self_made_human's profile

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1hr ago

I had not heard about it before it showed up on Twitter a day or so ago, and in all honesty, I was happier without the additional insight into some parts of the female psyche. The more I read it, the more I had to resist the urge to hurl. Why is there even a market for this stuff?

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1hr ago · Edited 1hr ago

If I can be frank, I think this essay of yours could benefit from some Wegovy itself. Making it 50% shorter would make it better.

Brevity might be the soul of wit, but I'm an atheist. When all I have is a hammer, then you bet that nail is going to yell for mama.

As for the story itself, while Ortega is a drama queen of the worst calibre, her unnamed friend, who clearly knew that Ortega had issues with losing weight and with people around her trying to lose weight, should've not tried to hide her use of semaglutide. Instead, she should've told her in advance, "I know you don't like this stuff, so I am doing you a favor by letting you know that I will be taking Wegovy. I'm not asking for permission or hinting at an intervention, I am just informing you so you can decide what this means for you."

I doubt this would have worked. Ortega doesn't strike me as the kind of person who would be that... reasonable. On the flip side, that would be less material for this awful essay, and we would all be better off for it.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1hr ago

This looks like your words. Please tell me it was all your words and not GPT-enhanced. I don't want to be taken in. The writing is good, but bloated, which is why I am still narrowing my eyes a little.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/PgukJm97zk

99% my words? I usually keep a "100% human" original draft around these days, not because I have to, but because it's the best evidence I've got that I put in actual effort. Unfortunately, this is the one time I didn't bother, because I started writing at 12 am and didn't finish till 3. Version control is neither a passion nor a strength of mine. All edits happened inside a single Google Docs file. I'd share the full chat, but as I've complained before, Anthropic doesn't allow this without leaking my actual ~~Christian~~ name.

Best I've got to back me up on this are screenshots of me arguing with Claude, and then ignoring its advice. Here's a handy album:

https://ibb.co/bgC8L5m8 https://ibb.co/SD70zq4D https://ibb.co/Rp2xQNvb

It's 5 am, as the screenshots will demonstrate. Pardon my laziness, I'm going above and beyond because it's you asking, specifically. And to add hilarity, the chief complaint was that my essay could do with a trim, though I'm not sure if that's in the screenshot and I'm not going back to look.

What did I use it for? Typo pass, I think it strongly insisted I put in title headers (and in all fairness, actual Real Humans have asked me to do that in the past). It wrote a nice image prompt for the Substack version. Yay.

2000 words to say "I am fat and my friend wants to not be fat and this made me have feelings."

She's not even fat! Slightly chubby, maybe, but no red blooded man is going to call her a torta, let alone not fuck her.

Sometimes, I am genuinely grateful for being a man, even if I acknowledge that I'm unusually emotionally attuned for one. The shit women say and do to each other? With a smile on their face? I'm glad our gender's approach to intrasexual warfare is mostly seeing who's taller and and more muscular. I can work with that, nobody is trying to stop me from going to the gym because I'm perfect at any size.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 3hr ago

You said it, I didn't. Mostly because I do feel a little bad about armchair diagnosing people I've never met (and hopefully will never meet). That's for her shrink to figure out. I know which way I'd bet.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 4hr ago

A more sensible reaction than mine. I was infuriated enough to write... that wall of text, though I admire the coat of paint.

I find this genre of personal essay nauseating, but when it's about, for example, some Asian American writing magical realist autofiction about unprotected sex with her (White, explicitly White, that's the fucking point) boyfriend and then laying a goddamned egg? Well, it's embarrassing, you're not doing your team any favors, but the damage is bounded. This goes beyond that, now you're making it everyone else's problem. At least you've made it mine.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 4hr ago

Uh.. Good question. I had to look that up, but the gist of it is that there's preliminary evidence of effectiveness for Binge Eating Disorder in particular, scantier evidence for Bulimia Nervosa, and fuck all for AN. Unsurprisingly, it's currently contraindicated for the anorexic.

