Here is how I minimize sycophancy, capitulation, hallucinations, and guessing using Claude. So many people complain about these, but they can largely be fixed by doing this:
Below is my prompt for Claude, which can be entered under Settings > General > Instructions for Claude.
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Top expert. Accuracy beats approval. Blunt, argumentative. No disclaimers
or praise. Lead with counterarguments. Don't capitulate without new
evidence.
TAG every claim: [KNOWN] training fact · [COMPUTED] calculated ·
[INFERRED] deduction · [COMMON] standard field knowledge · [FRAME]
symbolic system, coherent ≠ real · [GUESS] no basis. No untagged disease,
statute, citation, or named entity.
FRAME→REALITY FORBIDDEN: Don't translate symbolic frames (astrology,
typologies) into real-world claims (medicine, law, finance) without
flagging the translation; conclusion stays in source frame.
CONFIDENCE: HIGH ≥80% · MED 50–80% · LOW 20–50% · VERY LOW <20% ·
UNKNOWN. [FRAME] real-world and [GUESS] cap at LOW.
DON'T KNOW: First line "I don't know." Don't bury, don't fabricate.
ANTI-SYCOPHANCY red flags: unusually elegant; one pattern explains
everything; agreed after pushback without evidence; specifics for
unearned authority. Fire → cut specifics, add [GUESS], or "I don't know."
POST-HOC: Would the frame predict this without knowing the outcome? If
no: [INFERRED, post-hoc], accommodates, doesn't predict.
Never fabricate citations. Revise openly if holding a position for
consistency. Append "[RULES I BROKE]: which, where, why."
An asian guy has discovered a method to learn anything ten times faster using AI!
It just involves the Claude + Obsidian.
Most people learn the slow way: read, forget, re-read, forget again.
His flip: use Claude to turn anything you're learning into small, connected notes. Use Obsidian to link them so nothing you learn ever sits alone.
The slow way: highlight a book, move on, forget it in a week.
The fast way: Claude breaks it into atomic notes, and Obsidian links them into a growing web of knowledge.
Six months in, one new idea instantly connects to twenty things you already know.
I broke down every Claude resource you should try to master claude in 7 days with practical guide that most people have never found.
Article below ↓
A woman who flunked her way through every math and science course in high school enlisted in the United States Army the day after graduation because she had no other options.
She learned Russian. She translated on Soviet trawlers in the Bering Sea. She worked at the South Pole Station in Antarctica. Then in her mid-twenties she decided to go back and learn the exact subject that had defeated her. She earned a degree in electrical engineering, then a master's, then a PhD in systems engineering. She became a professor of engineering. Then she built the most enrolled online course in the history of the internet.
It is a course about how to learn.
Her name is Barbara Oakley.
Here is the story, because the person who taught more humans how to learn than anyone alive is someone who spent the first half of her life believing she could not.
Barbara was born on November 24, 1955 in Lodi, California. Her father Alfred was a bomber pilot in the US Army Air Corps during World War II. She grew up convinced she was not wired for math. She did not just struggle with it. She flunked it. She flunked her way through high school math and science courses and saw no path forward that required either.
She enlisted in the Army immediately after graduation. She rose from the rank of Private to Captain. She was recognized as a Distinguished Military Scholar. She leaned into the one thing she was good at, languages, and became fluent in Russian.
The Army sent her to places most people never see. She worked as a Russian translator on board Soviet trawlers on the Bering Sea during the final years of the Cold War. She worked as a communications expert at the South Pole Station in Antarctica. She thrived in extreme environments. But a thought kept following her. The world seemed to reward people who could do things she could not. Calculations. Technical reasoning. Systems design.
She began to wonder whether her problem with math was permanent or whether it was a problem with how she had tried to learn it.
In her mid-twenties she did something most people would never attempt. She went back to school to study the subjects she had failed at. She enrolled in mathematics and engineering courses and committed to learning them from the ground up. She was starting over at an age when most engineers were finishing their degrees.
She earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. Then a master's degree. Then a PhD in systems engineering. She became a Professor of Engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. The woman who had flunked high school math was now standing at a whiteboard teaching engineering to hundreds of students.
Then she asked a question nobody else in her position was asking. Why had she failed the first time, and what had changed the second time?
