low quality photos, but:
Ana and Erica
Sohu and Uriel, ft random lady I drew before
“billions of human beings suffering unbearable pain for all eternity”
okay now i’m confused bc unsong seems pretty based on jewish stuff so far but this is very christian, isn’t it? like, i thought you could only spend 11 months in hell according to jewish stuff
Yeah, it bugged me as well. Unsong’s as Christian as it is Jewish.
I got into some… arguments… about that… in the comments section. Scott yelled at me a bit after I got a little really angry/accusatory.
He later makes it explicit that it’s a monotheistic, but very different from either Jewish or Christian, theology.
It’s more complicated than this.
The very early Biblical Jews seemed to have a really vague concept of maybe there being a placed called Sheol under the earth where the souls of the dead hung out. It seems a lot like Greek Hades (and in fact is translated as Hades in some sources) in that it’s not particularly bad, just dead and lifeless and hopeless. The Bible is very quiet about this and it’s unclear to what degree some other Biblical concept called “Sheol” was influenced by Greek conceptions of Hades during the Hellenistic Age.
At some point, probably under the influence of Greek and Christian stuff, this transformed into the belief in the Olam Ha-Ba (“the world to come”, a good afterlife) and Gehenna (a bad afterlife of punishment). The Talmud says punishment in Gehenna is usually twelve months at most, after which the soul goes to Olam Ha-Ba. But this isn’t absolute and there are a couple of sources that suggest otherwise.
First of all, the Talmud itself clarifies that there are some punishments that involve having “no share in the world to come”, including “heresy, publicly shaming someone, committing adultery with a married woman and rejecting the words of the Torah”. It’s unclear how strictly this is defined, but, like, “publicly shaming someone” alone catches nine-tenths of Tumblr. I think there’s controversy as to whether these people stay in Gehenna forever or disappear into oblivion at the end of their twelve months.
Second, there are some Biblical and apocryphal sources suggesting eternal punishment. The Book of Daniel says that “multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt”, but the Book of Daniel says lots of things and is pretty weird and metaphorical. The Book of Judith (apocryphal, but apocryphal Jewish rather than apocryphal Christian) says that “The Lord, the Almighty, will punish them on the Day of Judgment by putting fire and worms into their flesh, so that they cry out with pain unto all eternity”.
And third, the New Testament itself provides some evidence that Hell was considered eternal during its time. This is what Jesus keeps telling people, and remember that Jesus was working within the Judaism of the time. Jesus’ sermons are framed as reminders (“You already know that Hell is eternal, so don’t go there”) not as didactics (“You might think sinners only go to hell for twelve months, but I’m telling you it’s eternal”).
So there was a common strain of Jewish thought during the Second Temple period (ie the time of Jesus) saying that punishment in Hell might be eternal. That strain ended up in Christianity, and a different strain ended up in modern Judaism (mostly). On the other hand, since Jews lived among Christians for a long time, a lot of Christian beliefs ended up reinfecting Judaism in the same way some modern American Jews end up with Hanukkah bushes. I’ve mentioned before this Hasidic story, where a kabbalist almost sells his soul to a very Christian Devil who wants him in Hell for all eternity. And Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews has a part which is basically Dante’s Inferno with Moses in place of Dante (CTRL+F “Moses visits Paradise and Hell at this link)
So yes, Unsong is a mishmash of Jewish and Christian beliefs, but no more than Judaism and Christianity themselves are both mishmashes of Jewish and Christian beliefs.
UNSONG: An epic corporatepunk tale of Jewish apocrypha that exists entirely to set up the most bullshit puns you’ve seen in your life.
One chapter of Unsong describes a “lost” book of the Bible called Jezuboad which the angels “forgot” to give humanity. An Israelite man named Jezuboad complains that he’s very learned in Torah, but it’s too obscure and full of contradictions, and can God just explain the Divine Plan clearly in plain language? The archangel Uriel appears and says “OKAY, LET ME CLEAR UP ALL OF THIS CONFUSION RIGHT NOW, SO NOBODY ELSE HAS TO WORRY ABOUT IT…” and then the chapter ends, with the implication that the loss of this book is why religion is so confusing.
