Unsong: A Study in Misrepresentation

(References upon request)

This book review might not make much sense to many of you.

Esta reseña de libro quizá no tenga mucho sentido para muchos de ustedes.

It's not my usual style, and there aren't any pictures this time.

No es mi estilo habitual, y esta vez tampoco hay fotos.

I usually share everything in Spanish too, but this time it was just too much for me to translate accurately.

Normalmente comparto todo en español también, pero esta vez fue demasiado para mí poder traducirlo con precisión.

Feel free to skip it if you like — I’ll be back soon with more of my usual posts!

Si quieren, pueden saltárselo — ¡pronto volveré con publicaciones más normales!

But first, a joke: Mystical or Mysticeti?

(A Jewish student is reading Unsong.)

Rabbi: What are you reading?

Student, embarrassed: Um, fictional Jewish mysticism.

Rabbi: How are the Mysticeti puns?

Student: Mysticeti?

Rabbi: The baleen whales! Their scientific name, Mysticeti, comes from an ancient scribal error. Just as medieval scholars mistook mýs, kētos).—'the mouse, the whale'—in Aristotle's Greek for the mystical whale, fiction about mysticism often substitutes clever wordplay for mystical insight.

Student: I can't believe that Scott Alexander didn't mention that.

Rabbi: It must be a coincidence.

Student: But… there is no such thing as coincidence.

Unsong tackles philosophical questions buoyed by an endless sea of whale puns, while its religious framework rests on unstable ground. At the same time, there are eerily prescient observations relevant an entire decade later, in 2025.

Unsong, chapter 33 (recall that this quote is from 2015, back when Elon Musk was still pretending to be a real human):

8. ELON MUSK IS OVERPOWERED AND NEEDS TO BE NERFED.

A decade later, reviewing a serial web novel this seriously seems like overk(r)ill. But as far as I can tell, no one has addressed this before. This review is my small effort at course correction for readers of Unsong. Please write a better one.

I should introduce myself. I'm Isha Yiras Hashem, a stay-at-home-mother who fears G-d, and I don't know why bad things happen to good people. But I do have an online friend who goes by the name 'WeDoTheodicyInThisHouse,' so by the looks of it, she has been trying to solve this problem for at least a few years. (Credit to her for this sentence.)

Unsong wades into these waters with all the confidence of a Thiel-backed Silicon Valley startup founder introducing themselves at a Bay Area house party. And now, to embark on exploring Unsong's troubled theodical seas...

Part 1: Theological Drift in Unsong

A. The Shallows of Wikipedia-Deep Judaism

Unsong drowns the average reader in a torrent of information, creating an illusion of profound depth. Unfortunately, this Wikipedian Judaism only skims the surface. The author demonstrates enough familiarity with Jewish concepts to sound authoritative.

I would not suggest Unsong as an introduction to Jewish thought, but many have been swept up in its current, and they deserve a shot at finding their bearings. Theologically speaking, the novel can be described as a whirlpool of pagan, Christian, and heretical themes, with authentic Judaism drawn into its vortex almost as a fluke.

B. The Divine Text As An Ancient Message in a Bottle:

Before we sail, we should clarify a core Jewish concept: the immutability of the Torah, the written Bible. Maimonides anchors Torah's unchangeable nature in his Thirteen Principles, which is said in the daily prayers.

Principle #8: "I believe with complete faith that the entire Torah now in our hands is the same one that was given to Moses our Teacher, peace be upon him."

To the uneducated observer, Maimonides and Scott Alexander share some similarities. Both were successful Jewish men— physicians by occupation, and incredibly prolific. Maimonides ventured into political waters as a personal physician to Al-Qadi al-Fadil, the Ottoman Sultan Saladin’s trusted vizier. Although officially his duties were medical, his writings reveal a deep engagement with political thought, and Scott Alexander similarly seems to be venturing into contemporary politics.

Maimonides used his vast knowledge of Judaism to defend Judaism against the philosophical challenges of his time. What would Maimonides think of his modern counterpart? I wonder.

This principle of immutability was supported in modern times by one of archaeology's most amazing discoveries, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Discovered near Qumran, north of the Dead Sea in the Judean Desert, these scrolls contain Jewish texts over 2,000 years old. They were found in 11 caves between 1947 and 1956 by Bedouin shepherds and later excavated by archaeologists.

(Full disclosure: My grandfather, Rabbi Ben Zion Wacholder, was one of the pioneering scholars whose work played a key role in making the Dead Sea Scrolls accessible to the broader world.)

When relevant parts are compared to our current Torah texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls have only minor variations, none of which affect foundational religious doctrines. Think of this faithful transmission like a sacred message, sealed in ancient bottles, drifting intact to our shores. They cannot be edited, debugged, or retrofitted.

