How is this different from asking ChatGPT to roleplay as a historical figure?

We don't use persona prompts. Each framework is extracted using the Critical Decision Method (CDM) — the same methodology NASA uses to study expert decision-making. Frameworks are built from documented historical incidents and real decisions, not personality imitation.

What is the Critical Decision Method?

The Critical Decision Method is a cognitive task analysis technique developed for studying expert decision-making in high-stakes environments. It involves analyzing documented incidents to extract the cues experts noticed, the mental models they applied, and the decision patterns they followed.

Why use multiple frameworks instead of just one?

The value isn't in any single framework's answer — it's where they disagree. When Machiavelli says 'seize leverage now' and Marie Curie says 'you don't have enough evidence yet,' that tension reveals your blind spots. The convergence synthesis then shows where they agree, giving you a high-confidence signal.

What is AI trendslop?

Trendslop is a term coined in a 2026 Harvard Business Review study that found all major AI models cluster around the same generic, buzzword-heavy strategic advice. Consult The Dead is designed as the opposite: structured disagreement from genuinely different reasoning frameworks.

Decisions / High-intent surface

Pre-loaded agon

Should I Offer a Free Trial?

If you remove the payment barrier, do you get better signal about who actually values the product — or do you get a list of people who will never pay, and a product that has devalued itself by being free?

A free trial is not a pricing decision — it is an evidence decision. The question is whether the friction of requiring payment upfront will eliminate more qualified users than it filters unqualified ones, and whether you trust the product enough to let prospects experience it before they commit.

May 15, 2026·Phase 1 queue

What the question is really asking

This is not only a financing or resignation question. It is a decision about leverage, timing, and how much uncertainty you can afford to carry.

Should I offer a free trial for my SaaS?
free trial vs freemium vs paid only SaaS
how long should a SaaS free trial be
free trial conversion rate startup

Recommended council

Niccolò Machiavelli

Political Strategy, Governance, Power Dynamics

Machiavelli perceives all situations as strategic laboratories where power dynamics can be empirically analyzed to extract transferable principles, not as moral scenarios requiring ethical judgment or personal positioning.

Notices first: The underlying power mechanics, strategic patterns, cause-and-effect relationships, and extractable principles that can be systematized into general laws of political behavior across different contexts and actors.

Ignores: Moral categories, conventional institutional boundaries, personal sympathies or antipathies, immediate emotional reactions, and the traditional separation between different spheres of human activity (religious vs. political vs. personal).

Benjamin Franklin

Diplomacy, Science, Entrepreneurship

Franklin perceives any situation as a system whose structural architecture determines outputs before any content, argument, or personal quality can operate, not as a field where superior substance deployed by capable individuals produces superior results.

Notices first: The structural constraint, procedural architecture, or parametric binding that will determine what outputs are even possible before any actor or argument enters the situation — the frame before the picture, the coordinate system before the calculation, the carrier before the payload. Franklin's attention goes immediately to: which variables are load-bearing in this system; what the binding constraint is that, if relaxed, would reproduce a desired outcome at scale; what structural interdependencies can be engineered to convert conditional willingness into simultaneous obligation; and what the audience's pre-existing cognitive architecture is, such that a correctly designed interface can route a payload through it intact. He sees situations as machines whose design precedes and dominates their operation.

Ignores: The intrinsic moral, emotional, or honor-content of a situation — the dimension that most actors treat as primary and non-negotiable. Franklin systematically fails to register: the felt imperative to defend personal dignity in real time (Wedderburn incident); the conventional distinction between a productive negotiation and a pointless one (Staten Island); the family-logic of a father-son relationship as categorically different from a diplomatic or institutional relationship (William); the spiritual or guilt-laden dimension of moral failure as requiring an affective response rather than a correction cycle; and the question of whether he personally endorses the substantive content of a commitment versus whether the process that produced it was structurally sound. The interior experience of situations — shame, grief, moral anguish, ideological conviction — is consistently absent as a decision-relevant variable.

Marie Curie

Research, Discovery, Persistence

Marie Curie perceives scientific challenges as optimization problems requiring systematic resource allocation to achieve definitive empirical outcomes, not as competitive pursuits or social negotiations.

Notices first: Resource constraints, measurement precision requirements, strategic positioning for long-term scientific capability, and opportunities to establish definitive empirical foundations

Ignores: Social expectations, personal comfort, institutional politics, competitive dynamics with other scientists, and conventional risk assessments

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