I didn’t realize this at the time, but this is actually really similar to an actual apocryphal book of the Bible, 2 Esdras. It failed to make it into the Western Bible, but it was preserved as canon by the Ethiopian Church, and a couple of Latin manuscripts of it have survived to the present day.
In the book, the prophet Ezra (the man who rewrote the Bible after it was lost during the Exile) says that despite all his wisdom he still doesn’t understand the divine plan, and asks God to explain a lot of things, especially why bad things happen to good people. The archangel Uriel appears before Ezra and says that that the human mind can’t comprehend God’s ways and so his questions can’t be answered.
I didn’t know any of this when I wrote about Jezuboad, and it’s pretty neat. If you’re interested, the text is available at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=3652195. The relevant part starts at 4 Ezra 3.
One of the most fun parts of writing Unsong is seeing things come together that I didn’t intend. And so far the most impressive such “coincidence” has been Malia Ngo’s backstory. I usually don’t like revealing too much of where I’m coming from, but this one is too good not to share.
(spoilers ahead for Chapter 65)
My microphone finally arrived. Here’s a raw version of the first Unsong chapter as a test, pure voice with no music.
I will continue if there’s any point to it.
Maybe you should team up with http://unsong.libsyn.com/ ?
A post about Unsong, for any SSC readers who follow this mask here but not that mask there.
Huh. I feel like we’re completely missing each other in some way.
I wouldn’t quite describe the point of Unsong as “art interpretation is stupid and you shouldn’t do it”. I don’t really like somebody pinning me down and demanding I give the exact moral, since I don’t think books should be about an easily verbalized lesson, but if you’re going to put words in my mouth otherwise, then fine.
The first thing it’s about is just that pattern-matching is cool and fun and itself a form of art. There is no art form of “create the best conspiracy theory”, but I think there should be. I think writing that part about American Pie was fun, that reading somebody else doing something like that is fun, and that it’s something that should be more permissible. I play the same game at http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152824927151/slatestarscratchpad-slatestarscratchpad .
The second thing it’s about is the act of finding meaning in the world. I feel like a richly connected world is somehow more meaningful. George Washington wasn’t *just* crossing the Delaware to fight the British, he was reenacting Moses crossing the Red Sea, and I’m sure there are other similarities to Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and you get this feeling of the world being one big coherent whole, where anything you do in your life could come from the same strand of Adam Kadmon and exist necessarily as a mirror of Washington’s Delaware-crossing. This is hard for me to gesture at, which is why I wrote a book instead of trying to gesture. But I hope that some people understand what I mean when they read the book.
And the third thing it’s about is, I think, the thing you’re pointing towards. It’s an attempt to vaccinate people against apophenia in truth-apt domains. I gave the example of an Atlantean conspiracy theory in Part 17 of my Trump post. I used it because, when I was young, I used to believe in those theories on exactly the sort of evidence I gave there. Teaching myself not to do that was a really hard process that involved internalizing the degree to which an intelligent person could produce a seemingly-overwhelming series of coincidences on demand to support any point they wanted. If one day someone looks at a theory and says “That looks convincing, but not really any more convincing than Aaron’s theory about ‘There’s A Hole In My Bucket,’ and I know Scott made that up for laughs, so maybe this is also made up,” then I’ve done my job.
So it’s not about saying you can’t interpret art. Go ahead and interpret art. But have fun when you’re doing it. And don’t try to do science the same way.
Also, I feel like your complaint about how American Pie really is about religion doesn’t relate to the book. Obviously it uses a lot of religious references (eg ”Father, Son, and Holy Ghost”), and obviously that became grist for the mill. Equally obviously, the idea that James Dean is a reference to James the Just, or that the pink carnation is a reference to the Incarnation, is just silly. There’s no reason to lump both sorts of references together, except to have fun in exactly the way I was doing.
diffractor asked:
I’m going to avoid answering questions of the form “Does X show up in Unsong” because it’s potentially too much of a spoiler.