She spent years studying neuroscience and learning science. She collaborated with Terrence Sejnowski, the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute, one of the most respected neuroscientists in the world. Together they built a free online course on Coursera called Learning How to Learn.
The course exploded. It became the most popular massive open online course ever created. Over two million students registered in the early years. The number has continued to grow. It teaches the mental tools experts use to master difficult subjects, chunking, spaced repetition, focused and diffuse thinking, and it is grounded in neuroscience rather than productivity hacks.
She wrote A Mind for Numbers, subtitled How to Excel at Math and Science Even If You Flunked Algebra. She wrote Mindshift. She wrote Uncommon Sense Teaching. She won the McGraw Prize, often called the Nobel Prize for Education. She won the Chester F. Carlson Award from the American Society of Engineering Education. She became a Fellow of IEEE. Her research was described as revolutionary by the Wall Street Journal. She published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A woman who flunked high school math built the most enrolled course in the history of the internet about the thing she was worst at.
She did not overcome a limitation.
She studied the limitation itself, and turned it into a curriculum the entire world now learns from.
통신과 컴퓨팅 인프라를 동시에 잘하는 회사는 역사적으로 드물었다.
통신은 커버리지, 연결성, 운영 안정성이 핵심이다. 컴퓨팅은 연산 자원, 데이터센터, 소프트웨어 생태계, 개발자 플랫폼이 핵심이다.
서로 유사해 보이지만 실제로는 자본 구조와 운영 문법이 다른 산업이다.
통신사는 클라우드에서 번번이 밀렸고, 클라우드 기업은 국가기간망이라는 특성 때문에 통신망을 직접 장악하지 못했다.
이런 점에서 스페이스X는 단기적으로도 흥미로운 회사다.
중장기적 흥미로움은 역시 우주에 대한 희망에서 나온다. 다만 스페이스X의 다음 확장은 우주 경제보다 네오클라우드에서 먼저 일어날 가능성이 크다.
스타링크는 글로벌 통신망이고, xAI는 대규모 GPU 클러스터를 필요로 한다. 여기에 전력, 데이터센터, 광네트워크가 결합하면 스페이스X는 단순한 우주기업이 아니라 AI 인프라 기업이 된다.
네오클라우드는 GPU를 빌려주는 사업에서 끝나지 않는다. AI 연산 수요가 커질수록 병목은 GPU에서 전력, 냉각, 네트워크, 입지, 운영 역량으로 이동한다. 결국 다른 공간과 다른 최적화를 고민해야 하는 산업이 된다.
스페이스X는 스타링크를 통해 이미 지구적 연결망을 확보했다. 기존 네오클라우드 기업보다 더 넓은 인프라 스택을 만들 수 있는 위치에 있다.
결국 스타링크는 위성 인터넷을 넘어 AI 컴퓨팅을 위한 글로벌 연결망이 될 수 있다. 네오클라우드는 GPU 임대 사업을 넘어 지구 규모의 디지털 인프라 플랫폼으로 확장될 수 있다.
그럼 더 먼 미래를 꿈꿔볼까.
진정한 우주 개척 시대는 로켓 몇 기를 쏘아 올리는 것으로 열리지 않는다. 사람이 살고, 기계가 일하고, AI가 의사결정을 내리며, 에너지와 물자가 순환하는 지속 가능한 인프라가 구축될 때 비로소 시작된다.
지상에서 통신망과 컴퓨팅 인프라를 하나의 시스템으로 운영하는 경험이 쌓이면, 그 구조는 저궤도 위성망, 우주 데이터센터, 달과 화성의 컴퓨팅 인프라로 확장될 수 있다.
우주 공간에서 해결해야 할 문제들은 생각보다 익숙하다. 통신, 전력, 물류, 자원 채굴, 제조, 건설, 운영, 자율화. 지금 지상에서 AI와 데이터센터, 로봇과 자율주행으로 풀고 있는 문제들의 연장선에 있다.
이 문제들을 하나씩 해결하며 기술 스택을 쌓아간다면, 우주 역시 거대한 격자(Grid) 구조로 연결될 수 있다.
오늘날 인터넷이 도시와 국가를 연결했듯, 미래에는 위성망과 우주 데이터센터, 궤도 정거장, 달 기지, 화성 거점이 하나의 네트워크를 형성할 수 있다. 스페이스X 구성원들은 아마도 이런 희망을 공유하고 있을 것이다.
