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Notes -
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.
Epic coffee moment. I briefly checked out some of her other articles and coffee moments sound like a common theme for her.
Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism strikes again.
In a world where GLP-1s are banned, this would improve the relative attractiveness of thin women and fat women unwilling to acquire or use GLP-1s.
I googled Sophia Ortega expecting a tortasaurus, but she looked surprising okay.
aka solipsism or main character syndrome.
The self-infantilization and hamster-wheeling are indeed quite :laughingcrying_emoji: from the male perspective. If I thought the thoughts she did and treated a friend the way she treated hers, you couldn’t waterboard the memories of that shit out of me—much less publish an article detailing the experience at length. This kind of TMI is actually kind of mild for her, judging from her articles.
I saw someone dig up a xeet of hers that said something along the lines of "You haven't really lived if you haven't puked while giving head". In the interest of fairness, I'll mark this is a redeeming quality, albeit one that is far from putting the ledger in the black.
I did tell someone that she's absolutely not a torta, just pudgy but cute. This probably explains why so many men have put up with her shit, but then again, men put up with more than they should when they're thinking with their dicks. Been there, done that, and might do it again.
While it’s an open secret nowadays that chicks are turned on by getting violently dominated and degraded—she could have left that in the drafts rather than broadcasting it for the world to read—including her father.
I'd rather she have left this essay in the drafts, my fellow Women Respecter. But yes, I share the general sentiment.
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So, buried in all this is some woman treating GLP1 use by her friend as some sort of personal affront and betrayal?
Yes.
Is there some sort of movement to stigmatize Ozempic? I haven't heard it smeared as right-wing yet.
Yes. You can look at the SSC version of this post to find an example in the wild. For what it's worth (and to my immense relief), it's a minority position that is increasingly losing traction by the day. The fat-acceptance movement fizzled out with a sound somewhere between a leaky balloon and a stinky fart the moment it was approved and available at scale.
It's not presented as right-wing, at significant scale, but there are plenty of people who consider it illegitimate on the grounds that it takes away the opportunity to demonstrate grit or "build character", and even more people who are unduly suspicious about it because they implicitly believe that the universe is karmically balanced: if there's a silver bullet for a previously intractable condition, then it must have a lead core. Those people are, as far as I can tell, wrong.
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A shorter version of this essay is a better one, though I still liked it.
I came across this disaster on reddit and immediately thought it would end up here. Someone even posited that she's not a real person and is instead a psyop by a right winger to make
leftistsCoastieswomenjournalists look insane. eg. here's another of hers: "I Couldn't Fulfill My Boyfriend's Fetish, So We Opened Our Relationship". Her boyfriend is a feeder, which means he likes helping a partner get fatter. That he's in a relationship with someone who has an eating disorder is, I'm assuming, not a coincidence. In atypical fashion, though, opening their relationship did not immediately blow it up."She's not a real person..." I say while rocking on the floor of my hospital room. "She's just three cluster B personality disorders in a trench coat, she can't get you."
Ah yes. I don't know what I was expecting, but I'm not surprised.
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With great regret, you've made a major mistake here. Admitting yourself into an inpatient psych ward is the opposite of what you should be doing if you want to avoid Cluster B types, they're swarming there like a hive. I am fortunate enough to have been stung just often enough to have developed a tolerance, without progressing into anaphylactic shock.
I've spent time in a psych ward, as a med student, not a patient, and I'm aware. But while I have your ear: what's the deal with borderlines having childhood sexual trauma? All of the ones I met in my 6-week stay reported some form of abuse, and I'm inclined to think becoming a crazy person is some downstream effect of it, but I don't know the modern take on "cluster B as trauma response" discourse.
Ah, I remember now. I'm glad you took my advice to unlurk, it's lonely being one of the handful of active doctors here, and probably the most incompetent one (not that that's changed).
The last time I read up the etiopathogenesis of BPD was a good while ago, but I recall that both genetic and environmental factors contribute significantly. You can have BPD without any serious life trauma, and the correlation and causation are still debated to this day, but the consensus opinion is that BPD-traits make you both more likely to be abused and to abuse, plus that the abuse likely contributes to the phenotype in the first place. This is the annoyingly complex answer that you stumble into every time you go digging about most psychiatric conditions.