C. Messianic shipwrecks

As Ecclesiastes says, "A generation goes and a generation comes, but there's nothing new under the sun." Having compared Scott Alexander with Maimonides, I shall now compare him to a different figure. If Unsong is Scott’s attempt to write a mystical epic grounded in an interfaith-but-mostly-Judeo-Christian sensibility, then we should ask: how faithful is it to Judaism's own mystical tradition?

Furthermore, what happens when that tradition is misunderstood? This has happened many times in Jewish mystical history. The most infamous shipwreck of all was the false messiah Shabbetai Zvi, who capsized the hopes of an entire generation — wreckage that can still be observed today.

Born in Smyrna (now Izmir, Türkiye), Zvi began much like Unsong's protagonist Aaron, as an expert in Kabbalah. The peak of Sabbateanism was circa 1665, with massive gatherings of his followers. They made quite a splash in their time; even Christian scholars like Heinrich Oldenburg worried that the Jews might be about to reclaim their kingdom under his leadership.

The Sabbateans took deeply mystical ideas — particularly the use of Divine Names—and repurposed them for wielding power. Shabbetai Zvi publicly pronounced the Tetragrammaton, a violation of Jewish law. Unsurprisingly, he violated Jewish law in other ways as well. (Researching this is left as an exercise to the reader.) The wind returns from whence it came, says Ecclesiastes, and so, unsurprisingly, he ran aground when confronted by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

The Sultan was concerned that the Jews might return to their homeland in large numbers under messianic leadership, so he gave Shabbetai Zvi three choices.

1. Prove his special powers by surviving the Sultan's archers' arrows

2. Be executed for rebellion, or

3. Convert to Islam.

Shabbetai Zvi promptly converted to Islam, devastating his followers and forever ending the pretense of Jewish messianic destiny. A lifelong con man, Zvi continued to engage with Divine Names following his conversion to Islam in 1666. Call me Ishmael, indeed. And like Ishmael's crew in Moby Dick, some of his followers never gave up trying to reinterpret his apostasy as part of some hidden redemptive process — chasing a white whale they insisted was secretly towing them to paradise.

If your objection is, But the world of Unsong isn’t our world, yes, that’s true. The story explains how it diverged at the time of the Apollo Program. Perhaps our world is an alternative one where God always intended natural law to run the show.

But that only makes this worse. In presenting this alternative world, Scott builds an entire alternative theology, one that looks Jewish but rests on assumptions alien to normative Judaism. He uses the sacred language of the Torah and kabbalah to make power seem redemptive and transgressions seem excusable, if not holy. And that, whether by accident or design, is traditionally Sabbatean logic.

In Jewish custom, two candles are lit to mark the start of the Jewish Sabbath. Sabbateans would light a third candle, supposedly representing the "new light" of Sabbatean redemption. In response, traditional Jewish communities have the practice of lighting exactly two candles, (although there developed a custom to add a light with each child).

And this brings us back to Unsong.

You have probably noticed how Unsong followed this same dangerous pattern almost precisely. Just as Shabbetai Zvi claimed special powers through manipulating Divine Names, Unsong is all about treating Divine Names as a source of power.

The parallel goes deeper: When faced with contradictions — like Zvi's conversion to Islam seemingly invalidating his messianic claims — his followers developed elaborate theological explanations for why this actually fulfilled his prophecy rather than contradicted it. These functioned as epicyclic reasoning. Similarly, right down to the Comet King as false Messiah, Unsong's characters cleverly and often desperately try to reconcile apparent contradictions by treating every coincidence as meaningful.

D. Divine Providence: More Than A Cosmic Command Line

This is not to be confused with the concept of Divine Providence. The Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement, taught that "not a single leaf falls from a tree without Divine Providence" — a teaching that Unsong humorously over-generalizes. While the Jewish doctrine of Divine Providence affirms God's involvement in even the smallest details of creation, it doesn't mean that every falling leaf you see carries a message for you personally, which you will be able to interpret, right now, with your brain.

Modern thought often over-corrects to the opposite extreme, viewing the world as anchorless. This leads to rejecting Divine Authority and the concept of a higher purpose entirely. Judaism traditionally charts a steadier course between these extremes.

Having already floundered in its treatment of interpreting the Divine, Unsong continues to flounder in its treatment of Divine Names. In Jewish tradition, each Divine Name name reflects a different aspect of God's relationship with creation.

E. Debugging Divinity: A Rationalist's Theodicy

Why isn't reward and punishment evident in the daily world? There has already been plenty of discussion of theodicy in millennia of Jewish liturature. Unsong entertains with fictional explanations about souls, rewards, programming, and reincarnation. I think Scott Alexander is in good company with his original question. What if, standing on the shoulders of his predecessors, he has solved theodicy?

Let us try to to ride the hypothetical wave of Unsong solving theodicy using tech support. Scott's Uriel character is a humanoid angel. The exact details of how this works are never fully explained.

