It works. I agree, more words seem to result in better critical rigour. But for the majority of my casual use cases it is capable of perfectly accurate and complete answers in just a few tokens, so I configure it to prefer short, direct answers. But this is just a suggestion. It seems to understand when a task is complex enough to require more verbiage for more careful reasoning. Or I can easily steer it towards longer answers when I think they’re needed, by telling it to go through something in detail or step by step etc.

The main benefit of asking for terseness in your preferences is that it significantly reduces pleasantries etc. (Not that I want it completely dry and robotic, but it just waffles too much out of the box.)