Blog/2025-10-12/Word Magic

I've been reading Unsong by Scott Alexander, and I happened to also encounter Peter Thiel and Sam Wolfe's essay Voyages to the End of the World (VEW) around the same time. Unsong is a fun read because the setting is clearly from someone either educated in or who grew up in Jewish tradition and is using the toolkit provided by that religion to create a science-fiction world where it's semi-real. VEW, on the other hand, appears to be using the same sort of technology of word allusion and relationship in a word-association sense that is quite entertaining. The strange thing here is that the Thiel essay seems to take the whole thing seriously.

Some of the Unsong jokes are just straightforward puns like this, played for a joke in-universe, and they're fun to read.

“Hmmmm,” said weird-hair-girl, and she made a show of thinking about it. “I’ve got one. How long did Joseph spend in the belly of the whale?”

“Three days and three nights,” he said practically instantly, before I could warn him.

“Oh, so sorry,” said weird-hair-girl.

David looked at her. “I can quote you chapter and verse. Jonah 1:17.”

“…would be a lovely answer, if I’d asked that. I asked you how long Joseph was in the belly of the whale.”

The rabbi trap had been sprung. His face turned red.

“Uh,” he said, “there’s nothing in the Bible saying for sure that Joseph didn’t spend time in a whale too.”

“Nope,” said weird-hair-girl. “I’m no rabbi, but I am pretty sure that zero, zilch, nobody in the Bible spent time in a whale except Jonah.”

“And the wives of the men slain in Sennacherib’s invasion of Jerusalem,” I interjected before I could stop myself.

Two sets of eyes suddenly pivoted my direction.

“The wives of the men slain in Sennacherib’s invasion of Jerusalem,” said David, “did not spend time in a whale.”

“Oh, they absolutely did,” I said, because at this point I was in too deep to back out. “They were very vocal about it.”

Weird-hair-girl raised one eyebrow.

“It’s all in Byron,” I said, then quoted: “And the widows of Ashur were loud in their whale.”

— Scott Alexander, Unsong, Chapter 5

But also, there are the other word-play world-building jokes like the word form M-L-K reappearing through history starting with Melekh (King) all the way to Martin Luther King (MLK twice over, initials and last name). These are fun little ways of drawing a thread through history to create this world where all these references are repeating and fractal and represent this universe where words matter in a magical way. For example

The timer read 4:33, which is the length of John Cage’s famous silent musical piece. 4:33 makes 273 seconds total. -273 is absolute zero in Celsius. John Cage’s piece is perfect silence; absolute zero is perfect stillness. In the year 273 AD, the two consuls of Rome were named Tacitus and Placidianus; “Tacitus” is Latin for “silence” and Placidianus is Latin for “stillness”. 273 is also the gematria of the Greek word eremon, which means “silent” or “still”. None of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.

— Scott Aaronson, Unsong, Chapter 1, Dark Satanic Mills

Well here's a similar sort of high-inference reading of Bacon's New Atlantis in VEW

Joabin’s being Jewish and gay fulfills two of Daniel’s Antichrist prophecies: “Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, nor the desire of women” (Dan. 11:37). We also know that Joabin descends from a lost tribe of Israel, implied of the Antichrist in Revelation 7:4–8. And in Paul’s telling, the words that herald the Antichrist’s appearance are “Peace and safety!” (1 Thess. 5:3). As we recall, Bensalem translates as “son of peace” or “son of safety.” We should also consider Joabin’s odd boast of Bensalem’s virginity in light of Saint Jerome’s speculation that the Antichrist would be born of a virgin. In the apocryphal “Testament of Solomon,” Solomon commanded demons to build his temple. Salomon’s House, the temple rebuilt, employs the same labor.

— Peter Thiel & Sam Wolfe, Voyages to the End of the World, First Things

This essay, too, draws all these lines between various ancient allusions in a similarly word2vec cosine similarity approach. But rather than treating them as world-building entertainment they play them straight. In the essay, we are to believe that this is real and in this world. The writing style isn't unusual. The "everything is linked" thing and historical coincidences are in everything from Marvel characters having been kings or heroes of old to conspiracy theorists positing the idea of Masonic control of the world. But this is an earnest attempt by a successful person to convince us that the Antichrist is real and coming which makes it somewhat interesting.

Given the current paradigm shift underway of LLMs, I can't help but be reminded of the way that these neural networks operate. There is a similarity to their functionality in two ways: intermediate layers and chain of thought. Starting with the assumption that Peter Thiel's success is from being able to better model the world and from the assumption that he isn't writing essays because he is trying to deceive you into something, I think I see a parallel.

The first thought I had was about intermediate neuron layers and attempting to either slice off various layers of a network or to simply terminate the inference at some point. Intermediate neuron layer outputs are not meaningful on their own. You could interpret them as text after feeding some subset of them to a later layer in some combination and then 'convert to text' but that doesn't mean anything if the whole model was trained on something and you've just shaved off the last few layers. This doesn't seem particularly useful to think about, though, because nothing here fits well enough together. What does it mean to take out a layer? Where do the outputs go? Which ones do you link to which later ones with what weights? What does it mean to 'convert the vector to text'? Ironically, this seems like a nonsensical thought cul-de-sac.

The second seems closer to what we see here: LLM chains of thought can often be entirely nonsensical and yet help them conclude the right things:

(Dimethyl(oxo)-lambda6-sulfa雰囲idine)methane donate a CH2rola group occurs in reaction, Practisingproduct transition vs adds this.to productmodule. Indeed"come tally said Frederick would have 10 +1 =11 carbons. So answer q Edina is11.

— Arun Jose + DeepSeek R1, Will Chains of Thought Stay Readable for Long, The Information

Chain-of-thought style LLM reasoning is therefore not quite the same as the kind of logical reasoning we purport to employ as people. It isn't legible in the form that it is written there and one cannot use that intermediate trace in any reasonable way to produce outputs. One can't even use that trace in another LLM to produce a useful output. So what if we are like that in our internal thoughts. We are more constrained by our language to not produce the illegible seeming-nonsense that DeepSeek R1 did there but what if our intermediary thoughts are just as wild pattern matching exercises that go through later transformations to finally determine our actions? If we then tried to reveal the pattern of our thoughts, it might look a bit like Thiel's essay: unrelated relationships drawn together to form some sort of coherent thread through time telling us what to do and what to predict is about to happen.

Perhaps there are many out there (surely Sam Wolfe is hopefully among them) who can take Thiel's essay and its allusions and inferences and slot it into their minds such that it aids their decision-making in a real sense. For my part, I can draw something from it but not very much perhaps due to the incompatibility of our respective minds. In the end, all I got from Peter Thiel's Antichrist works are reinforcements of things I already believe: that ossification is always imminent.

I understand his claims to be that crises (both manufactured and otherwise) will provide an opportunity for heavy regulation of individuals under the guise of fighting those crises; and that AI doomerism, rampant environmentalism, climate change and so on are examples of these crises. One could see the Antichrist structure to either be a rhetorical flourish or a deliberate technique to win approval among a group more willing to hear it in these terms than in the drab language of "regulation ossifies development and encourages centralization of power". But I choose to see it as this: a glimpse into the internal thought structure of a mind capable of effective market prediction which has generally illegible intermediate states.