Maieutic prompting: reason as a tree you can audit, not a chain you must trust — and prune the contradiction a vote never sees

1Key Takeaways

• Ask a model a deceptively simple question — "Is a whale a fish?" — and a single chain of thought can wander into the intuitive-but-wrong answer: it lives in water, it swims, so it's a fish.
• Chain-of-thought has no self-check; one bad step sails straight through.
• Self-consistency samples many chains and votes, which fixes random slips but not a shared wrong intuition — a vote measures agreement, not truth.
• I built an interactive demo of a third option that beats both, and the tree and the….