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.
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.
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 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/ ?
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.)
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.
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:
I don’t think Less Wrong would be an appropriate place for this. If you really want to do it, maybe /r/unsong or /r/slatestarcodex.
worldlypositions
I am told that knowing about the planning fallacy and trying to account for it does not avert the planning fallacy. I wonder if this is because people are dutifully trying to shift their expectation of something going wrong appropriately close to 100%, when the actual expectation should be closer to 5000%. Nonetheless, I caught my plane and am successfully moving at six hundred miles per hour above the Atlantic Ocean. The contrast between the ease of this and the ease of moving at half a mile per hour from my bed to the bathroom at the start of this journey feels like a good example of something.
And while a few things have gone wrong, probably more things have gone especially right. Moving my things in a giant suitcase turns out to be much less terrible than lugging them around on my back in a bulging ‘personal item’, as is my usual strategy. Especially because someone else is in charge of the giant suitcase now.
There was no queue to check in, security was easy, my gate was right outside it, separated only by a shop I wanted to go to. I was fairly anxious at the start of the plane trip, but then a nice flight attendant gave me multiple tiny bottles of wine to drink. He also kindly informed me that my airplane food, while dubious in ways, was not dangerous and that I should just eat it, which is something I usually miss traveling alone.
This plane has a respectable selection of movies and TV. As well as a less respectable selection, from which I have mostly selected. I watched ‘Why him?’, a movie portraying a Silicon Valley billionaire boyfriends as a sort of horrifying other species, unable to communicate with or understand normal humans, but ultimately friendly. While I’m not opposed to laughing at the oddities of Silicon Valley boyfriends, I thought it was interesting that for this to work they had to basically make the guy seem really clueless and stupid in ways. Even though most such people are pretty smart. I wonder if the writers are not that familiar with such people, so don’t know how to justify a smart person behaving in laughable ways. But maybe it is just funnier if you exaggerate it to the point that it is impossible to justify.
I watched a TV show about finding strangers who look identical to each other, and getting them together to see how alike they are. If it was a real test roughly as presented, it was very striking. Of the seven pairs they had on the show, one pair were both homosexual night club workers with the same hair style, and another pair had the same first and last names. They mentioned a lot of other similarities between pairs, but those seemed more like what you might come up with if you took two random people and looked for things in common. Or things that would tend to make you either look similar or find each other. However the two coincidences I mention seem surprising. I suppose the show probably just had a lot of such people to choose from, and took the most interestingly similar ones. Which they didn’t explicitly claim to not be doing. But that seems naughty.
I downloaded Instapaper, and have been finding it a surprisingly appealing way to read things (surprising because nothing is an appealing way to read things). Possibly it just seemed appealing because I filled it with things from the archives of Slate Star Codex and The Last Psychiatrist.
I listened to half of a podcast about Alexander Hamilton, who seems to be now permanently classed in my mind as ‘topic of derpy fictional amusement’ rather than ‘history it would be virtuous to know about’. Hopefully I can gradually expand this circle so that the agricultural revolution seems like particularly obscure backstory to Hamilton, nonetheless fascinating to a fan.
The podcast said that Hamilton the musical is about the conflict between being shiny and political, and being straightforward and doing the work you think is important, or something like that. As represented by Burr and Hamilton. I observe that Burr and Hamilton also seem to represent a conflict between waiting for it and grabbing opportunity immediately. Which makes me wonder if those axes are related.
For instance, I wonder if waiting a lot is in general a better strategy in social spheres than it is in object-level ones, because there is often more to be permanently lost. Like, if you say a dumb thing people can bring it up forever, whereas from the perspective of object level inquiry, you can change your mind about it in five minutes when you decide that it is wrong. I’m not sure if this holds for actions more serious than saying things—if you run your company into the ground or burn down your house it may be hard to undo, but you can recover socially (eventually).
That podcast was destroyed randomly, and can’t be recovered because accessing the internet on this plane seems to require the internet. So instead I listened to a third of a podcast about people killing other people. I think some of them were the Assyrians. Some of their killing was especially not nice. That’s all I know, because I only listened to it for like an hour, and apparently Assyrians are not yet catalogued under ‘obscure Hamilton backstory’ yet.