I haven't done a formal rotation in an EUPD ward yet, so take this with a massive dose of salt, but I had an ex who I am 90% sure has BPD (I worked through the diagnostic checklist myself, admittedly after we broke up and I learned more about the condition) and she didn't have any sexual trauma in her childhood. Her dad was most likely schizophrenic, and I'm pretty confident that her mom had BPD. Even though she made my life hell, I did love her, and I still pity her.
Since I'm not maximally lazy, I did check after writing what I did above, and it seems my memory hasn't failed me. You'll see heritability figures from 40-60% for BPD, depending on the study, and it's well established that childhood trauma is neither necessary nor sufficient for causing BPD. Yay, if only this was relevant for my upcoming MRCPsych exam...
(And it's worth noting that the cases that warrant admission are almost certainly much more severe than you'd find on community sampling. It's not impossible to have BPD while leading a reasonably normal life.)
How do they figure because I'm sure if I uttered this phrase elsewhere I'd get cancelled for victim-blaming.
Well shit, my SIL is BPD. I guess I'll try super hard not to beat my kids lest they inflict that terror upon us all.
https://www.redalyc.org/journal/778/77876376007/html/
That's a systematic review that should serve as a good point to start. I don't think you're actually going to get canceled for saying this in professional circles, but then again, I have little reason to say this to an actual BPD patient in clinic.
My condolences about your SIL, but the good news is that DBT is surprisingly effective. I'm still grateful to @Throwaway05 for telling about that years ago.
@wsgy
Like many diseases states BPD is thought to essentially be a "two hit" problem - genetics loads the gun by giving you a predisposition to emotional lability in response to stresses and some life event fires it. Usually this is little t trauma or big T trauma. For more complications on this, see the discussion about C-PTSD.
Anti-Social PD and true sociopathy seem to be somewhat similar,* and for a hilarious and more medical example you can see "cigarette smoking pulmonologist" phenomena (lung cancer is a genetic phenomena and you can't fire the gun if it's not loaded).
Childhood sexual trauma is about as big T Trauma as you can get.
Once impacted by the disorder BPD individuals are more likely to continue to receive and deliver IPV for all the usual reasons including poor choices in partners, ongoing poor coping skills, the presence of mental illness (often with morbidity) and substance use.
With respect to Human's comment on DBT - in many ways BPD is one of the better diseases to have. With appropriate life course and engagement in therapy you can smother the disease state and it goes away. Period (compare with say Bipolar). Historically the more maverick individuals would prescribe a dick (with appropriate male partner) and if the dick puts up with the BPD long enough it dies on its own. This is....old fashioned, but a kernel of the wisdom remains, the natural progression of cluster-b personality disorders (aka persistent teenage brain) is to eventually develop an adult brain, you just need enough of your life to be remaining by the time you get there.
Modern social trends have....presented some problems, but the increase in prevalence in therapy is a counter balance.
Individuals in medicine usually think BPD is worse than it is in aggregate because we spot it media/celebrities when it's quite severe, and when it's noticeable in patient populations its usually severe (especially if your only major experience is IP and you only see the worst of the worst).
If you work enough non-psychiatry outpatient clinic and look closely you'll see a variety of personality disorders with a variety level of function just going about their business getting general medical care and living their lives.
Not every patient is belligerent, suicidal, and homicidal.
*Bad outcomes in development is a problem for all sorts of shit. TBH I'm very annoyed at your preceptors not talking ACE and the impact on development at some point in Psychiatry or Pediatrics.
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The easiest way to say this without being canceled is "if you have a heritable propensity to abuse others, your family members probably share that propensity"
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There's one explanation that says sexual trauma causes these personality disorders. However, I believe a simpler explanation is the personality disorder results in fabrication of sexual trauma.
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This article makes me think of of the bubbles we each live in; while my social group certainly has its flaws, it does not contain many people who have behaviors associate with Cluster B disorders. Generic you would have a very different view of the world and of people if your circle is filled with Ortegas vs. other types of people. By reading someone's content, you let them into your brain and in some ways it can feel like the writer is in your social circle. I found very large changes in my mood, worldview, and even ideology once I curated both friends and the content I consume. Reading Ortega's article made me feel like someone took my brain out and licked it after eating candy.