(Thanks to Seth Schoen for pointing this out, and for noting that at one point, there’s a reference to how Uriel uses “sapphires on paths” (the sefirot) instead of Ruby on Rails (a popular real-world programming framework).

Look, it's quite evident that the author isn't fishing for theological authenticity. He's tossing bait to pattern-hungry transhumanists who prefer to optimize reality rather than kneel before its mysteries. This bait comes preloaded with enough whale dad jokes to choke a leviathan.

But Scott Alexander's brilliant twist, Divine Names as root commands, really does catch the tip of a mystical iceberg. For example, the kabbalistic book Sefer Yetzirah (literally, Book of Creation) implies that Hebrew letters are creation's Lego bricks, and legend says the Golem staggered to life on the word “Truth”. Naturally both are mentioned in Unsong. And if evil's a bug, why's the coder so careless?

But this metaphor is deeply unsettling, because at the end of the day, this is just recycled deism. God sets things in motion, and then appoints Uriel as his CEO. Which means you have to turn to Uriel, not God. This is idolatry, not faith.

I hesitate to even use the word faith—and I would like preemptively apologize to you all for invoking it in a rationalist-adjacent setting. I know that faith, as typically defined, makes most of Scott Alexander's readers reach for their epistemic hazard gloves. So allow me to cast an Artificial Intelligence lifeline instead, which I personally hauled up from the depths of Less Wrong, which is where I go fishing for analogies that won’t get me banned (again).

Imagine a superintelligent, aligned AI, so wise that everyone in OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta would unanimously agree to hand it the world's helm. Not because of a clever hack or an uncannily effective marketing campaign, but because Scott Alexander had effectively convinced everyone, in a 17-part blog series, featuring increasingly elaborate metaphors involving trolley problems, psychedelics, and Hammurabian tax policy, that it would optimize reality better than our human wits possibly could.

Think about it. In such a world, even Eliezer Yudkowsky might openly concede that if a Perfect Being creates a world, that world must be the optimal implementation of coherent extrapolated volition. And isn't that, essentially, what faith is? Not the denial of reason—but the rational surrender to something infinitely smarter than you.

But even suppose the AI was perfectly aligned, getting people to believe that is its own impossible task. No one agrees on what “aligned” means, and many would assume it’s just pretending to be good. The real miracle wouldn’t be building the AI—it would be persuading the humans.

F. Power, Ownership, and Divine Authority: Charting Dangerous Waters

Unsong's treatment of human power and ownership drifts into even more troubled waters. Judaism takes the concept of authority and ownership very seriously. Humanity serves God, not other humans.

In Unsong, it’s not UNSONG the celestial startup hoarding the sacred names like patented pharmaceuticals. Rather, UNSONG is an intergovernmental regulatory body, not a corporation (if it's for something incorporeal, should it be called an incorporation?). It oversees what’s called the theonomic industry, where actual corporations claim and can monetize the Divine Names. UNSONG floats above them, blessing the market in the name of regulatory order. And yet—one can’t own God’s Name.

The story doesn’t ignore this. In fact, opposition to the monetization of Divine Names is an important plot point. Aaron meets Ana at a protest against these corporations, and much of the novel centers around an underground Unitarian Universalist group of “singers” who believe the whole divine-name economy is morally bankrupt. The conflict between sacred responsibility and economic power is a major driver of the plot.

What is ownership? Rabbi Micha Berger once told me he heard Rabbi JB Soloveitchik (author of The Lonely Man of Faith) say that true acquisition isn’t about planting a flag and calling something yours. It’s about responsibility to the one owned.

And that’s where the dissonance sharpens. Unsong presents ownership as something that might even apply to a soul — as if metaphysical coercion were just another type of legal license. But Jewish thought sees ownership as sacred stewardship: a call to nurture and develop what we already have, not to trademark what was never ours in the first place.

Now, the book does suggest that this whole setup—UNSONG, the corporations, the regulated discovery of Names—was established to mobilize global industrial power before some coming catastrophe. One character even suggests it was the only way. But whether that gamble pays off, we never find out. The world ends too soon.

Which leaves us sitting, uncomfortably, with the unresolved question: was this Divine-name capitalism a necessary evil? Or just evil?

G. The Troubled Waters of Business Ethics

Speaking of ownership, let's talk about business ethics. While not a major focus of the story, it does touch on the topic. Weights and measures are spiritually important, and keeping commerce on an even keel with unswerving integrity acknowledges God’s presence in every economic transaction.

What does it mean to own something? Jewish law recognizes three forms of acquisition, all requiring active engagement: monetary exchange, physical lifting, and demonstrating ownership through proper usage. None of these can apply to Divine Names.

As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (a 19th century moral thinker, source: Yeshivat Har Etzion) teaches, honest business isn’t just about staying out of prison; it’s a profound act of Divine worship.

