The Council of Invisible Counselors

Perplexity will not role-play a council, and asking it to produces a limp imitation with footnotes. But it can do something the other three cannot: find out what real, named experts have actually argued, with citations - the genuine council instead of the invented one. Reframe each voice on the panel as a research question about a real constituency's documented position, and you get a better debate than role-play would have given you, because the arguments are ones people really made.

• Swap invented counsellors for real experts' documented positions.
• Ask for who holds each view and where they said it.
• Ask which side the published evidence actually supports.
• Take the sourced positions elsewhere to stage the debate.
• Keep an ongoing decision's sources in a Space.

Do not role-play a panel of consultants - an invented CFO's objections are only as good as the model's guesses, and the figures it reaches for will be fiction. Perplexity can give you the real council instead: the documented positions of people who have actually done this.

My tech services company in Hyderabad - 60 people, project work for US and UK clients - is considering a mandatory four-day work week. Research each of these separately, with sources and dates.

1. Which organisations have actually run four-day-week trials, and what did the published results say? Cite the evaluations. Separate independently evaluated trials from company press releases - the gap between those two is the whole story here.
2. Which trials were reversed or abandoned, and what reasons were given? Cite the reporting. The failures are harder to find than the successes and matter more to me.
3. Has any Indian IT or IT services company tried a four-day week or a compressed week? Cite what exists. If the answer is nothing substantial, say so plainly - that is itself a finding.
4. What have named CFOs, operations leaders and economists argued against the four-day week, and where did they argue it? I want the actual objections with attribution, not a generic case against.
5. What does the published research say about compressed-hours burnout - whether reduced days with the same workload worsens outcomes? Use Academic focus and cite the studies, noting sample sizes and whether they were in knowledge work.
6. For a services business billing clients by time: what is documented about how firms handled client coverage and contractual obligations during such a trial? Cite anything specific.
7. What do Indian labour law and standing contracts actually require around working hours, weekly offs and overtime for a company like mine? Cite the provision, with its date. Getting this wrong is expensive and this is the one answer I most need sourced.

Cite everything with dates. Flag single-source claims, and tell me which of these you could not answer rather than filling the gap.

Then take this to another tool and stage the debate - a panel briefed with real documented positions and real evaluation results argues far better than one briefed with nothing.

Rather than role-playing an industrialist, a shop owner and an economist, find out what real people in each of those positions actually said and what the data actually shows. I want the real council, with citations. Use Academic focus where the question is scholarly.

1. What have named Indian industrialists said, in interviews, memoirs or testimony, about the end of the License Raj and the 1991 reforms? Cite the source and date for each. I want attributable views, including from people who opposed liberalisation.
2. What documented evidence exists on the effect of liberalisation and organised retail on small traders and tier-2 city shopkeepers? Cite studies, surveys or reporting. Where the evidence is anecdotal rather than measured, say so.
3. What do economists actually argue about the reforms' effect on inequality, the informal sector and regional divergence? Name the economists and cite the works. Give me both the position that reform drove poverty reduction and the position that it did not, with their best evidence.
4. What happened to public sector banks after liberalisation and bank-sector reform, as documented by RBI or academic work? Cite it. This constituency is usually left out of the discussion.
5. What are the official data series for Indian growth, poverty and inequality across the 1990s and 2000s, and what do they show? Cite MoSPI, RBI, World Bank or NITI Aayog with dates and series names. Where estimates differ - and 1990s poverty estimates differ a great deal - give both and explain the methodological dispute.
6. What is the live scholarly argument about whether growth accelerated in the 1980s rather than after 1991? Cite the main contributions on each side.
7. Which widely repeated claims about 1991 are not supported by the evidence? Cite the corrections where they exist.

For every figure: the source, the date and the series. Do not give me a number without one. This is the chapter where the other three tools will cheerfully produce a confident growth rate that is wrong, and a sourced range is worth more than a clean-sounding single figure.

Save it in a Space. Then take the sourced positions to another tool if you want them argued out in character.

Do not build the superhero here. A writers' room needs two voices willing to be wrong in interesting ways, and this is an answer engine - it will give you a cited summary of superhero conventions, which is the death of a concept. Run the debate in Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini.

There are two research jobs worth doing first, and the second one will save you real embarrassment.

1. What Indian superheroes already exist across comics, film, television and streaming? Cite the works with dates and publishers or studios. Cover the older comics traditions as well as recent releases - the thing you think is original has often been done.
2. For each, what is the source of the hero's powers - mythological, technological, or something else? Cite where this is described. I want to know which half of my planned debate has already been exhausted.
3. How were these received critically and commercially, as far as is reported? Cite reviews and any reported performance figures.
4. What have named Indian comics writers, editors and creators said about what works and what fails in the Indian superhero genre? Cite interviews and essays. These are the real counsellors I want in the room.
5. What is documented about the Astras and about boon-and-curse structures in the Sanskrit epics - as scholarship states them, not as popular retellings do? Use Academic focus and cite it. If I am going to build powers on this, I would rather build on the scholarship.
6. What have critics identified as the recurring failures when mythology is adapted into modern genre fiction in India? Cite the criticism.
7. Are there live rights, trademark or adaptation claims around the major existing Indian superhero properties? Cite what is publicly reported. Worth knowing before naming anything.

Cite everything, with dates. Where a source is a single blog post or a fan wiki, say that is what it is - this subject is heavily covered by unreliable sources.

Then take answers 2, 4 and 6 into a writing tool as the brief for the writers' room. "Here is what exists, here is what creators say fails, here is what the scholarship actually says about the Astras" produces a sharper argument than two invented writers guessing.