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.