“I spread the map out on the dining room table, and I held down the corners with cans of V8. The dots from where I’d found things looked like the stars in the universe. I connected them, like an astrologer, and if you squinted your eyes like a Chinese person, it kind of looked like the word ‘fragile’. [...] I erased and connected the dots to make ‘porte’. I had the revelation that I could connect the dots to make ‘cyborg’, and ‘platypus’, and ‘boobs’, and even ‘Oskar’, if you were extremely Chinese. I could connect them to make almost anything I wanted, which meant I wasn’t getting closer to anything. And now I’ll never know what I was supposed to find. And that’s another reason I can’t sleep.”
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (emphasis mine)
Well, sort of—the protagonist is a child who tries to decipher a clue for a treasure hunt and so he realizes that a model that can predict anything is useless.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (emphasis mine)
The “23 Enigma” is the Discordian belief that all events are connected to the number 23, given enough ingenuity on the part of the interpreter.
Apophenia.
Well, sort of—the protagonist is a child who tries to decipher a clue for a treasure hunt and so he realizes that a model that can predict anything is useless.