I was bored so I decided to tackle this AI and "Strawberry" problem surfacing LinkedIn; Ask an AI how many R’s are in strawberries. What’s interesting isn’t the mistake. It’s why the mistake happens. Language models (and humans) compress familiar words. They recognize instead of verifying. So here’s a simple prompt I’ve made to correct the system to slow down and stop guessing: ( “The answer space is enumerable in under N steps. Forbid semantic inference and require explicit enumeration.”) Then try again, in a new chat. Instead of pattern-matching “strawberries,” the model is forced to list each character and count explicitly. No vibes. No confidence tricks. Just steps you can audit. This isn’t about strawberries. It’s about how often fluency gets mistaken for correctness in AI and in people.. Small constraints change behavior. Verification beats confidence. Try it on any model.

A Systems-Based Analysis of Culture, Power, Violence, and Conspiracy Narratives Abstract This thesis examines how historical pressure, institutional incentives, and cross-cultural exposure shape collective behavior and adaptive intelligence over time. It challenges popular conspiracy narratives—including elite omnipotence, racial domination fears, and external “negative force” hypotheses; by evaluating them against long-term empirical trends in violence, knowledge transmission, and sociocultural outcomes. Drawing on historical data, criminological research, and systems theory, this study proposes that modern societies, particularly African-American culture in the United States, demonstrate adaptive synthesis rather than subjugation or domination. The findings suggest that power structures persist through incentives rather than comprehension, that violence has declined historically despite moral anxiety, and that outcome-oriented pragmatism, not conspiratorial control; best explains contemporary behavior. Keywords: cultural synthesis, systems theory, violence trends, conspiracy narratives, African-American culture, institutional incentives 1. Introduction Public discourse frequently attributes global outcomes to hidden elites, monolithic racial ambitions, or non-human forces operating beyond human perception. These narratives often persist despite weak empirical grounding. This thesis argues that such explanations fail because they do not account for historical data, incentive structures, or adaptive human behavior. Instead, this study advances a systems-based framework emphasizing outcomes over intent, adaptation over suppression, and institutional incentives over centralized understanding. By analyzing historical violence trends, knowledge transmission from Islamic civilizations to Europe, and modern African-American cultural behavior, this thesis demonstrates that long-term pressure tends to produce synthesis and pragmatism rather than collapse or conquest. 2. Historical Knowledge Transmission and Institutional Development