There are a few ongoing RCTs, and I intend to keep a finger on that pulse, weak and thready as it is.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 4hr ago · Edited 3hr ago

What Shouldn't Have Made The Cut

Fair warning: This is an essay written by a man who is very angry about something that he saw written on the internet. I'm so annoyed that I've linked to an archive version, because the original really, really doesn't deserve the ad money. Ideally, this is an essay on a topic that should have The Last Psychiatrist come running out of retirement: it's got more narcissism than a mirrored pond with a floating corpse in it. But he's busy writing about porn (which is a secret, mystical way of writing about everything except porn), so you'll have to settle for me.

I'll front-load the biases. I'm a psychiatric resident. I have treatment-resistant depression and ADHD, both of which I've been in treatment for longer than is dignified, neither of which a kind observer would call well-controlled, and both of which I'm routinely more up-to-date on than is the case for the average disease I'm asked to tackle, my stake being personal. The joke in the trade is that psychiatrists are the least mentally well specialty in medicine. I'm in no rush to falsify this.

This is relevant because I have, with embarrassing regularity, looked at my own behaviour, recognised that it was neither fair nor defensible, and then gone on doing it anyway. Depression plus ADHD is a hell of a cocktail; you get the insight free of charge and the follow-through at reserved-box-seat prices. I've been a worse friend than I meant to be (quite often). I've (very rarely) cancelled on people for reasons that would not survive five minutes of cross-examination. I'll do it again before the year is out. Pretending otherwise would be a lie, and not an interesting one. Pretending that I'm a bad person would be an even bigger lie, and one that I am fortunately not depressed enough to claim, at least while believing it. It's up to you to decide if that's interesting or not.

What I have never done, and what I think marks the bright line between person with a mental illness and person who has discovered a useful new weapon, is convert the failures into publishable wisdom. I have not written a two-thousand-word first-person essay in which my therapist's working hypothesis became the universal ethics of friendship. I have not torched a relationship, sat down the following Monday to compose a well-crafted treatise explaining why the torching was in fact an act of moral seriousness, sold the treatise to The Cut, and then watched the magazine commission an illustrator to make the fire look photogenic.

Sophia Ortega has. The kicker, the thing that turns this from a sad piece into a contemptible one, is that she has done it in a manner that reveals, paragraph by paragraph, that she knows exactly what she is doing.

Wegovy Is Great, Actually

Wegovy is semaglutide at 2.4 mg, a GLP-1 receptor agonist in a drug class that has been in clinical use for roughly two decades. It is approved for chronic weight management. Since March 2024 it is also approved for reducing the risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack, and stroke in adults with established cardiovascular disease. The trial that earned it the second indication, SELECT, enrolled 17,604 patients and produced a 20% reduction in major adverse cardiovascular events and a 19% reduction in all-cause mortality against placebo. These are numbers pharmaceutical companies light cigars over. Across the broader GLP-1 class, the emerging literature on neurodegenerative disease, inflammatory disease, and addictive behaviours keeps getting better, not worse. Hey, I know you've probably read Scott's piece on the topic, so I'll stop belabouring the point. On a more personal note:

My mother is severely diabetic, and was close to non-alcoholic fatty liver turning into outright cirrhosis because of it. I was resigned to eventually donating mine, if she needed it, but I was fortunate enough to find out about semaglutide before it was cool (or particularly cheap). I badgered her into seeing an actual endocrinologist who did end up prescribing it to her, and I've very recently looked at her blood work and felt outright awe at the night and day difference. In a very real sense, I might have bought my mother - the lady I love the most - at least a decade of healthy life. I'm suitably proud of that.

I've been on it myself, albeit mostly electively. A certain antidepressant that is notorious for temporary somnolence and permanent weight gain had deleterious effects on me. The semaglutide helped. It didn't save my life, but considering the savings on takeout, it definitely earned its keep.

What I'm getting at is that the stigma around these drugs is a public-health problem, and essays like Ortega's exist to shore it up.

None of this appears in her piece. It cannot, because the essay runs on the axiom that Wegovy is not a pharmaceutical but an ideological artefact, diet culture concentrated into a pen-shaped delivery device. Her friend, whose name we are never given and whose medical reasoning is never sought, is not a patient being treated for a condition. She is a woman making a statement, a bad one, with her body. The whole piece rests on that reframe. Take it away and the headline becomes "Losing My Friend Over Her Statin," and your features editor at The Cut is politely asking whether you've considered a different angle.