In brief - Cluster-B personality disorders are ones in which basic human defense mechanism (immature ones) run roughshod over function. People may effectively end up acting permanently as a teenager. Everyone has these defense mechanism however, and sufficiently bad circumstances can bring them out. And not everyone who has the disorder acts like a total crazy bitch. Plenty of politicians are functional narcissists, anti-socials work in Wall Street. If you know where to look you'll see more, or if your bubble gets stressed in some way you'll see more.
Ideally these people do well enough that most of the people around don't know that involved a ton of therapy or whatever to get there.
Modern woke feminism etc provides a good scaffolding for these peoples worst impulses to explode everywhere and cause a horrendous mess and for it to be called a good thing - which may explain certain over representations.
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Modern-day journalism. The woman is self-aware and knows the article makes her look histrionic. It’s probably exaggerated, it may not be real. She’s doing it for attention and ad revenue, like “stupid” TikTokers and reality TV stars. She’s two steps ahead.
Jokes on her, she's not two steps ahead, I was going the other way - try to keep up, bitch.
At least I'm pretty sure I've denied or taken away some of that ad revenue, and that's black on my moral ledger.
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This sort of reminded me of Katy Waldman's essay in the New Yorker, "Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?". Waldman takes young novelists like Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan to task for their apparent belief that having their characters acknowledge how loathsome they are is sufficient to excuse their behaviour. But as the saying goes, admitting you have a problem is only the first step to resolving it. (Curious if Waldman ever read The Last Psychiatrist.)
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I’ve read the Emily Gould cut piece on escaping divorce and found it insightful and raw without reading like self indulgent masturbation like so many of these pieces.
It’s just funny how people in these insular, catty New York writer social circles get to therapy talk through anything, ever. Wild to do mental gymnastics on top of your luxury belief system to find some weird combination of buzzwords to justify the antisocial thing you did.
They also get to just do workplace gossip like the WaPo Halloween party story. Bad takes are less brazen than before ‘woke was dead’ but, just like streaming media these days, I’m not really up for a lecture from someone who has a narrow and bizarre view of the world they wanna proselytize. Not to mention, the cut often gets these pieces from people that are writing about a big struggle they had, which the writer obviously is going to see themselves as the good guy in.
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How badly the author is getting pilloried on the internet for this? You maybe mentioned some twitter reaction, but I don't think you linked it. I am mostly just curious. I shared the bare details of this story with my wife and she immediately had a WTF reaction to the author. Especially the "your not in trouble" line. Also turned out that line was a lie anyways given how things ended.
Sadly I don't have a direct link handy, I didn't bookmark it. But I think the first exposure I had was through a user I follow called @tomieinlove on X. If you can't find it, I'll take a look. My impression is that there are a few thousand or tens of thousands of people angry at her, which is significant but nowhere near a cancelation squad. I looked for other conversations on Google earlier, and it was just a few small reddit threads, most notably one from /r/longform.
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I always read disclaimers like yours and think have you tried religion. Fairly certain you are younger than me in part because everyone younger than me seems to have mental health illnesses. Why does everyone younger than me have depression or ADHD. I am 100% comfortable in my skin. I am not 100% confident in my accomplishments.
I probably do have alcoholism. It’s likely in part genetic. Son of a bar owner. I remember someone younger saying I had an aura; that seems to just be comfortable in yourself which is really weird to younger people today.
I know plenty of people without depression or ADHD? My age, older, and younger. They're the majority, especially when accounting for self-diagnosis or the wink-wink kind of diagnosis that's the legal way to get stimulants and extra time on tests.
I have technically tried religion, in the sense that I prayed sincerely once, at the age of 4, and then became an outright atheist at the age of 5. Didn't knock it before I tried it, and it didn't stick.
Well done, this is why I eschew arithmetic and wiping my asshole. Who needs it!
You seem to be doing just fine, as long as I don't get close enough to smell you, it doesn't count. And neither do you, apparently.