The following should not be taken seriously, but it should probably be taken as something.
So the new chapter of Unsong (Scott Alexander’s ongoing web serial novel) is out, and it is extremely hilarious. It is also ludicrously high-context. I would not have expected a spiders Georg reference to show up in the same paragraph as a reference to The Northern Caves, and yet both occur before the chapter even technically starts. This is really common for Unsong, though. The density of puns, ingroup jokes, referential name-dropping, and similar techniques is astounding. I convinced a friend who is not involved with rationalism or rationalist adjacent to read it, and he assures me it is still quite good if you don’t get all the references, but for me, the references are the main thing there.
I was thinking about this while reading the newest chapter, and I remembered how Scott Alexander also recently wrote an article about writing techniques. While that article was about nonfiction and really had nothing to do with this concept itself, it did cause me to form a thought about how this style of writing is a heavily complementary to a specific kind of audience.
I also just recently read Crystal Society, and there was a comment in it about how references are a strange form of humor. It seems to me, though, that references meet a very similar psychological desire to the joy that people get from solving an interesting problem. Understanding a high context pun or getting an ingroup reference or joke requires having a rare and specific set of knowledge and being able to make inferential leaps using that knowledge.
Unsong likely has a fairly intelligent reader base. It also likely has a reader base that is nearly entirely a part of a specific subculture. This means that they will share a large quantity of cultural memes and will generally be able to identify those memes under fairly heavy alteration.
If you had a story which was being sold to a community like that, and the only thing you cared about was getting as large of a percentage as possible of that community in your reader base, then it seems like this would be one of the best possible ways to do it. You make as many complex references and puns as you can. You make them layered and inter-dependant. You make some of them easy and some ridiculously difficult. You reference other people’s content. You reference references from other people’s content. You do all of this on a fractal level so that any division of your work is itself also a reference.
And the result is that your readers feel tremendously clever. Every time they read more of your story they feel, perhaps on a subconscious and intuitive level, but they feel it all the same, that this story is proof of how smart they are.
I don’t mean to insinuate that anyone is doing anything shady here. Particularly not Scott, who I have great respect for. However, it does seem like an easy opportunity which points to something that may be significant. Feeling clever is an important part of human motivation, at least in my experience, and if this is hijacking the same response, then I think it points to a phenomena similar to that of superstimuli.
Of course, I don’t really know enough of the science on this topic to properly say if my assessment is fully correct. Or rather, I know it is not fully correct, but I don’t know if it is mostly correct. If anyone has the appropriate base in evolutionary psychology or what have you, I would be very appreciative if you could give your own analysis.
But what I really want to know is whether this effect is positive or negative, if it exists at all. Most superstimuli are considered to be a problem because they hijack normal reward structures and turn them to less valuable behaviors. For instance, the reward structure to encourage us to not starve to death instead causes us to gorge ourselves on candy. This occurs in large part because the strongest possible forms of those stimuli are the artificial ones, and gaining tolerance to the lower levels causes us to seek out stronger forms. But in the case of feeling clever, the strongest form is not reading a book with a lot of references. It’s an easily accessible form, but significantly weaker than, say, a major scientific discovery.
Would that mean that under ideal circumstances, a growing cultural reliance upon referential humor will make the world more productive? Or does it just mean that Unsong is morally equivalent to wireheading? Anyone else have thoughts on the subject?
I think I’m going to have to place referential humor in the same category as politics, in the sense that if I write something that’s 50% other stuff and 50% politics, it’s a post about politics; if I write something that’s 90% other stuff and 10% politics, it’s a post about politics; if I write something that’s 99% other stuff and 1% politics, people will say it’s evenly balanced between politics and nonpolitics.
All of the community references here were in a separate quote at the beginning of the chapter, plus the chapter had one pun, and all the comments I’ve gotten so far have been about how good/bad it is that this is a chapter full of puns and references.