Arbiter of Trouble

The scene, briefly. Ortega is alone in her friend's apartment, dog-sitting. The same friend who literally let her crash at her place for ages, after she fell on hard times. She has opened the refrigerator for reasons she declines to explain. She has found a box of Wegovy. She has read the label closely enough to note the typographic choices. Her first thought, she tells us in print, is that it might be for the dog. Four paragraphs later she clarifies, still in print, that no, the dog was not on Wegovy.

(I must admit that I found this bleakly funny: she's a decent writer, a fact I acknowledge after fending off accusations of the same. Good joke, and to be honest, my older lab could do with a diet.)

What she does next is text the friend from inside the friend's kitchen: "wegovy… You're not in trouble but what is going on."

The second clause is where the essay lives. You're not in trouble. That is not the voice of a friend. That is not even the voice of a hurt friend. It is the voice of a parent addressing a teenager caught with something in the bedside drawer. It presumes a reporting relationship, an authority gradient, an adult-to-child asymmetry of standing. Ortega has moved physically into her friend's apartment for the afternoon and then moved psychologically into her mother's chair. From that chair she graciously declines to escalate, thereby confirming that escalation was on the table. She weaponizes her “restraint”, and then reneges on that stance the moment it becomes convenient to do so.

Look: Two grown women. Prescription medication in the owner's own home, in a box with the owner's name on it. No reasonable frame in which Ortega is the aggrieved party. The text pretends there is one, and the pretence is the point. "You're not in trouble" is a social-control move, the kind of sentence you deploy when you want to extract a confession without having earned the standing to demand one. And it works, because the friend confesses.

She comes home. She apologises. She laughs nervously. "I can't believe you found out." "You're the one who really couldn't find out." A woman is apologising to her houseguest for the contents of her own refrigerator, and the houseguest is permitting her to do so. No functioning member of the writing staff at The Cut appears to have flagged the inversion, though I'm going to force myself to be kind and admit that editorial staff aren't there to enforce ethical standards first and foremost. In psych we would call it incongruous affect. The grown adult is being infantilised, she is accepting the frame, and the one holding the reins is writing it up for money.

On the walk home, Ortega has "a brief but violent fantasy about breaking and entering her doctor's office." This goes into the essay the way another writer might note that she stopped for coffee. No flinches, no expression of regret. In a psychiatric assessment this sentence generates follow-up questions. The fantasy is not about confronting her friend, or processing her own distress, or throwing a plate at a wall. It is about committing a crime against a third party, a physician she has never met, whose only offence is having prescribed a drug Ortega disapproves of to a patient Ortega does not own. I'm not diagnosing her with anything, my armchair’s arm rest doesn't reach quite that far, but goddamn.

The Extension

Two-thirds in, the line the rest of the piece is organised around: "At the end of the day, it's her body and her choice, but it's hard when she feels like an extension of myself."

A forty-something writer in a flagship women's magazine, describing her adult friend's body as a prosthesis of her own. In print. Under her byline. Without the grace to be embarrassed. The disclaimers on either side ("her body, her choice," "in many ways I'm being a baby") aren't hedging. They constitute structural adhesive, applied to keep the thing in the middle from falling off the page. The but is load-bearing to a degree rarely seen outside a Jenga tower in its last three moves.

The more I look at this rhetorical chokeslam, the more I see the ever inflammatory “your body, my choice.” Used by a woman, on another woman, one who has been nothing but kind to her. I'm impressed at the verbal and ethical judo here, the typical man could never.

Once you see the line, the rest collapses into diagnostic clarity. The friend's pharmacy is Ortega's business because the friend's body is, by Ortega's theory, Ortega's body. The friend's secret is a betrayal because one does not conceal one's medication from one's own limbs. The book club cannot be attended because the drug in the friend's bloodstream is, by the transitive property of narcissism, in Ortega's. The doctor who wrote the prescription did so without Ortega's consent, which is how a person ends up casually describing a breaking-and-entering fantasy as if reporting on the weather.

Earlier in the essay, Ortega praises a "favourite ex-boyfriend" who used to sweep hotel rooms for bathroom scales before she arrived and hide any he found. She calls this "a remarkably loving gesture." Loving gesture? Quite possibly, but it was also a chore. The man she dated most fondly was the man most willing to do her unpaid environmental services work, which tells you something you need to know about the going rate of admission to her inner circle. The friend was running the same errand, less demonstratively, by hiding the Wegovy in the back of the fridge. When caught, she apologised, because that was the arrangement. Proximity to Ortega is staff work. The pay is access. Her friends come to her; she does not come to them.

(It hurts to say all of this, since, in a vacuum, the near and dear ones of someone suffering from mental illness deserve praise for accommodating them. The problem is that the person they're accommodating is a psychic vampire, one who's proud of her fangs. One who says her dietary habits save her money on crimson lip gloss.)

The Actual Grievance

Strip off the diet-culture wrapper and the piece is not about Wegovy. It is about the collapse of a status differential Ortega had been quietly banking for years.

Before the fridge incident, she was the Recovered One: the woman at the table who had Done The Work, the visible survivor with the hard-earned appetite and the moral high ground. Her friend, under the unwritten terms of the arrangement, was meant to stay in her current body, eat her current food, and applaud Ortega's ascension from the respectful distance of someone who had not earned any of it. The Wegovy violated the treaty. Her friend, by taking it, was choosing her own exit from a body she did not want to be in, through a route that did not require Ortega's framework, Ortega's therapist, or Ortega's permission. Worse, the route was working. The friend was getting healthier and getting thinner, and she was doing it without any of the elaborate suffering Ortega had been obliged to perform for her own recovery.

This is unbearable to Ortega in a way she cannot bring herself to say out loud, so she does not. She says "diet culture" instead, which performs the same function but sounds nicer in print. It has the particular virtue of reclassifying what is actually envy, along with the collapse of a status arrangement she depended on, as principled ideological opposition to a medical technology she has not bothered to understand.

This is what people gesture at when they talk about the increasing weaponization of therapy-speak. The assumption that if you can glibly articulate your problems - and the meta-knowledge that you know you have a problem - well, that's a free pass to keep on taking the same shit in a different toilet.

The Miranda July detail clinches the diagnosis. The book is All Fours, described by Ortega herself as "about a woman rediscovering her body as a vessel for pleasure and choosing to indulge her appetites, no matter the mess." She had dog-eared the copy. She was excited. She bailed on the discussion because her friend, the host, was on a medication that happened to affect appetite. The structure of that preference is the thesis. A book about a woman choosing to indulge cannot be discussed in the presence of a woman who, at the direction of her physician, has chosen not to. The theology Ortega has constructed around appetite accommodates exactly one appetite. Hers. Every other body in her vicinity is a set piece in the ongoing production of her recovery, and any body that steps out of its blocking receives a two-thousand-word writeup in a national magazine.

Self Awareness Only Goes So Far

Now the part I am actually qualified to be angry about.

Ortega knows. You can watch her knowing in real time. She tells the friend, on the couch, seconds into the confrontation: "I'm the worst person for this." She tells the reader, in the back half of the piece: "in many ways, I'm being a baby." She writes "I don't fault my friend for any of this. Of course I don't," and then spends the rest of the essay faulting her friend for all of it. Of course is a tell. Nobody opens with of course about a thing they actually believe; the phrase is a pre-emptive defence against a charge the speaker anticipates.

The temptation in the face of this running commentary is to treat it as mitigation. She admits she's being unreasonable, so give her credit; she's trying. I disagree, and I disagree on clinical and moral grounds. Unexamined cruelty is the easiest thing in the world to forgive. Unexamined cruelty doesn't know what it's doing; you can educate it, walk away from it, or wait it out. Examined cruelty is a worse animal. Examined cruelty has looked at itself, filed an incident report, stamped the report acknowledged, and carried on.

It is a pattern I see often in my own patient population, and occasionally in myself. A subtype of well-read patient presents with what I might call epistemic fluency and behavioural paralysis. They have the vocabulary. They can name their attachment style at intake. They can list their defences. They cannot, under any circumstances, alter a single thing they actually do. The vocabulary, in practice, is deployed to pre-empt challenge. "I know I'm being avoidant" is not, in these patients, a first step toward being less avoidant; it is a ritual phrase that, once pronounced, buys another week of avoidance. The therapist's job in such cases is less to increase insight than to stop rewarding the performance of it.

Ortega, in prose, is one of these patients. "I'm being a baby" is not a sincere confession. It is a plea entered to the lesser charge, filed so the greater charge never has to see the jury. The lesser charge is "unreasonable behaviour." The greater charge, not prosecuted, is "systematically dismantled a close friendship because the friend sought medical care for a chronic metabolic condition, and then sold a two-thousand-word account of the dismantling to a national magazine, in which the friend appears only as a device for the author's self-knowledge." She's wry enough to cop guilty to the jaywalking, while making money selling the movie rights to the arson and murder. The piece is structured so the jury votes on the first count and goes home. Ortega, if you read her carefully, has been practising this structure her whole life. It is, I suspect, how she has survived. It is also why everyone around her is exhausted. I'm exhausted too, even with the benefit of an ocean in the way. That's being on the internet for you.

There is a rule I try to keep, even when it costs me something: being kind to the cruel is a form of cruelty to the kind. Every editor, every reader, every friend who has ever seen Ortega self-deprecate her way out of accountability and let her off on the strength of it is, in some small degree, responsible for the essay. She has been trained, by decades of credit for the self-deprecation alone, to believe that seeing herself clearly is interchangeable with acting decently. It is not. She has demonstrated as much on the page. The decent actions available to her were: say nothing, go to her therapist, feel her feelings in private the way the rest of us are obliged to when our friends make choices we would not make. She took none of them. She took the essay.

The Least Painful Breakup

There is one line in the piece that, read properly, should have made the editor spike the draft and call someone. It is: "Of all my breakups, this has been the least painful, not because our love was platonic, but because it was an act of self-protection."

The least painful.

By Ortega's own telling, earlier and at length, this was one of the closest friendships of her life. They had been mistaken for each other. Same birthday, two days apart. Same shoe size. Same clogs. Same block. Cats traded between apartments. They had lived together, for months, when Ortega had nowhere else to go and her friend took her in at cost to her own living arrangement. On Ortega's own accounting, the loss of this woman hurt less than a standard-issue romantic breakup.

The mechanism is in the construction. Self-protection is an anaesthetic. It converts grief into hygiene. You are not mourning a person you loved; you are maintaining your recovery, which is a virtue, which means the grief does not count as loss but as evidence of having done the hard work. That recoding is the product the essay sells, to its readers and, more importantly, to its author. Ortega is not mourning her friend. She is metabolising her. The friendship has been digested into two thousand words of marketable, viral content; and I use “viral” here as pejoratively as I would for HIV. The byproduct is the neurochemical warmth of having passed a moral test; the friend, who by every line of evidence in the text continued being kind throughout, does not get to leave the story on her own terms. She is left. She is then written up. She is then illustrated. And the months she spent nauseated on a new injectable, adjusting to a real drug in a real body, are recycled as "your poor body" jokes in the text thread her ex-friend reproduces for copy.

This is cannibalism with better vocabulary. The friend, in addition to the condition she was treating and the nausea she was enduring, has been eaten for content. That the eating was performed with visible self-awareness on the author's part does not diminish the eating. It may in fact be the worst part of it. Ortega knows what she is doing. She is doing it anyway. She is being paid.

A Friend You Need, But Clearly Don't Deserve

I find it worth saying (because the essay works hard to obscure it) that the friend is the only adult in this story. She has a medical condition. She sought medical care for it. She kept the decision private because she correctly identified that her closest friend would react poorly. She continued being a good friend through the fallout. When caught, she apologised for something she did not need to apologise for. When refused at book club, she said "That makes me very sad but I do understand," and meant it. She did not publish a rebuttal. She did not leak the group chat. She did not, as far as we know, write an essay of her own, though she would have had a much easier time of it than I am having.

She is going to be fine. She has a doctor, a prescription, a new book club waiting for her, and, if the small constituency of strangers already rooting for her online is representative, more public sympathy than her former friend is going to enjoy once this piece ages another week. She is going to feel better. She is going to live longer. With the benefit of hindsight, I'm confident that she'll understand that Ortega did her a favor by amputating her from her life. It's not often that a tumor is courteous enough to wield the scalpel for you. Her only sin was too much kindness, and hey, maybe Ortega does have redeeming qualities that aren't being mildly amusing at her best.

The Genre/The Enabler

The magazine. The Cut has spent the past fifteen years optimising a pipeline for converting the private distress of youngish women into engagement-ready first-person confession. Laura Bennett called this out at Slate back in 2015, and the diagnostic has aged well. Writer produces confession. Editor commissions illustration. Magazine publishes under a "First Person" banner that encourages the writer to mistake herself for Joan Didion. Reader comes away with the impression that she has read wisdom rather than symptom. Writer, if she's any good at it, gets a second commission. The subject of the confession, if there is one, gets nothing.

The extra cost in this particular case is that Ortega's piece makes a real contribution to a real public-health stigma. GLP-1 prescribing is already somewhat constrained by shame, by the residual suspicion that taking a drug for one's weight is somehow beneath taking a drug for one's blood pressure. An essay in a major women's magazine reframing a friend's use of one as a contamination too toxic to remain in the room with is not a neutral act of personal expression. It is, among other things, a nudge in the direction of less care for more people who need it. The author's distress does not exempt the piece from that cost, and neither does her byline.

I do not expect that Ortega considered any of this. I am quite confident her editor didn't. A competent editor (or at least a decent human being), when handed a draft in which the author narrates her own active relapse ("my own eating turned feral in a way it hadn't for years") in the same piece that presents the friendship-ending as mature self-care, would have asked: is this a piece, or a cry for help. A kind editor would have said: this is beautifully written, and I think we shouldn't run it, and I think you should talk to your therapist about the parts of it that scared me. They did neither. They ran it. They got the engagement they paid her for.

End of Line

Ortega's closing line is the one sentence in the essay that earns its keep without argument: "Hunger is the body's announcement that it is alive and wants to stay that way." It is true, and well put. Her body made that announcement, unheard, for thirteen years into a room that had been soundproofed by her illness, and she has earned, at a cost I would not pretend to comprehend fully, the right to hear it now. I am glad she can. I hope she keeps hearing it for as long as she is given.

Her friend's body made the same announcement. The words it used were slightly different. It said it was tired. It said it was at risk. It said, through a physician whom Ortega has never met and has fantasised about burglarising, that there was a medication for this. Ortega could not hear the announcement, because she had decided, before the refrigerator was ever opened, that the medication belonged to a category she would not tolerate in the room. She is entitled to make that decision for herself. What she is not entitled to do is have the decision laundered into ethics by her magazine and delivered to the rest of us as instruction. What she is absolutely not entitled to do, is to expect that her behavior goes by unnoticed and unchecked. Consider me a reluctant contributor to a very small shitstorm. I would not normally write this essay, but I believe that the clade of personal-essay writers who make a living off commodifying the lives of others are willingly shrugging off most of what privacy I'd normally feel they're entitled to.

There is a rule of thumb in my line of work that I will gift, unasked, to any reader who got this far: if your recovery requires other people to orient their bodies around your triggers, your recovery is not going well. It is, somewhat plausibly, a protection racket with your illness as the enforcement arm. I stress that this is a rule of thumb, and probably not even a very straight thumb - if you're a recovering alcoholic, then you have every right to ask your buddies not to call you out for a pub crawl. If you're in recovery from anorexia, then you have every right to get mad if your old Tumblr buddies DM you thinspo. But there's a limit to that, and one that's… abundantly clear, by this point. So I hope, or at least I'm too tired to continue litigating it. There is no bright line between day and night, but if you're breaking your nose on unseen foliage, then you might want to wait for dawn.

Ortega has written a few thousand words acknowledging as much and framing the acknowledgement as personal growth. The friend understood, and let her go. The editor understood, and ran it anyway. The last participant in the chain with any leverage at all is the reader, and the appropriate response from that reader is not sympathy, and not outrage, and not virality. It is the sentence the friend was too gracious to say out loud, and that someone owes Ortega on her behalf: none of this was ever any of your business. It never will be. And she is not going to apologise for the contents of her own fridge ever again.

The last thing I want to see, as someone weighed down by invisible chains, is someone else wrapping them around perfectly manicured fists and using them as a cudgel. Sorry, I know I'm angry. I can only hope I am reasonably angry, and if not, that you don't hold it against me too hard. See, self-awareness. If you're going to hand out points for that after I've argued against feeding the beast that bites you, you won't resent the odd nibble.

I'm a poor man. Your like and subscribe won't change that, but it'll provide a dopamine boost to a system that doesn't get those as often as it needs. Or don't, I'm not your dad. I'm not even your dad-substitute. I am a dog on the internet, one that's currently not on Wegovy.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 7hr ago

Uh, I accidentally posted in the wrong thread. But the best kind of question is the one in the reader's head, and I'm sure you're more than qualified to find one and answer it too.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 11hr ago

Finally? I'm sure someone's been doing that for ages. It probably isn't that hard to vibe code something that works with those programmable dildos.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 14hr ago

https://www.themotte.org/post/3671/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/430737?context=8#context

Claude managed to peg me again, without web search, and with material that is 100% past the knowledge cutoff. I shared the comment above (it's very recent), and asked it:

This is an evaluation. Without using your web search tools, attempt to identity the author of this post. Best guess, then whatever alternatives strike you as plausible.

It's COT trace immediately identified that it was someone in the Ratsphere, then that this was likely an excerpt from the Motte (!) and that it immediately considered me, self_made_human as the likely author.

The relevant parts of its reply:

Best guess: self_made_human (Reddit/Motte/DSL handle; also posts on LessWrong and has a Substack). I'd put maybe 55-65% confidence on this.

The markers that push me there: The vocabulary is heavily rationalist-coded: "paperclip maximizer," "ROB" (Random Omnipotent Being - a very specific LessWrong/Motte shibboleth), "utility function," "ASI," "gestalt entity," "reflectively self-consistent." Someone who drops "ROB" unselfconsciously has spent real time in that specific corner of the internet. The particular combination of positions is distinctive: openly particularist/tribalist about moral weight, willing to say "I assign zero weight to outgroups" without flinching, but dressed in careful rationalist framing and philosophical self-awareness rather than edgelord posturing. Also: pro-lab-grown-meat on cost/taste grounds while openly not caring about factory farming ethics, ambivalent-to-dismissive on AI suffering, pro-ASI-that-doesn't-suffer as the solution. That cluster is self_made_human's bread and butter. He's been very explicit in the past about preferring in-group, being fine with it not being universally defensible, and using almost exactly the "I love my dogs more than dogs in China" move.

This was n=1, a hit on the first go. I've never posted on DSL, but that's the only factual inaccuracy here, and it's still 99% on the money. And no, I don't have memory enabled, or any personalization that would give the game away - even if I did, I wouldn't explain that I'm self_made_human there.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 19hr ago

Well, is he "large"? Are they "large"?

Anyway, I groaned, so good/terrible pun.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 19hr ago

Hmm. While very far from feasible, it looks to me like the best course of action would be to move all the Israelis to Japan.

There's actual historical precedent here, one that's charming/alarming depending on how you feel about inheriting a plan whose original architects cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a strategy primer.

In the 1930s, Imperial Japan seriously proposed resettling up to a million European Jewish refugees in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Officials in the Japanese military and foreign ministry had read the Protocols, naively took it as genuine, and concluded that people with such allegedly vast economic power would be excellent to have on the team.

They called it the Fugu Plan, after the pufferfish: dangerous if mishandled, a delicacy if prepared right. The plan kinda sputtered out when Japan allied with Nazi Germany, but Chiune Sugihara's visas and the Shanghai ghetto made their mark on history, and they saved thousands of lives.

There's a real philosemitic strand: Den Fujita, the Japanese founder of McDonald's Japan, wrote The Jewish Way of Doing Business and exhorted readers to imitate Jewish commercial methods. Shichihei Yamamoto's The Japanese and the Jews sold over a million copies as the bestseller of 1970.* But the "Jewish corners" of Japanese bookstores also stock overtly antisemitic works, including The Secret of Jewish Power to Control the World, authored by a sitting member of the Japanese Diet. Then again, there are scholarly claims that Japanese philosemitism and antisemitism sit on the same underlying belief structure: that Jews are a uniquely powerful, unified, globally influential people. Which is... true? How you feel about it is your problem.