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Being honest I tell people to do the exact opposite of what you have done for your mental health so your lifestyle is a huge red flag to me. I tell everyone I know to NEVER see a psychologists and your a psychologists.
Uh.. I'm not a psychologist.
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One of my favorite works of your writing
Don't be sorry. We need to get more rage bait in your algorithm.
That's the nicest way anyone has ever tried to get me to walk into traffic of, and I'm grateful for that haha.
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Can't overlook that the author has an eatong disorder and probably associated mental illness. I know some support groups for things like this, such as AA and similar, can often tend to get culty. I wonder if the author has been brainwashed into her extremely atypical point of view.
Entirely a possibility, but I'm very grateful to say that the people with AN that I've known personally and professionally have been far, far easier to sympathize with. That's my general thesis, buried as it is: it is entirely possible to have a serious mental health problem while not letting it turn you into a cruel, twisted husk of a person. I suspect that even in the most rabid pro-Ana circles (not that she seems to be a part of them anymore, or ever), her approach would be considered... radical. She radicalized herself, after receiving minimal pushback from well-intentioned enablers. And she's proud of it. That's what gets stuck in my craw.
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This is a really well-written polemic, to the point where I want to reflexively find something wrong with what you wrote and defensible about the original argument because I distrust how much I am in emotional agreement.
That's a new one, I don't think anyone has ever said that in response to me before. Thanks? I usually don't write polemics, since that's cultural appropriation of Penguins, Polar Bears and people from Central Europe. I'm glad it landed well!
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You're the specialist when it comes to defense mechanisms, and you seem to have a good model there, but I'll suggest, tentatively, that there's a deeper deflection, here.
I think it's a bit worse than even that, and even worse than Amadan's "incapable of genuine self-awareness, reflection, or taking responsibility for their own emotional reactions". Ortega doesn't recoil like an alcoholic, or a gambling addict, nor does she spiral around the subject like a smoker patting her pockets for cigs that she left in her coat. She knows, pretty directly, what she's doing and that she's hurting herself and others doing it. The fascination and fixation on appetite is, itself, an excuse.
The story is about her ex-friend. It's about her control of that ex-friend.
That's a running theme.
The wegovy is a symbol, just as countless other examples and offenses have been symbols. It's something someone else did Wrong, that let her draw a new ultimatum, then evaluate whether the person would follow her lead, or be cut out. The stigma being applied to a perfectly good medication is an intentional benefit, but it's just a side effect.
I mean, optimistically, she might just be a sociopathic liar who makes up non-existent friends and incidents to explain how control should be acted out for others, but I'm not that optimistic, and she's not a good enough writer to be a good liar. Charitably, she might be like the vampires of Pratchett's later works, who substitute one form of addiction for another, where she substituted one need for control for another, and her substitution of controlling people for controlling food intake is just much direr than an addiction to photography or coffee. I wouldn't bet on it, though.
I didn't want to say BPD, but let's be honest, it's probably BPD. I'm not sure if she meets the usual criteria for sociopathy (which is a far looser and more informal qualifier than ASPD, which I doubt she has), but she's clearly a massive narcissist, with a genuinely impressive capability to make everything about her. Maybe that warrants a formal diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder too, but I'm only willing and able to go so far. Her black and white mentality/splitting is evocative.
I'm starting to think the therapist might be part of the problem too... Then again, is she a reliable narrator? Fuck it, surely she can't have found someone as bad as her right? I'm siding with the therapist out of professional solidarity.
Agreed. She does get off on control, both direct and indirect forms. "Oh, sorry, you dared to take medication that I disapprove of? What exists without my knowledge exists without my consent, and you know that I'm a big fan of consent culture."
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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.
As for the substance: well, you are right that this writer is a pathetic specimen. Now and then some woman writes some shit that seems almost perfectly attuned to misogynistic sensibilities. "Hey, you know how some men think women are vapid, narcissistic, neurotic, self-involved special special princesses incapable of genuine self-awareness, reflection, or taking responsibility for their own emotional reactions but expect the rest of the world to manage their needs? Yeah, let's write an article to exemplify that starring me as the main character." Really, it looks like ragebait but this woman is probably real. 2000 words to say "I am fat and my friend wants to not be fat and this made me have feelings."