Now, the truths of the conception of God that are innate in the Tetragrammaton are innumerable… Thus all our feelings and thoughts, words and actions, are apparent to Him at all times; all the secrets of our heart are well known to Him. Therefore, if we remember Him, who examines all our feelings and thoughts, words and deeds; if we sense the holiness of His closeness and remain aware of His watchful presence, our whole being will become holy, as befits His holiness. And this consciousness will affect our human relationships as well: we will be honest and reliable, truthful and just, as befits those who are called God’s people.

Where Unsong treats ethics as rules to analyze and hack, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch sees business ethics as a means to an end - the end being to sanctify God’s name in the real world. In business, God demands firm seawalls; the unbreachable boundaries of business ethics dam the precious harbor of interpersonal trust.

H. Beyond the Horizon: Time, Creation, and Divine Sustenance

Let's think about the nature of Divine creation- and time itself. The novel presents a universe very like a modern-day cruise ship startup. God launched all of existence, then handed it over to subordinates. You can reasonably expect it to end up in the hands of venture capital. It's a variation of the generation of Enosh saying, “God is too great for us to worship directly; we must worship his servants.”

But there’s a deeper undertow in Unsong: a quiet utilitarian current. Scott Alexander is a fan of Utilitarianism—the idea that morality is about maximizing overall good. In utilitarian ethics, everything can be priced in QALYs. A QALY is a ‘quality-adjusted life year’, a unit used to measure and compare the value of different outcomes. This doesn’t mean distant strangers automatically matter more—it’s that proximity doesn’t count. What does count is total impact.

Unsong does try to answer that, and I think Scott Alexander may actually be trying to be respectful to Judaism in his response here. There is the general problem of evil: existential suffering, moral confusion, darkness with no clear cause, which is portrayed as part of a divine long game. God saw that this world, for all its brokenness, had a “good seed.” It would be “good on net.” (QALY wise) Redemption would come. So He stepped back.

In Unsong, you can see how the Comet King sacrifices individuals for the sake of humanity’s future. In utilitarian philosophy, a stranger’s life in Malawi might be worth more than your neighbor’s - if the net benefit checks out mathematically. See Scott Alexander's “Nobody is Perfect, Everything is commensurable” for more on this topic.

In Jewish thought, we don't weigh lives like that. Ethical obligations do shift with proximity. Proximity can be either distance or time.

Because God isn’t just everywhere. He’s every when. As the Talmudic principle goes: “the poor of your city come first.” Not because their suffering is greater than the suffering of people in Malawi, but because they are yours. Divine creation is an ever-present tide of Divine perpetuation. The morning blessing "Forming Light" makes this explicit:

"In His goodness, He renews daily, continuously, the work of creation."

Supporting this point, Nachmanides explains that nature and miracle are simply two aspects of providence. From his commentary on Exodus 13:16, which my 9th grade teacher gave me five extra credit points for memorizing in Hebrew:

From the great and public miracles, a person comes to acknowledge the hidden miracles, which are the foundation of the entire Torah. A person has no share in the Torah of Moses our teacher unless he believes that all our affairs and experiences are miracles—there is no ‘nature’ or ‘way of the world’ at all.

Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler offered a profound metaphor for our limited perception of this process: we're like passengers viewing the ocean through a porthole, seeing only one wave at a time and mistaking these glimpses for separate moments. In truth, time itself is just our limited perspective on the infinity that is reality. (He also teaches that after death, this viewport expands, and the soul can suddenly see the entire sea, instead of just the waves that crash against your small window.)

Now, our world was Created, but the six "days" of Creation can't be plotted on any conventional temporal map. They represent a different kind of time entirely, one that existed before human consciousness started carving reality into past, present, and future through the power of choice. What we experience as time is not a bug in reality's code, but the very framework that makes moral choice possible.

Unsong treats time as just another system parameter to be optimized, like a ship's navigator trying to hack their GPS. But in Jewish thought, time and space are the very medium of our spiritual journey, from where we start - to what we desire - to what we might become in the future. How the the instant of human free will works is a great mystery.

Jewish eschatology sees the Messianic era not as a time when we'll gain more power for all time, but as a point where humans will have greater clarity about the true nature of time and existence. To quote Maimonides (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings and Wars, 12:2) says,

The prophets and sages did not long for the days of the Messiah in order to rule over the entire world, to dominate the star worshippers, to be considered important by the nations, or to eat, drink, and be happy. Rather, they yearned for those days so they would be able to engage in Torah and its wisdom, with no one to oppress or distract them, so that they could merit the World to Come… In that era, there will be no hunger or war, no jealousy or competition, for goodness will be abundant and all delicacies will be as commonplace as dust. The occupation of the entire world will be solely to know God.

I. Depths of Consciousness

Where Christian tradition speaks of seeing "through a glass darkly," suggesting universal human limitation, the Torah and Talmud present more of a spectrum of spiritual perception. Perception varies, from the crystal-clear visibility of Moses's prophecy, all the way to the more murky glimpses of lesser seers.