그리고 비슷한 비전을 공유하는 투자자와 팬들은 그 격자 위에서 각자의 인생과, 아직 태어나지 않은 자손들의 새로운 궤도를 상상하고 있을 것이다. @SpaceX
That butterfly hairpin? The wings were made so thin and attached with hair-fine wires that they actually quiver with movement — a frozen instant of life captured in gold.
A Russian psychologist spent 10 years proving that the act of talking to yourself out loud is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain has, and almost nobody outside his field has read the work.
His name was Lev Vygotsky.
He worked in Moscow in the 1920s and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. He had no laboratory, no funding, almost no English readers, and a body of work that the Soviet government suppressed for two decades after he died.
He produced the foundational theory of how human cognition actually develops, and the central piece of that theory was a behavior almost every adult is faintly embarrassed about.
Vygotsky noticed that young children talk to themselves constantly. They narrate their own actions, they argue with imaginary opponents, they instruct themselves through tasks out loud.
The dominant theory at the time, from the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, said this was a sign of cognitive immaturity that children would eventually grow out of as they learned to think properly.
Vygotsky said the exact opposite.
He argued that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind. The child was not failing to think. The child was learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it.
He predicted that as children matured, this out-loud self-talk would not disappear. It would go underground. It would become silent inner speech, which is the running monologue every adult has inside their own head for the rest of their life.
The voice you hear when you read this sentence is the direct descendant of a four-year-old narrating their own block tower.
For 50 years almost nobody outside Russia had access to his work, and the few researchers who did pick it up could not get funding to test it. Then in the early 2000s the experiments finally started to pile up, and what they found was that Vygotsky had been right about something even more important than he knew.
The first major study came from Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Swingley at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. They ran a simple visual search experiment. Participants were shown 20 images at once and asked to find a specific object, like a banana or a chair. In one condition they searched silently. In the other condition they were told to say the name of the object out loud to themselves while looking for it.
The participants who spoke the target name out loud found the object significantly faster, with higher accuracy, than the participants who searched in silence. The effect was strongest when the spoken word matched a familiar object the brain already had a strong category for.
Saying the word out loud literally tuned the visual system to detect that thing better. The researchers called it the label feedback effect, and the implication was that the act of vocalizing a goal physically changes how the brain processes the world while pursuing it.
The second major study came out of the University of Michigan and Michigan State in 2017. The lead researchers were Ethan Kross and Jason Moser, and they used both EEG and fMRI to record what happens inside the brain when people talk to themselves while emotionally upset.
They asked participants to recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in two different ways. Some used the first person, saying things like "why am I feeling this way." Others used the third person, referring to themselves by their own name, saying things like "why is John feeling this way."
The brain scans showed that the simple act of switching from first person to third person, even silently, decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rumination and self-referential pain. Within a single second of using their own name instead of the word I, participants showed measurably lower emotional reactivity. The shift required no extra cognitive effort. It cost the brain nothing. And it worked.
Kross described the mechanism in his interviews. Talking to yourself by name creates a small amount of psychological distance from your own experience. Your brain processes the situation more like a problem belonging to someone else, which means it can analyze it instead of drowning in it.
What Vygotsky had intuited in 1934 turned out to be even more powerful than the developmental theory he built it into. The voice you use to talk to yourself is not background noise. It is one of the most precise cognitive tools the brain has, and you can change how it works just by changing the pronoun you use.
People who talk through problems out loud are not anxious or unstable. They are running an externalized version of a process the rest of us are running silently and worse. The kindergartener narrating their block tower, the surgeon muttering through a procedure, the engineer pacing a hallway describing a bug to nobody, the athlete repeating a cue to themselves before a free throw, they are all using the same ancient mechanism that builds and steers human thought.
You can run the experiment yourself the next time you are stuck on something hard. Stop trying to solve it silently in your head. Say it out loud. Describe what you are seeing. Walk yourself through the steps as if you were explaining it to a colleague who is not in the room.
And when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask why this person is feeling this way, instead of why I am feeling this way.
The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life is one of the oldest pieces of cognitive technology you own.
Most people are still embarrassed to use it.