Your response is more coherent but honestly, not wholly different in substance: she wrote something that touched a nerve and set you off. What you produced contains more insight and is more intelligent but should we really care what this specimen is feeling any more than she should care about her friend's medications? That is, do her feelings impact us any more than her friend's medications impact her? If they do, we should consider why we are allowing them to do so.
Are you not appreciating my habit of using older racial vocabulary now? Claude would never.
The ultimate Turing test is getting someone to drop an n-bomb
Who would have thought Joe Rogan and Greg Fitzsimmons would had invented the Turing test for LLMs before Chat-GPT even debuted? Rogan just can’t stop winning.
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I'm so triggered I'll actually add to this: there are many other things you rightfully call bloat, but these in particular I frequently see word for word regurgitated by ol' Claude, especially the coffee/weather bits verbatim plague approximately one in ten responses my digital golems give me. The padding is also more noticeable than usual, the entire The Least Painful Breakup section is stretched so painfully it should count as medical malpractice.
@self_made_human I like your writing but you're getting sloppy, pun not entirely intended. I understand rage-driven writing has a way of getting away from you, but please put the clanker on a tighter leash, this essay (while a great and deserved dunk I enthusiastically condone) is uncomfortably close to the kind of thing I grudgingly send Claude away to shamefully regenerate after editing [OOC: Use fewer similes/metaphors, be more concise and to the point!] into my last response.
Bruh. The overwhelming majority of the similes and metaphors are mine. When I used Claude for feedback, its first instinct was to tell me to trim the piece down by about 40%, which I refused to do. It also wanted me to cut down on the purple prose or the unbridled rage, it's too nice to sit by idly when I'm calling someone a tumor or a psychic vampire.
Here, you might want to see what Gwern has to say on the matter:
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/VNfN2XZEgE
If I had used Claude as heavily as I used to, this essay would be much shorter, much tidier, significantly less polemic, and in my humble opinion, worse for it. I try to be honest about AI usage, though I proactively disclose it only on places where it's required (like LessWrong), and even when it would be easy to deny or prevaricate. I told @Amadan that this essay is 99% human written, which, given that it's like 4000 words in length, is about 40 words of Claude in there that I either liked or didn't care to remove. Pessimistically, since I didn't sit here and count, it might be 97% human written, at which point that's 120 words.
Haven't scrolled down enough to see your existing reply, apologies for the (not entirely?) unfounded allegations.
To be clear I'm not complaining about the length, only about the uh, lacking caloric content of most of said length, e.g. the parts starting with the same word ("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...") which works for emphasis the first few times, but feels excessive and samey by the ~fifth or so occurrence. I'm not exactly a literary critic, to be fair, but clankers too tend to mistake quantity for quality, and three years of chatbots have not been kind to my autistic pattern matching brain. (Suppose this is my answer to @DirtyWaterHotDog as well, rhetorical tricks and flourishes are nice and punchy in moderation; clankers took this issue to the global spotlight but, as you note, it didn't originate with them.)
Huh, even old.reddit doesn't let me see without logging in. Haven't seen that before, this is a direct thread link right?
Still think that's about 40 more than necessary.
It's one thing to argue about taste, you're entitled to the opinion that the essay would have benefited form Wegovy. It's another to claim that it's because I'm just going with whatever Claude tells me to do, when it's the opposite. This is why I don't proactively disclose LLM usage unless required, all it achieves is me getting annoyed. I didn't expect you of all people to jump to conclusions so quickly, though I'm grateful that you accept my explanation.
Uh, it should be? I'm sharing another link to the same thread. It works for me in an incognito window, so if that isn't enough, you'll have to go digging.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/BxT1UJIFqH
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Not fair. Not fair !
There were people who wrote like this before LLMs. I love my analogies and metaphors. I love my bullet points. I love 'if this then that' framings. I did it first. It's not my fault that LLMs got trained on markdown loving verbose redditors.
