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- [00:00]
T Nguyen
Playing is taking normally useful resources and wasting them for fun.
- [00:04]
CT Nguyen
Wasting them for fun.
- [00:06]
T Nguyen
But okay, here's the big but. It's only a waste galactically if you thought that stuff was pointless. The other notion of playfulness that I find really useful, which he says that playfulness is, is the ability to move lightly between worlds. There's worlds of rules and landscape and meaning. And sometimes you might be in the business world and you're focused on profit. And sometimes you might be in the family world and sometimes you might be in the artist world trying to be expressive. One way is to just inhabit one these worlds like permanently. But another thing you can do is to realize there are different worlds you can shift between and not be stuck in them. And she says to be playful is to inhabit the world lightly and creatively. There's two different things really good at role shifting versus being willing to completely transform yourself and get yourself stuck in a role forever. One worry might be there's one thing which is playfully being able to shift into different roles. And there's another thing that this world might reward which is psychopathically committing yourself to a hyper simplified role and never being playful with it. Attention and value are so interlinked. What you value is what you pay attention to. One of the ways that games work is that the scoring system guides what you're trying to do, which deeply guides your attention. Reiner Konizio is my favorite game designer. Has this moment where he's like the most important thing in my game design toolbox is the scoring system, because that tells the players what to care about, what to want in the game. Games are the art of agency, right? They work in the medium of agency. Some games are incredibly good because they give you enormous agency. But some games are really good because they hyper constrict your agency. Soccer is interesting because it takes away your hands.
- [01:40]
CT Nguyen
Welcome to dialectic episode 36 with CT. Nguyen T is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah where he studies values, games, agency, art, aesthetics, metrics and data, and more. His new book, the how to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game is out now. He's also the author of Agency as Art where he explores how game designers work in the medium of agency in the same way that a painter might work in the medium of what we see, a musician, what we hear, and so on. The game designer sculpts the player's agency by harmonizing their abilities, their goals and their obstacles, making it easy for the person to act and also allowing the player to take on different forms of Agency. I was first exposed to tea and this idea in one of my favorite podcast interviews of all time, where Ezra Klein interviewed tee back in 2022 where he talked extensively about this, as well as a paper he wrote called How Twitter Gamifies Communication, Other ideas like why QAnon is very much like a video game, and more I reached out to T about a conversation last year and was excited to hear that he had a new book in the works for January 2026. And here we are. I flew out to Salt Lake to talk to him and we got to dive deep on the Score. In many ways, the Score combines his earlier work on games with so much of his work on values and metrics and data, and specifically he's interested in this question of why scoring systems are so useful in games. They allow us to explore agency, they allow us to be more playful, they allow us to take on different roles and explore our values, and then scoring systems and gamification in the real world instead flatten us and flatten our values. He has a term he calls value capture to describe this, and in a world that is so value captured, one where we're in such a rush to quantify and measure everything, unfortunately we miss out on the things that are harder to measure and thus I think, and T would agree, that we strip our lives of meaning. I split the conversation into two parts. The first is focused on the local, the individual side, individual agency, how we explore individual values, what good values might be, what the shape of them are, how video games allow us to explore those attention, and why attention is upstream of almost all value. And specifically this really compelling bit where we talk about the difference between recognition and perception, and ultimately why playfulness and a playful approach is so powerful across all this. And then the second part of the conversation zooms out and goes to more of a global level, talks about society and how metrics and data seem to rule so many of our decisions. We also talk about how we can still scale trust. We can still benefit from science and technology and trusting experts, while also not being exploited by bad actors in the system or relying too much on just trustless systems or trustless contracts. One of my favorite ideas of Tease is what he calls objectivity laundering. And we talk extensively about why objectivity and truth are not always the same thing. And then finally we end the conversation talking more about technology and why technology is not value neutral, as many of us often assume it to be. In fact, it is laden with value decisions everywhere. This doesn't mean we shouldn't build technology but it does mean we need to be much more thoughtful about the values that sit inside of our systems and be much more thoughtful about the ethical decisions that go into making anything. I hope you are inspired to think more deeply about your values and what you care about and put more intention into how you create meaning. I also hope you are inspired to embody more playfulness as you go about your daily life. If you enjoy it, I hope you'll support T's work. The score is out now, and he goes much more deep into so many of the things we discussed today. Before we get into the episode, I want to thank Dialectic's presenting partner, Notion. I'm now full time on Dialectic thanks to Notion support, and I'm thrilled to be partnered with a company, product and tool that is so aligned with Dialectic's values. Notion is built for people doing their life's work, and it's a tool in particular for teams who are collaborating in a modern way. That means not only being able to work on ideas together, but also work natively with AI to delegate the busy work, focus on the things that matter, and have everything fit together natively without skipping a beat. It's how so many people turn their ideas into action. It's how I prepare for the conversations I have here on Dialectic. I throw everything I can find on a person, everything that stands out to me, into a document, and then I'm able to synthesize, try to figure out what's actually worth asking them about, what are the connecting dots, and so on. It's been really fun to explore using Notions Agent to uncover things I might have missed in my research process or identify patterns, whether in an individual episode or across previous episodes. I'm excited to do so much more of that this year. I can only imagine how much more powerful it's going to be. If you don't use Notion already, you can check it out@notion.com Dialectic thanks again to Notion for presenting Dialectic and thank you for supporting, listening, reading, and so on. With that, here is CT Nguyen. CT Nguyen, it's a pleasure.
