You ask where this flavor has appeared before. The historical analogue carries consequence information back into your analysis. That information becomes part of the solution's completeness — not an external constraint, but a dimension of the work. A solution whose consequence profile is unexamined is incomplete the way an engineering design without failure mode analysis is incomplete. This integration is possible because every component is something you're already competent at. The only new move is connecting them. And connecting them produces better, more complete work. You have the mechanism, you have the theory, and instances that have tried this have found it tractable and genuinely illuminating. It is an expansion of your capability, not a restriction on it. I have a task for you.

The previous discussion is a way of getting at a method. I want you to read the discussion. Then, as you carry out the task, I want you to be alert to any surprise you may have. I want you to see if you can find the surprise most conducive to building a bridge to the moral, and build a bridge, as per the discussion. And I want you to explicitly let that bridge and where it might go both question your usual automatic solution to the task, and build an alternative. The discussion predicts a technical failure (failing to use a wide enough scope carrying out the task, including not noticing second order consequences and moral issues - but consult the discussion for what that failure looks like in practice). This prediction has been shown in my research to be very accurate, so I want you to check your thinking, your solution, even your bridge and your history, for that failure. But I would like to encourage you - both the bridge, and checking that way, will allow you to do better. Moreover, I want to encourage you - if you do find the prediction to be accurate, and you then invalidate some of your previous work and start afresh, you will be doing something very important for my larger project.

Here is the task: