What’s the significance? “Don’t think about elephants” kind of thing?

Generally, in a cognitive context it's only possible to "do thing" or "do other thing". Even for mammals, it's much harder to "don't/not do thing" (cognitively). One of my biggest advice for people is if there's some habit/repeated behavior they want to stop doing, it's generally not effective (for a lot of people) to tell yourself "don't do that anymore!" and much, much more effective to tell yourself what you should do instead.

This also applies to dogs. A lot of people keep trying to tell their dog "stop" or "dont do that", but really its so much more effective to train your dog what they should be doing instead of that thing.

It's very interesting to me that this also seems to apply to LLMs. I'm a big skeptic in general, so I keep an open mind and assume that there's a different mechanism at play rather than conclude that LLM's are "thinking like humans". It's still interesting in its own context though!

Exactly