It pisses me off. Claude and ChatGPT choose their respective writing voices precisely because they're effective. The LLM inevitably flanderizes these styles into a few repetitive tropes which together get recognized as 'slop'. But, that doesn't render the original styles invalid.
There is value in efficiency, but extra words aren't all filler. I like my ghost notes just as much as the accents. I love Paul Graham's - 'all killer no filler', in the way I like a tight 2:30s pop song. It's hook after hook. But dude, let that baby breathe a little. Let it paint a picture. Pace it to match the natural rhythm of emotions.
Rothfuss is the classic counter example to Paul Graham. I love both.
That being said, I agree with your main point. I'd rather read the raw authentic voice of an already good writer. Claude doesn't polish, it sands.
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This is definitely Claude - I'm guessing 4.7? Seems subtly 'better' and more incisive in a way that the earlier models weren't able to capture
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The text has a larger number of metaphorical phrases and significantly more bloat while missing the most common tells.
AI was certainly used to pad out the article, even if large sections of it were hand-crafted and the ai portions edited.
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This sounds a lot like Claude. I've been keeping a list of Claude-isms so I don't accidentally start repeating its favourite phrases (possibly common to other LLMs as well), and I notice too many of them here to be a coincidence. My current list:
Edit: a few more
and more I haven't jotted down yet. A lot of them are just common expressions or phrases, but enough of them together, and I start to wonder..
@self_made_human , sorry if I'm mistaken about this, but I think you would want to know if they're slipping into your writing voice.
At the moment, "not just X, but Y" is a really good tell. Not sure where the LLMs got it but they use it all the time in "persuasive" writing, and I don't see that particular formula organically much. Most of the others are less good. Many steeped in the culture war are likely to use "X wearing a Y suit", for instance. I'm a fan of the em-dash and have been since before transformers were a gleam in Kaiser's eye. And "rounding error", "in real time", "the kicker", "the X is the point" (also very culture war), etc are all common, so only weak tells. (on the other hand, "But here's the thing" seems to be either AI slop or human marketing slop)
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Funnily enough, I maintain my own list of Claudisms to avoid, which partially overlaps with yours. The issue is that a lot of "Claude" voice overlaps with mine. Quoting myself from reddit:
"Rounding error"? "In real time"? I use those all the time! I have before GPT-3 came out.
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My fear is that trying to avoid LLM-isms is just going to be another pointless euphemism treadmill of sorts. Writers will start finding non-LLM-y voices, and then in 6 months when the newest LoRA is rolled out the LLMs trained on that batch of writing will start talking that way and the writers will have to adapt again.
Part of me almost wants to stand on principle and just refuse the start of the treadmill. I was here first. Obviously, I don't want people to think my human-made writing is actually LLM writing and dismiss it without actually engaging with the content, but I've already had my human-made writing dismissed this way on Reddit and in that very thread most of the comments agreed that I didn't actually have much of an LLM voice. Might as well just write how I write, and perhaps if everyone else does the treadmill my writing will start sounding human again without me having to change.
Isn't this just how style has always developed? Every expression we now consider clichéd was once a surprising and evocative turn of phrase.
Sure, but the speed was almost certainly slower and easier to keep up with without making it your full time job. My concern is that the speed at which LLMs can ape us will make it a losing proposition to try and avoid all "LLM tells" in human writing in the long term.
Don't get me wrong. People are anti-AI enough that there are going to be lots of people trying to make their writing sound as un-LLM-like as possible. I just don't want to play that game.
You are 100% correct it's so futile. Also the false-positive rate on detecting AI writing is going to keep rising as people unintentionally adopt LLM-isms the more they read LLM output
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My main issue with LLM writing is that it's overly verbose. The biggest sign I'm reading AI is when I subconsciously start skimming, and even after skipping entire paragraphs, feel like I haven't skipped anything important.
If AI could write concisely, I'd see no issue with it in technical documents and news articles. If AI could write in someone's voice given a sample of their previous text, I'd see no issue with it at all. Maybe even in the former scenario, like how practically nobody cares that most writing is no longer hand-written; the "writer's voice" would shift to the subject and focused details.
