Predict whether Scott Alexander's Kabbalistic fantasy novel will be published (in that you could buy a physical copy of it) by 2025, ten years following the release of its prologue online.
It would be cool to see Unsong published, but I will take appropriate action if you feel this market should not exist, Scott.
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Couldn't you already buy a vanity print of it if you wanted to? What's the threshold in terms of counting as being published?
@bw Oh, I didn't know that. I'm conflicted on whether this means I resolve the market positively. The subtext in my own head was that this would require it to be officially published to resolve positively. That was not mentioned in the actual text description of the market though. I will wait.
@IshaanKoratkar The original text was not clear, which is why @Tripping asked for clarification about exactly this scenario. Your answer seems pretty clear.
Can anyone predict whether UNSONG will be published using Kabbalah instead of aggregated bets? It would be more fitting.
@IshaanKoratkar
Everything is vaguely isomorphic to the Kabbalah (with a crack, of course). If I pick, say, a Leonard Cohen lyric at random, it should contain within it patterns of the future. The publishing of UNSONG is one such pattern.
“Who in this merry, merry month of May. Who by very slow decay.”
May is the fifth month, and the third month with 31 days. 3 times 1 is only 3. GPT-3 – an infinitely schizophrenic oracle whose graphical representations all look like a sephirot tree – was released in 2020, five years before 2025. The fifth jhana in Theravada Buddhism is the first of the “boundless jhanas”. The internet is boundless, and from it UNSONG sprung. May is given the epithet “merry” by Cohen – likely referring to the Virgin Mary. Mary gave birth to Jesus, the way the internet gave birth to Unsong.
The first sentence in the lyric is merely establishing UNSONG’s existence and inception. The next one predicts its death.
Publishing can be viewed as a kind of death. The original vision of the author has fully decomposed from the realm of their soul, its leaky corpse oozing literary fluid into our reality. “Who by very slow decay” is the title of one of Scott’s essays about palliative care. Leonard Cohen died by fall after suffering palliative care. Fall implies leaves falling, and leaves are another word for pages. In “Who By Fire” Cohen foreshadows this by saying “Who in her lonely slip.” Slip here refers to paper again. Leonard is referring to himself as a woman because he is not referring to himself. He is referring to Madonna, who fell upwards into heaven.
Tying this together, UNSONG will fall upward into the heaven of a hardcover copy (remember – there’s a crack in everything) by 2025. I reverse my original bet.
@whybyfire Apparently the overt meaning of "in this [...] month of May" was applicable. Perhaps "very slow" indicated the end of the month, i.e., as late as possible.