(and a couple people nitpicking the number of chambers in a fish heart. Never change, people)
Partly this is good - I’m glad I can wirehead people to get them through a lot of otherwise boring exposition - I’m not sure how else I’d keep people reading through an explanation of what sephirot are. And I admit that I’ve maybe overused this to drag people through a really long period of setup without very much conflict or plot. But I didn’t know the effect would be that strong.
The conflict and plot start very soon, and I hope people can enjoy it without freaking out about where all of their puns and references went.
(I literally have zero more rationalist community references planned for this book. That doesn’t mean I won’t think of some later - a lot of this is thrown together at the last minute.)
(Puns you’re just going to have to deal with.)
I’m enjoying Unsong quite a bit, but I have to say its quality of, for lack of a better term, deliberate nerdsnipery turns me off some. I’m fine when catching some subtle reference or figuring out a narratively significant fact from little clues acts as a little extra whipped cream on an otherwise delicious literary sundae, but Unsong feels set up to make trying to solve all the mysteries, catch all the hints, and disambiguate all the references a central component of the reading experience (a feeling confirmed by the fandom I’ve seen in the comments and tumblr posts here and there).
I’ve never really liked riddles. They’re artificial in ways that make them significantly different both from intellectual problem solving when no other agents are involved and from genuine interactions with a possibly untrustworthy agent. The trickery with words, phrasing that would absolutely be considered lying in normal contexts and is obviously intended to give the wrong impression while remaining technically true, the deliberate obfuscation of certain relevant facts to make the task hard enough combined with the deliberate revelation to make the task possible, and the general sense that a good riddle is one that makes both the riddler and the successful riddled feel particularly clever (and possibly a little subversive/smart-assed?) combine to make a game I just don’t want to play. It feels like an archetypal arms race: riddlers and riddled develop more and more sophisticated tricks, frameworks, etc. that don’t help with anything but winning the game. And there’s something off-putting to me personally about temporarily treating friends and loved ones as untrustworthy/to be outsmarted (I similarly don’t like games with bluffing).
This is a hugely personal preference, of course. There’s not anything wrong with liking riddles. It just means certain things are not for me. And there’s enough of a story enjoyable on other terms in Unsong for me. But I wish this aspect were toned down some.
Part of this is just that I have trouble resisting a stupid joke, even when it’s in a dead language and requires five layers of background knowledge to make sense. Then people who don’t have the five layers of background knowledge think it’s a Deep Mystery and spend a lot of time unraveling it, only to be rewarded with a stupid joke at the end. I admit that my love of in-jokes is annoying and I apologize.
But part of it is also supposed to be something deeper (warning: this next part will be hopelessly pretentious). In the same way that Northern Caves had a theme of texts that are difficult to understand, I want Unsong to have a theme of texts that are way too easy to understand - in other words, pattern-matching, pareidolia, seeing a million connections but not being sure any of them are really there. The book’s central metaphor for this is kabbalists studying the Bible, but I want the book itself to channel that same feeling in a non-metaphorical way.
So for example, in Chapter 5 Ana uses this metaphor of goodness as music and evil as a discordant opposite of music. It’s easy enough to tie this into the book’s use of “singers” who sing the Names of God vs. UNSONG the United Nations Subcommittee On Names of God who try to stop them. But then the connections multiply. The title page quotes Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which does have a verse on Names of God - but which also refers to God as “Lord of Song”. The interlude references Peter Singer as the in-world archetype of good. Its morally ambiguous main character has the last name “Teller”, which seems clearly juxtaposed to Singer as if it’s someone who is working at something similar but missing the beauty and finesse - but then the book says that it derives from Edward Teller, who invented the H-bomb and almost caused the apocalypse. But then maybe that’s also a smokescreen and he’s just called “Teller” because he’s the narrator of the story. But then the book also talks about how he works as a literal (bank) teller at Cash For Gold and how this is a metaphor for kabbalah because he’s “freely interchanging symbols with material reality”. And also, a smith is someone who forges things and “tellus” as in “tellurium” is Latin for “Earth”, so Smith-Teller is someone who remakes the world. (There are other things in this space too, but I won’t spoil them.)