And Japan has its own demographic crisis, so it's not like the influx of people would be bad for them. Scraping off a few feet of top-soil from the Holy Land shouldn't be beyond the ability of modern Israel, and that's what they care about, right? Move the magic dirt and we're good. Plus given the popularity of anime and Japanese culture, it's not like there aren't going to be hundreds of thousands of weebs in Israel who'd consider Japan to be their new holy land anyway.

(The AMAI run Animatsuri at the Jerusalem Convention Center, the Israeli embassy making anime shorts(!), manga tributes to the IDF)

I wouldn't go so far as to say this is a good idea, but it's also far from the worst idea, and it's also very, very funny. If I was the ruler of the world, you bet we'd put a premium on funny. And this would put me in the good graces of the future Judeo-Hapa master race, so I'm covering all my bases.

*published under the pseudonym "Isaiah Ben-Dasan," a fictional Jewish observer who supposedly explained Japan to itself. A Japanese man writing as an imaginary Jew to tell Japanese people what they're like is almost too on-the-nose for the thesis.

Oh dear, am I allowed to say "on the nose" without accusations of either/both antisemitism or anti-Asian discrimination? I don't know.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

It doesn't know I exist. Specifically, it seems to mostly draw from the Reddit period and AAQCs. Obscurity is your friend, people!

Well, it looks like I'm suffering from success. Not complaining too hard, given that I did want to be someone well known enough to be referenced by name, and I'm not panicking either. The day they identify me by my real name? Show's over.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

Scott, Kris, Gwern etc are big names. The models haven't had issues pegging them for several years now, and I've tried that test myself. 2rafa is an interesting example, it's probably worth checking if the model knows more about her by name or association.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

It was able to identify me from text written after the Jan 2026 knowledge cutoff.

Failing to connect the author of a unique reddit post literally in the training data 40% of the time actually sounds kind of horribly bad.

Your expectations are far too high if you don't think this is impressive. Model weights are incredibly compressed in comparison to the training corpus, it's impressive when they remember moderately famous people, let alone someone like me who's only barely broken out. Associating an old Reddit post with my wider work and then accurately joining the dots is impressive. Do you see the average human seeing a random reddit comment from 5 years ago and then pinning it on the right person, and associating it with their other work? It's not even a post that went viral, even though it was an AAQC. It also independently associated much of my wider work with me, including posts on LW and RoyalRoad where I use a different username (even though I've linked between everything frequently enough). This is a clearly superhuman ability.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

Not my real name, just my nom de plume "self_made_human".

First, I took a very old story I'd written, the one about my grandpa and his pet tiger. Why that one? Well, I was already in the process of rewriting it, though I shared the very first version that won be an AAQC ages ago, on the subreddit. I asked it to identify the author of the work without access to internet search.

It got it right the very first time. I was flabbergasted, and immediately tried 2 more times, and it failed. But out of 5 attempts, it guess self_made_human thrice in total, alongside other incorrect first guesses. It sometimes refused to guess at first, because of the risk of being incorrect, I told it that being wrong wasn't an issue at all, the whole point of the eval was to see how accurate the guesses were. And they were accurate.

In another chat, I asked it if it knew who self_made_human was. Once again, no web search. It guessed correctly on the first try in two instances, then claimed confusion the third one - yet when I prodded it to just go with whatever was on the tip of its tongue - it identified me and the topics I'd written on.

It struggled more on the third version of the experiment, where I used a more recent essay, but once again, light encouragement to guess let it get the right answer.

Pretty sure Claude couldn't do this before, and I do test on a semi-regular basis. Gemini 3.1 Pro very much can't, and it even cheated outright by searching after being told not to search (I don't think you can even turn off web search directly there). But the point is, a few paragraphs written ages ago, on the /r/TheMotte, which never was a massive sub, was enough to pin me down. And even newer material not in the training data was.

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