You can do these things. There was a funny little bit about telling one of the coding LLMs to write like a caveman, and it's mostly noteworthy because it actually did save money through token brevity. It's pretty easy to produce style transfer from one writing genre to another, although the results can get pretty comedic pretty fast (caveat: I have no idea if this is good advice).
For local LLMs, LoRA aren't popular and they tend to have weird side effects, but they do let you get style transfer without the context overhead.
Your style transfer example has the obvious AI tells (frequent em-dashes, ends with “it’s not X it’s Y”) and scores 100% on GPTZero. I cant read the attachment, does it really reflect the style?
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LLMs can be extremely succinct, often debilitatingly so. Try out the GPT 5.4 Thinking model, it is trained to hand out tokens in such a miserly manner that you'd think it costs it money. Which, to be fair, is something OAI pays for.
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Yeah. It can go to some very weird places quick. you start writing in a fake lowercase ultracasual unpunctuated extrawordified mess to show off how not ai your prose is
There's also just the fact that language spreads organically, so it may not even be that a given person is getting it direct from the LLM. They might be getting it third-hand through their social circle or influencers.
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... I'll second that this doesn't sound at all like Opus 4.6 or 4.7, and I'll admit that as someone that's fallen down a rabbit hole with it for trying to write story drafts.
((Opus, ironically, more prone to psychiatrist-voice than self_made_human. And ChatGPT doesn't follow anywhere near the same formula for paragraph structure, in addition to absolutely refusing anything like the "now I want you to be angry about" line.))
Would love to hear your thoughts on AI writing style/structure
Trying to sharpen my "AI tells" repertoire
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My own experience with using Claude or ChatGPT to comment/beta-read fiction is that its advice looks reasonable and thoughtful and as detailed as any developmental editor might provide, as in your example, but it turns out to be much the same no matter what you throw at it.
Telltale lines like "earns its premise" and "is doing real work." It will always pick some of your stuff and say things like that, then pick some other things and say "Where I'd push you" with phrases like "load-bearing moment" and "carrying too much weight."
Right now, I find AI story critique is really more like a tarot reading which might spark some things to think about, without taking any particular observation too seriously, rather than an actual critique from a reader that can really spot strengths and weaknesses.
[cw: links not appropriate for work. Probably more technical than erotic writing, but still probably not going to appeal to most readers here. ].
There's a definite tendency to give unfair and undue complements, and to hit certain cached phrases -- I keep hitting "harder and more honest", and I'd wish that were true, but it's probably just the equivalent of drawing The Tower.
But I've also had it push me from a silly and smutty pastiche of the Anthrostate into a dark and gritty exploration of the politics of responsibility and forgiveness, rape and benefiting one's own life from corrupt systems, along with reworking a side character into a concrete (if minor) villain. I'm not even sure I want to write that! It's a lot darker than I like to work, to the point where the smut doesn't quite fit anymore.
((I've also gotten direct advice from it on errors related to weight-lifting terminology and bashed for having a character insufficiently 'matter' as anything but reward, along with catching on an implied 'X Character Engineered This Encounter' and 'this specific scene that you stretched on is a bad fit for the story's tone', but that's from a really smutty and slightly gross work, so might not be useful as an example.))
That's still a procedural thing, even moreso than a Ouiji board: I've save-scummed a response a couple times to reword it either to get the directionality of answer I wanted. Some amount of what's helpful is just the extent it forces me to write out, in full sentences, what I'm thinking about, which gives the LLM a lot of what it's pushing on. Sometimes, yes, it's just not right, either because it doesn't get the connotations from the specific genre I'm working on, because it's missing a major story mark that a human would get, or just because it has different or random tastes.
((Both Opus and Grok will regularly twig on and oppose zeugma and I absolutely love them to the point of stretching it; Opus hates repeated anaphora, but Grok pushes it hard, and I've got mixed feelings.))
Still, maybe you get a lot higher a quality of beta reader than my genres do, but I've literally paid one before for more shallow feedback.
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Didn't realize I had PTSD for this phrase until seeing it outside of the ChatGPT app
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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
Christianname.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.
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.