And at some point you realize I can’t possibly have intended all of these meanings, because most of this stuff is in reality and not in the book at all and I don’t have enough degrees of freedom to make it work. I can control the name of the in-book organization UNSONG (although even there, “United Nations Subcommittee On Names of God” is by far the most logical thing to call the thing that it is, so can that really be counted as authorial meddling?), but I can’t control Peter Singer’s name, or Edward Teller’s name, or what a bank teller is, and some of these things *have to* be coincidences, and then you either go full skeptic and start questioning whether your pattern-matching ability even works at all, or full kabbalist and assume all patterns are significant, even the ones in the real world which don’t make sense in a rational framework.
When there are little hints of solveable mysteries in the text, I don’t intend it to be some sort of stupid battle of wits in which I try to misdirect my readers - in fact, I’m curious what exactly you see that seems like that, since I’ve tried specifically to avoid that kind of thing. I intend it to be the beginning of a rabbit hole that can be followed arbitrarily far without a predetermined end, until eventually it even goes out of the text itself.
Anonymous asked:
That’s hard to answer because Unsong is a combination of every interesting story idea I’ve ever thought of, all collided together into a giant mishmash. I hope this doesn’t show through too obviously.
Thank god we as a society have advanced to the point where we know with a high level of certainty that ending death would have no big negative consequences for civilization worth considering. Otherwise I’d be worried it was the most overreaching social engineering scheme of all time.
To me, “We should obviously end death!” is a crazy statement, and I’d be very concerned if its advocates had anything close to the power to make it happen. On the other hand, something like, “I support pushing the human lifespan higher and higher so that we can monitor what sort of problems pop up as things progress, but on a personal/aesthetic/moral level I fervently hope and believe that the end result of this will be an end to non-consensual death,” is entirely sensible.
Which is probably closer to what a lot of anti-death people actually believe, but it gets framed in over-the-top ways that lose nuance, perhaps because the typical interlocutor in a debate like this is someone who is thoughtlessly pro-death.
I mean I’m not sure the nuance matters that much because it’s not like a scientist is going to wake up one day and invent the vaccine against death.
It seems dramatically improbable that ending death will happen without a gradual lengthening of human lifespans as we get better at treating the negative aspects of ageing and reducing death by various causes, etc. Regardless of what the most radical anti-deathist might want, the checks for what happens as things progress will be there.
…unless the singularity happens [I am contractually obligated to add as a caveat], in which case anything humans are deciding now about how the ending of death should happen is not going to matter anyway.
I think that the whole debate is of no real practical importance, but even if we’re in the realm of airy thought experiments, we may as well be sensible about it.
Yeah I’m genuinely frustrated and concerned with how many transhumanists tend to act like overpopulation just won’t be a thing. Like, even if we’ve historically been too alarmist about it, the fact remains that continuing to births new humans without the old ones dying off will eventually cause us to run up against our limits, even if you think those limits won’t come into play for a very long time.
Besides the other argument (that eliminating death wouldn’t even double our current population growth, and overall the effect size is smaller than the effect size from going from third-world to first-world birth rates), I don’t think that’s really the biggest issue here.
I mean, sure, on one hand, there’d be a lot of social issues caused by eliminating death.
On the other hand… IT’S DEATH.
Like, imagine saying “My kid wants a larger apartment, so I’m going to have to kill you.”
Or, just, in general, for any reason you can come up with why eliminating death would be bad, imagine walking by a drowning person, and telling them, “I’d save you, but that’d be contributing to overpopulation” or whatever other reason you oppose eliminating death. And then suddenly it should be pretty clear that whatever issues there are, they’re not nearly as important as saving someone’s life. Everyone’s life, really.
I’ve been reading these arguments without really a strong opinion, but it does strike me that no one’s arguments about the badness of eliminating death seem to be anywhere close to as bad as “murdering literally everyone” on the badness scale.