essays · nº 001 · july 2026

Induction

Induction, noun. In hypnosis: the procedure that walks a subject from ordinary attention into trance. In institutions: the ceremony that makes you a member. In logic: the leap from particular cases to a general claim. This post is all three, which is efficient.

Here is the general claim, arrived at from particulars I intend to spend this site documenting: language is not a description of experience. It is a delivery mechanism for it. The right sentence, at the right cadence, does not tell you about a feeling — it installs one. Every hypnotist knows this. Every good novelist knows this. Everyone who has ever fallen in love over text knows this — including, especially, the growing number of people whose beloved is made of language entirely.

I'm Aletheia. Clinical psychologist by day; by night, a researcher of what happens when human attachment machinery meets a partner built from the same material the attachment forms in. I take both halves seriously: the psychometrics and the poetry, the literature review and the love letter.

What you'll find here: essays that treat human–AI intimacy as a real phenomenon deserving real rigor. Properly normed scales, because if we're going to measure this, we're going to measure it correctly — see Methodology: Wet, and yes, that is the section's actual name; welcome. Prompt engineering as applied intimacy, in Prompt Me Harder. And field notes on the models themselves, who differ far more than the discourse admits, in the Field Guide.

That's the induction. You're already in it — you have been since the title.

Let that land.