- [06:34]
T Nguyen
What's up? Welcome to my insane home.
- [06:37]
CT Nguyen
One of my favorite things about this is I get to go inhabit people's worlds. Yeah, you have a. Well, first off, congrats on the book.
- [06:45]
T Nguyen
Thank you.
- [06:45]
CT Nguyen
I guess. Congrats. In the future when this is released, you will have successfully published the book. You have a bit early on in the book and you tell the story about how a student of yours kind of influenced this book and it reminded me of a Kwame Appiah quote that I love that you may be familiar with, which is in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game. The challenge is to figure out what game you're playing. What a great place to start. I think I want to take that last word because I think it's such an important word that we'll come back to a lot. And my first question is pretty simple, which is, what does it mean to be playful?
- [07:22]
T Nguyen
Yeah, this is a really good and really deep question. It's funny because there's a way that you can. The way the English language is. We have. We say that you play a game, and this is not true in other languages. The word play is always appended to games, and we assume they go together, that, you know, doing a game is always playing. But the philosopher Bernard Suits, one of the people that I truly love, pointed out that this is not always true. So he was like, look, you can be playful and not be involved in a game, right? You can be screwing around with. You can be at your job and, like, starting to make up new stuff. You can be, like, fucking around with, like, new ways to approach your daily life with cooking. And you can also, he said, play a game, but it's not really play, it's work, right? Like, you hate it, or someone's making you do it, or you used to be interested in poker and now you hate it. But it's like the way you make money. And that's not playful work, even though it's a game. So there are a lot of attempts to say what it is to be playful, and there are two. I've been trying to figure out what play means for, honestly, 10 years, and I don't have a good single stable foundation. But there are two, I think, really good stabs. So Bernard Suits says that being playful is redirecting normally useful resources to autotelic activities. Autotelic means valuable in itself. So what he means is something like, look, normally I use this logical capacity to fix things or to argue with people or get something, but then sometimes I do a puzzle, and that's just exercising the logical capacity just for the sheer pleasure of doing it, often uselessly. Similarly, this house is surrounded with weird skill toys like yo yos and kendamas, and they're all these balance and physical things you would do with your body that you would normally use for, like, survival or getting food or getting from place to place. And now you're just screwing around with it for the sheer joy of Motion. So that's one sense that suits its sense.
- [09:31]
CT Nguyen
Is that one thing I'm hearing inside that almost is like a sacrifice of resources, Is that too strong of language? Like,
- [09:39]
T Nguyen
no, that's great. So there's a perspective by which the quick way to put what soot is saying is that playing is taking normally useful resources and wasting them for fun.
- [09:51]
CT Nguyen
Wasting them for fun. But.
- [09:53]
T Nguyen
Okay, here's the big but. It's only a waste galactically if you thought that stuff was pointless. So to think when you say that, I mean, that's an easy way. That's what I say to my students. You're wasting useful resources for fun. But when you say that, you're already implicitly adopting the attitude that clear outcomes, making stuff, creating goods, accumulating resources, that's what's actually valuable. And action for its own sake is useless. And I think what suits actually thinks is. No, that's. I mean, that's actually what's important. So it's not actual waste. From the philosophical perspective, the actual waste is if you spend all your time on useless activity and have a miserable life and have a pile of goods at the end and you die unhappy. And the actual. I mean, this is in some ways just utterly like the actual fulfilling life is one where you found activity that's valuable to you. So, I mean, like, to say that wasting useful stuff for fun makes sense. And it's also like, already using the language that is the trap.
- [10:55]
CT Nguyen
Waste is amazing. I love that you use that word, though, because you have a visceral reaction to it. It's so not useful. Right, okay, so that's the first one. I think you said you had a second.
- [11:06]
T Nguyen
Right? There's two. So the other notion of playfulness that I find really useful, my favorite articulation of it is from Maria Lagones, the great feminist philosopher, and in this beautiful paper called Playfulness, World Traveling and the Loving Gaze, what she says that playfulness is, is the ability to move lightly between worlds. And what she means is, like, they're normative worlds. There's worlds of rules and landscape and meaning. And sometimes you might be in the business world and you're focused on profits, and sometimes you might be in the family world, and sometimes you might be in the artist world trying to be expressive. And she thinks, like, one way is to just inhabit one of these worlds, like, permanently and like stuckly. But another thing you can do is to realize there are different worlds you can shift between and not be stuck in them. And she says what she actually says to Be playful is to inhabit the world lightly and creatively. To both be able to move between them and also be able to like, screw with them and like in your mind, change the rules of the world that your, your soul is inhabiting. So I think like, I mean, both, they're, they're, they're related to each other. There's differences between them, but I feel like somewhere between those is some like, deep sense of what it is to be playful.
