Superstitions may be effective but they can still be superstitions. Some people might actually think the LLM cares about being tipped.

I care less that such prompting hacks/tricks are consistently useful; I care more about why they work. These hacks feel like “old-wives tales” or, as others have mentioned, “superstitious”.

If we can’t explain why or how a thing works, we’re going to continue to create things we don’t understand; relying upon our lucky charms when asking models to produce something new is undoubtedly going to result in reinforcement of the importance of those lucky charms. Feedback loops can be difficult to escape.