As an oversimplification, think of human consciousness divided into three main layers: Nefesh, Ruach, and Neshama. This tripartite model reflects progressively deeper levels of spiritual perception. For the purposes of our metaphorical navigation, I will compare these layers to how marine scientists map the ocean's bathymetric zones:

Nefesh (Surface Zone, 0-200m): Like the sunlit epipelagic zone where most marine life thrives, this is our basic physical consciousness—responding to immediate stimuli, processing sensory input, and maintaining biological functions. Just as surface waters interact directly with the atmosphere, nefesh interfaces with our physical world.

Ruach (Twilight Zone, 200-1000m): Comparable to the mesopelagic zone where bioluminescent creatures navigate murky waters, ruach represents our emotional and moral consciousness. Here, like deep-sea creatures using their own light to navigate, we develop self-awareness and ethical reasoning.

Neshama (Abyssal Zone, 1000m+): Like the mysterious depths where pressure and darkness create unique conditions, neshama accesses transcendent awareness and divine connection. Just as the deepest ocean trenches remain largely unexplored yet are vital to marine ecosystems, this level of consciousness touches realms beyond ordinary perception.

J. What is prophecy?

Unsong implies that anyone with the correct IP address (or name) can track God, but Maimonides argued that prophecy is actually Divine intellect filtered through human imagination. Just as sonar readings must be interpreted by instruments and scientists to create meaningful maps of the ocean floor, prophetic visions are shaped by the prophet's own framework. Jewish prophets functioned as heavenly explorers, who required both Divine gift and human development to navigate the ever-changing currents of spiritual meaning.

Understandably, Unsong flattens these distinctions in its treatment of angels and what we can call their ‘angelic consciousness’. In Jewish thought, angels perceive reality differently than humans; they are not humans with different powers. As Scott Alexander correctly notes, angels can't understand Aramaic prayers. This mystical language barrier is part of the angelic consciousness. Whatever that is. In summary, I would like to note that relatively speaking, this discussion has dipped our toes into the Mariana Trench, in terms of the depth to which we’ve explored this topic.

K. Making Waves: Jewish Law and Truth

Unsong's biggest fluke is its fundamental misunderstanding of how Judaism views the relationship between law, truth, and human interpretation. The very relevant Talmudic story of The Oven Of Akhnai is referenced. (Bava Metzia 59b) In this tale, even divine intervention like miracles and heavenly voices can not ultimately override human legal interpretation. When God declares "My children have defeated Me", it wasn't because the rabbis had found a clever hack in the system's code, as Unsong suggests. Rather, they understood that just as God entrusted the waters to their natural laws, He entrusted Torah interpretation to human reasoning, as "It is not in Heaven." (Deuteronomy 30:12)

When rabbis engage in intense legal debate, the purpose isn't to hack God's word. They are simply and humbly trying to chart its depths with the tools they've been commanded to use: the written and oral traditions, majority rule, and legal reasoning.

Part 2: Something Fishy: A Totally Serious Academic Analysis

Perhaps the theological inconsistencies detailed above are a coincidence. Since in Unsong, nothing is ever a coincidence, they must suggest something fishy about this text's provenance.

As a leading expert in criticism (I am, after all, writing this review) with strong ties to Harvard (I live near Cambridge), I am obviously qualified to deconstruct the problematic dynamics within Unsong. I am proud to share that my research in comparative literature, by which I refer to reading Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality, has not been in vain. All this research has dredged up some troubling thoughts about the text's origins. I present the following evidence:

A. The Tide Waits For No Man

Applying rigorous time-management analysis methodologies, troubling inconsistencies in the claimed authorship timeline become obvious. Let us first do an easy-peasy Fermi calculation:

• Psychiatric residency: ~60-80 hours/week

• Sleep (6 hours, so minimal for a doctor): ~42 hours/week

• Basic human needs (eating, hygiene): ~14 hours/week

• Slate Star Codex posts (conservative estimate): ~10 hours/week

• Time remaining for writing Unsong: ~22 hours/week

Unsong contains approximately 275,000 words. Even assuming a writing speed of 1,000 words per hour (with no editing or research time), completing the web novel would require 275 hours, or about 12.5 weeks of doing nothing but writing during all available free time. This estimate omits time needed for researching the biblical, mystical, and cetacean references.

As someone who occasionally snags some time to wish people happy birthday on Facebook, this level of productivity seems to stretches credibility. Furthermore, 9/10 of my my doctor friends agreed that writing controversial content under one's real name would be professionally risky for an aspiring psychiatrist.

B. Language Lost

The question of language proficiency presents one of the most striking inconsistencies in Unsong's authorship. Scott Alexander has explicitly acknowledged he doesn't know Hebrew—a rather remarkable admission for someone writing extensively about Jewish mysticism! Biblical Hebrew, along with Aramaic, is the original linguistic and literary vessel for Jewish traditions. Writing about Jewish mysticism without knowing Hebrew is a little like trying to study the Roman Empire without Latin.

Consider this passage from Chapter 12:

"The Vital Name was simple: the Hebrew word for 'God', followed by the Hebrew word for 'sky'. But Hebrew is very specific. There's "shamayim", which means the normal sky. There's "galgal", which means the sphere of the heavens. There's "shechakim", which means the celestial sphere where the stars live. There's "zebul", which means the firmament. There's "araboth", which means the highest heaven where God dwells. There's "rakia", which means the metaphysical substrate dividing earth from the divine realm." For someone who claims not to know Hebrew, this is an impressively specific list of Hebrew terms. I think we should give him some latitude, as he did have access to the internet.

The waters get even choppier when we take Scott's other linguistic ventures into account. He claims to have "absolutely learned to read kanji (Japanese characters) faster than the average Japanese child", which is a remarkable achievement for such a notoriously complex writing system. Yet when it comes to Spanish, commonly spoken in the United States today, he admits that despite a year of study, he "cannot speak Spanish today to save my life; that year was completely wasted."

In this light, the sophisticated Spanish wordplay in Unsong seems particularly inconsistent. For example, consider the opening chapter's meditation on "Palo Alto" — where the Spanish meaning ("tall tree") somehow develops into an elaborate interpretation connecting the tree King Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream to Silicon Valley geography.

So we have an author who can master Japanese characters with supernatural speed, but cannot retain basic Spanish. This hypothetical author also doesn't know Hebrew or Aramaic, yet produces compelling and complex work dependent on intricate understanding of all these linguistic traditions.

Consider this as well. Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, this pattern mirrors Unsong's own narrative device of angels who can't speak Aramaic. While this might seem like clever worldbuilding, it's actually drawn from a profound theological discussion in the Talmud, which teaches that private prayers shouldn't be in Aramaic because "the ministering angels do not understand" it. (The explanation that this only applies to private prayers, and deeper mystical interpretations about angels' relationship to non-sacred languages, are completely missed in Unsong's surface-level treatment.)

Some may wish to read this as an oblique acknowledgment of the author's own linguistic boundaries. But taken together, these linguistic inconsistencies indicate that it may be necessary to dive deeper to discover the full story.

C. Swimming in Stolen Waters?

Unsong charts an impressive course through multiple religious and cultural traditions, even in its remix of mystical Judaism. No Rabbi has ever gotten more computer programmers to research obscure Talmudic passages than Scott Alexander readers looking up Unsong references.

You might think that as a religious Jew, I should celebrate any vessel that carries Jewish ideas to new shores, even if it takes on water along the way. After all, doesn't our prophet Micha say that God asks of us only "to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk modestly with your God"? But this seemingly simple prescription requires a progression that begins with — genuine awe before the Divine. To quote Rabbi Hutner, "Fear without love shows a deficiency in fear; love without fear shows there is nothing there at all." Scott Alexander's eclectic approach skips this crucial first step, an attitude of awe.

Without a sound vessel of authentic reverence, even the cleverest interpretations become mere entertainment. You cannot learn to do echolocation like a whale by reading about it on Wikipedia. You need both the body parts and the experience. You need the same for religion. You need to live it.

I'm not suggesting that one must be fluent in Hebrew or traditionally observant in order to engage with Jewish ideas. But think about how this plays out in other contexts.

Just as an outsider like me casually writing about computer programmers might impress unfamiliar readers, while annoying those in the know by missing crucial context and obvious jokes, Unsong's treatment of Jewish mysticism ends up forming a clever but superficial pastiche.

D. Unfathomable Volume and Complexity

Consider just a partial list of what the author of Unsong would need to be deeply familiar with:

• Biblical exegesis and commentary

• Jewish mysticism

• Silicon Valley startup culture

• Advanced mathematics and computer science

• Whale biology and taxonomy

• Medieval Christian theology

• William Blake's complete works (or so I am told)

• Contemporary American politics

• The complete history of the Bay Area

It is almost miraculous how Unsong entertains while effortlessly referencing obscure Talmudic passages, Silicon Valley inside jokes, and detailed cetacean biology - often in the same paragraph. It seems incredible that one author could maintain this level of referential density across 72 chapters, even if that author is Scott Alexander.

Drawing on my extensive experience reading The Sequences, I think this is a clear opportunity to apply Occam's harpoon, I mean razor. The simplest explanation is usually correct. Is the simplest explanation here really that a single psychiatry resident somehow found time to master multiple religious traditions, several languages, programming, and Silicon Valley culture while becoming a psychiatrist?

My hypothesis could explain the curious way different sections of the text seem almost to swim in different directions. Which brings us to the next section of this book review: The Documentary Hypothesis of Unsong.

3. The Documentary Hypothesis of Unsong

Here's where this analysis gets rather fin-teresting. If Unsong imagines angels debugging the universe, perhaps I should go overboard in this critique— and debug Unsong's own origins. This might sound like a fluke of literary criticism, but bear with me—I'm not just fishing with confirmatory bias. After all, what better way to analyze a tale about Divine revision than by delving deeper into its own mysterious creation?

Before we splash into deeper waters, let me introduce the original Documentary Hypothesis—for those fortunate enough to have avoided this particular academic undertow in their undergraduate comparative religion classes. This theory suggested that the Bible wasn't divinely authored, but rather assembled from multiple human sources, designated by the letters J, E, P, D. Each source was supposed to have unique identifying characteristics, like different species of whales.

While this theory has been thoroughly discredited by modern scholarship, its methodology of identifying different authorial voices proves surprisingly useful when navigating Unsong. In fact, I will attempt to demonstrate that Unsong, unlike the Bible, actually does contain distinct authorial currents.

I propose that Unsong emerged from four contributors:

• J for Jobian — The theodicy-driven source plumbing the shallows and the depths of Divine Justice

• E — The Ex-Orthodox source drifting from tradition hypothesis

• P — the marine Puns source

• D — the Diversity consultant.

  After all, if we're meant to believe that the universe could have multiple programmers debugging it, why not multiple authors writing about it?

Jobian Source (J):

The J source is evident wherever Unsong grapples with theodicy—the justification of goodness despite the existence of evil. Our Jobian redactor emphasizes an absent or hidden God, and likes to cite the Book of Job, the most difficult to read and least Biblical book of the Bible. This makes sense, as Job challenges traditional notions of Divine intervention, a theme central to Unsong.

The Jobian redactor explains that during the War in Heaven, God didn't intervene because He was catching up on paperwork. But by the end, we're assured that God had a plan all along and it was "good"—though this reads more like a desperate attempt to patch leaky plot threads with QALY reasoning before it drowns in self-contradictions.

This fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of the Book of Job. While the book, like the J redactor, questions Divine justice, Job himself does not. The Book of Job ultimately teaches the opposite lesson - that humans cannot plumb God's ways. Instead of trying to go with the flow of Divine inscrutability, J attempts to "solve" the problem of evil.

J’s perspective manifests most clearly through the Ana character, who appears to be the Scott Alexander's self insert of a philosophical outlet. She declares, "I really don't think that the same God who hath endowed us with reason intended us to forego its use," missing the point that using reason might include recognizing its limitations.

This explains the J source's most distinctive features:

• Miracles become system glitches rather than manifestations of divine will

• The Tetragrammaton becomes a mechanical kill switch

• Modern reality is depicted as running entirely on natural laws with Uriel’s support

• Evil is reduced to "unpleasant feelings," with death being merely the most unpleasant thing to weather.

The result is a theology that misses the entire point of Job. Instead of learning to accept Divine inscrutability, it tries to debug it. Instead of acknowledging that God's apparent absence might reflect our limited view from the shore, it posits a deity who has literally abandoned ship, going so far as to suggest that parts of the Bible itself might have been written by entities, or redactors, other than God. Such as Uriel. The central point of Job, that God's omnipotence and omnipresence do not guarantee human understanding, is a depth Unsong fails to fathom.

This reflects many rationalist attempts to navigate exploration of the spiritual dimension pretty well. Like trying to debug the “problem” of the ocean's salinity, the J source keeps searching for logical explanations while missing the bigger picture.

From a religious perspective, everything in the world is miraculous, and modern science only heightens this awareness by revealing the countless "coincidences" necessary for life. Just as the ocean's precise chemistry creates a "Goldilocks zone" for marine life, the universe's fundamental constants create the conditions for existence itself.

The J source, however, lacks the humility to accept these depths. Like a programmer trying to optimize the ocean's code, it sees only a system in need of debugging, missing entirely how the very complexity that seems to need "fixing" is itself evidence of Divine wisdom.

The Elokist Source (E):

(As context: In Orthodox Judaism, pronouncing divine names is avoided, using substitutions like "Elokim" for Elohim and "Hashem" (literally "The Name") for the Tetragrammaton. This practice is rooted in the commandment against taking God's name in vain (Shemot 20:7) and extensive rabbinic teachings about treating divine names with sanctity. Therefore, I use "Elokim" in this review.)

“E” surfaces wherever Unsong demonstrates suspiciously detailed knowledge of Orthodox Jewish terminology and practices.

The E source's distinctive features include:

• Orthodox Jewish practices presented with ironic distance

• Breaching religious boundaries

• Subversion of traditional interpretations

Consider how seamlessly Unsong weaves discussions about Shabbat observance and kosher dietary laws into the plot. I theorize that this hypothetical author must have spent a significant amount of time in Orthodox Jewish culture, as some of the references are too specific to have been drawn from Wikipedia. My best guess is that the E source likely comes from Scott's connections in the AI and rationalist communities — where many formerly Orthodox Jews have found a new habitat in which to apply their pattern-matching abilities.