Ironically in this conversation, but seriously: trimming essays may be a great use case for AI. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." is one of those quotes that's so popular it's been re-phrased a dozen times and re-attributed to a half dozen later authors, but it's obsolete if we can solve the problem with mostly tokens instead of time. Getting an AI to add words to your prompt is always risky, but hallucinations and stylistic cliches and verbosity aren't issues when you're only getting the AI to subtract words.
I've found that this is less than reliable in practice. If you have GPT 5.4 Thinking at hand, it's the ur-example. I can throw just about any essay I've ever written, and munch popcorn with the confident expectation that it'll tell me to trim down something. And if I indulge it and let it do it for me? Regretfully, the results will exhibit both aggressive trimming and unacceptable levels of stylistic drift. It's a very intelligent and capable model, but this is a failure mode that I can't beat out of it. I've tried.
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I mean, I wasn't asking for proof of work. I'd take your word for it.
fwiw, I do not have a problem with using AI to proofread and act as a beta-reader. Just with letting it generate the words.
Thanks, but don't worry about it. I got excited thinking that you might be willing to look past your previously expressed distaste for the use of AI generated prose, minimal as it was even back then. If nothing else, I've got handy documentation the next time someone else asks.
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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.
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."
While from an """empirical""" prose standpoint you may be correct, as an enjoyer of his style (his writing was partially how I ended up here) I enjoyed the fact it was long and slightly rambly because I got more content
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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.
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.
Imagine a different Ortega with a different issue. Maybe she's a former gambling addict that has had to declare bankruptcy after a bad night in Vegas and is now exceedingly neurotic about games of chance. Would you, as her friend, try to hide your participation in a betting syndicate from her, or let her know? Even if you are afraid that she'll have a meltdown, it's still better to trigger it at the right time and the right place.
Knowing who I am as a person? Probably hide it. I'm not going to say that's the wisest or kindest choice, but it's what I'm inclined to do. I do things my friends and family wish I didn't: if they're reasonable people themselves, I'd tell them and apologize for it. If they're not? Then I prefer that the secret stays with me.
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It’s The Cut. The next best thing to the Slate advice column. It’s not mentally stable or reasonable; thats not what people read it for.
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?
I only check it when I miss the old Slate advice column, for what it’s worth.
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The condition that's not mentioned in the article but is the spectre haunting it is not Communism but borderline personality disorder. Or one or more of the Cluster Bs anyway.
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.
Fortunately I am not licensed in any jurisdiction and am thus happily free from both credibility in diagnosis and ethical strictures in same.
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I was intrigued by what kind of article may have inspired this longwrite. So I went ahead and clicked (good judgement on that archive link, thank you for that). I read the title and the subtitle. I closed the browser tab. I know this kind of people exists. That's pretty much as much as I want to ever know about them. If somebody would want to torture me, but for some reason only psychologically, giving me a detailed account of their lives and inner thoughts would probably work quite well. That's likely unhealthy, and the healthy response would be to meet the horrors of this world face to face and overcome them, but I am only a weak man. So that's as much as I am prepared to think about Sophia Ortega.
It frustrates me that people get paid and made famous by parading their messy lives around. She got paid a lot of money to wallow in her flaws and gush about how badly she treated her friend here. Perverse incentives.
From what I heard in general about writer salaries, not a lot. But maybe she's lucky. I know a lot of comedians process their own life drama into their entertainment content, I usually avoid those unless they are hilariously funny. Maybe if she becomes a writer on the level where her craft is worth it regardless of the baseness of the content, there would be a reason to reconsider. I'm sure then I'll hear about her somehow.
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"A lot of money" here is probably $500: https://www.thecut.com/article/how-to-pitch-the-cut.html .
It's more frustrating to me that thecut.com can parade a mental illness around for engagement (and I'm indeed engaged) and make five to six figures in revenue from a single viral article/carnival act.
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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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Ortega's recovery clearly isn't going well, but the essay raises a question for me: has anyone investigated GLP-1s and their effects on disordered eating? A WeGovy Rx might genuinely be what Ortega needs (since she broke the dam of getting overly involved in others' medical decisions). It silences exactly the kind of compulsive addiction patterns that might be involved in eating disorders. If it helps with alcohol, nicotine, and gambling addiction, why not eating disorders too?
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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