Comment by calhoun137

> Does replacing that lengthy text with "if you aren't sure of the answer say you don't know" have the same exact effect?

i believe it makes a substantial difference. the reason is that a short query contains a small number of tokens, whereas a large “wall of text” contains a very large number of tokens.

I strongly suspect that a large wall of text implicitly activates the models persona behavior along the lines of the single sentence “if you aren't sure of the answer say you don't know” but the lengthy argument version of that is a form of in-context learning that more effectively constrains the models output because you used more tokens.