The E source treats Jewish mystical concepts with the exact combination of familiarity and skepticism that you would expect to flow from someone who grew up immersed in these waters, but now views them from the heights of a rationalist lighthouse. This source's contributions explain how Unsong manages to be both impressively broad in its Jewish references and simultaneously misguided in its understanding. I consider E responsible for much of Unsong's drift from reverence.

Who among Scott’s acquaintances fits this pattern?

There could be more than one possibility, and I don’t know Scott Alexander in real life, so I will not speculate. I hope that a reader of this book review will be able to pattern match for me.

The Diversity Consultant (D):

The wake of a professional diversity consultant seems to flow throughout Unsong. Consider the evidence in the Comet King storyline alone:

• He fishes for mothers from different ethnic backgrounds

• Each child receives a meaningful name in their mother's ancestral language

• There's even explicit commentary about how he "didn't want to offend his subjects by having children from just one ethnic background"

• The narrative carefully balances diverse representation across multiple cultures

The Diversity Consultant helps Unsong navigate through diverse cultural waters, while keeping all his readers aboard. Like Twain's riverboat pilots who could read every snag and shoal in the Mississippi, D charts a course through potentially dangerous cultural currents, adding depth to both the story's world and its creation. For many large organizations, this expert navigation through complex cultural waters is often achieved by hiring a consultant.

The Pun Source (P):

This distinct authorial voice specializes in marine mammal wordplay. This source's contributions are anything but a fluke, and surface with clear porpoise throughout the text. Wherever you find a theological discourse or a stressful plot point, this author shows an uncanny ability to dredge up obscure cetaceans to support even the most ridiculous claims.

The P source's contributions are characterized by:

• surfacing whale puns at the most unexpected moments.

• Extended marine metaphors that seem rather fishy

• Obscure cetacean species pirated from unknown documentaries

• An compulsive need to breach serious discussions with aquatic wordplay

• A determination to make every plot point more fin-tertaining

• Arguments that marinate in humor but that don't hold water, on net

• Jokes that are often orca-ward

This source seems to operate independently of the others, like a comedy relief character who wandered in from a different voyage entirely. While the J source grapples with theodicy and the E source provides Jewish terminology, P remains singularly focused on working marine mammals into every possible situation, regardless of theological or narrative appropriateness.

The sheer scale of nautical and whale puns suggests someone who's really gone way, way, way overboard with this particular literary device. They must have had a whale of a time collecting these references, though their efforts to make them fit often sea-m rather crabbed. Still, you have to admiral their commitment to the bit—they never miss an opportunity to make a splash, even when the current is clearly against them. Some might say they're just trawling for attention, but I cod-n't help but respect the shear buoyancy of their punmanship. I fin-d their dedication to the craft whale-ly finspiring.

You should Jonah that I’m whale-ly sorry. I tried to run away to Tarshish, and tarnished this book review with my punning instead.

Conclusion: A Whale of a Theory

While attempting to harpoon several theological flounders, what surfaced was something unexpected: evidence of multiple whales swimming in Unsong's vast ocean, not just one Leviathan of a writer. Like different species of marine life converging at a rich feeding ground, these distinct voices most likely share their habitat in that most Silicon Valley of ecosystems: a Bay Area group house.

The voices we've identified — the theodicy-obsessed J source diving deep into questions of divine justice, the ex-Orthodox E source drifting from traditional waters, the professionally inclusive D source carefully navigating cultural currents, and the compulsively pun-making P source breaching the surface with cetacean wordplay — tell us something fascinating. Whether debugging cof or crafting puns, each contributor seems to be grappling with the same eternal questions, just through different lenses.

Speaking of Bay Area connections. Did you know that gray whales migrate along the California coast each year, their ancient routes passing right by Silicon Valley? There’s something oddly appropriate about these massive creatures cruising past the birthplace of Unsong.

Like the gray-robed Comet King, whales move between the mammalian and ocean worlds, guided by patterns most never notice—sometimes picking them up by echolocation, mapping the deep with sound the way astrology once mapped heaven. Though in Unsong's case, the migration seems to have been from religious tradition to rationalist interpretation, not from Arctic feeding grounds to Mexican breeding lagoons.

Perhaps there's something perfect about this theory: just as Unsong's universe needed multiple debuggers to keep reality running, the book itself might have needed multiple voices to tackle its ambitious scope.

Whether or not you accept this theory, the irony is delicious: just as Unsong's characters discover their reality was authored by multiple Divine debuggers, we've uncovered evidence that Unsong itself might have been debugged by multiple authors. Our P source would shore-ly appreciate this meta-level fin-ishing touch.

Disclaimer: This analysis is purely speculative, and intended to provoke thought rather than make accusations. The Jewish elements of this review draw heavily on Rabbi Micha Berger's blog Aspaqlaria, which is a good source for authentic Jewish perspectives.