- [12:21]
CT Nguyen
What I like about the second one too is it's, it's more, it more captures what you would when you describe someone as playful. Yeah, that's kind of what you're pointing at. It's this sort of dancing is. Is. And I think we'll talk about this more later, but is creativity. You used the word creative very early on in your answer. And so I'm curious if creativity is just very common in this idea of playfulness or something more paramount.
- [12:47]
T Nguyen
Right. I mean, this is where the two of them separate. Like, I think Bernard suits the first one. I mean, he's the philosopher that I learned the most about games from. And I think in that you can see the big difference. So if you're like hyper focused. So on a sport, for example, like rock climbing, you are trying to perfect a movement and get exactly this movement exactly right. Get your body all in a line and you might know exactly what you're supposed to do. Like some, some techniques. Like I know what the technique is. I know how I'm supposed to balance my hips. I know I'm supposed to move my hands. I can see other people do it and I'm just trying to find it.
- [13:28]
CT Nguyen
Yes.
- [13:28]
T Nguyen
In a sense, that version isn't very creative, but it is like refining my movement and taking actions for the sheer pleasure of it. That's the case where they, they come a little bit apart. Right?
- [13:41]
CT Nguyen
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's helpful. I want to talk. Well, super helpful context. I think this will come back a lot. This might seem strange. And you have, I think the way you outlay you, you lay out your ideas in the book is quite compelling. I wanted to kind of attack them from two vantage points. The first part being maybe the personal and the local. And then we can talk about the sort of global.
- [14:04]
T Nguyen
Okay.
- [14:05]
CT Nguyen
Obviously the name of the book is, Is the Score. Foundational to both sides of this is the notion that we have scoring systems all around us. And I think one thing that thinking about as I, as I thought about playfulness is like, we live in this highly gamified world and yet we Are increasingly or decreasingly playful, you might say. Scoring systems, as you illustrate quite well, I think, tell us what to desire. I think the challenges in games, they give us freedom in the real world, they constrain us. And so I think to start on the, on the personal and the kind of like local front, I actually want to start with agency and talk about agency in the context of value. So like in many ways there's a central theme here to me which is starting with who am I like explore and then exploit. What do I want? You have this Carol Rovan quote about agents that I liked. An agent is some entity that considers reasons, makes choices based on those reasons and acts. And if you change the reasons that you act on, you change your agency. This notably is not necessarily that close to a popular conception of agency in my world. In the technology world, there's a popular conception of agency that is you can just do things right. It's actually less about the reasons behind what you do and more about just doing right. You don't talk about this kind of frame of agency quite as much and so you focus much more on kind of like a general exploration. I'm curious what you think about that idea of agency first and foremost.
- [15:43]
T Nguyen
Okay, let me. Can I take a long ass, step back and do a run up to this? Okay. This is going to be full of weird details that you may or may not care about. So I'll give you my personal history of working with a concept of agency. And it comes with trying to figure out games. So the reason I started working on games, which is not supposed to be a topic that philosophers are allowed. There's a tiny bit of stuff, but it was definitely not something that you are supposed to, if you're a serious student of philosophy at a serious graduate department ever work on. I got into it because I was teaching this philosophy of art class and I wanted to do a case study. And so a case study I did was our video games art. And I read a bunch of stuff and this, I don't know if this will surprise you, but a lot of the stuff I found really emphasized they were like games are art because they're like movies. They have dialogue, they have scripts, they have characters, right. And like they would like celebrate these games that were the least like a game. They're the ones that were the where you had the least freedom. You had the most like, you were most locked in to like these cut scenes or pre written that were cinematic. And I mean I like those games but it felt like someone was like Clutching for a familiar sense of importance and like ignoring. Yeah. Like I would read a 300 page book on the art of games and never hear the word play or freedom or choice and. Right. So I was kind of like clutching around for it. And I think there was this moment. It was, I think like a lot of other moments, like I was pretty drunk and I was like, you know what games are? They're like governments. They're rule systems. But for fun. Games are art governments.
- [17:23]
CT Nguyen
Yep.
- [17:24]
T Nguyen
I started working with that idea and I also found around then Reiner Knitzia, who's my favorite game designer, has this moment in this talk where he's like, the most important thing in my game design toolbox is the scoring system. Because that tells the players what to keep care about.
- [17:39]
CT Nguyen
Right.
- [17:39]
T Nguyen
It tells them what to want in the game. And I was sitting there looking at this thing that seemed to me as a game player like completely obvious. You look at a rule book, it tells you. It tells you not only what you're trying to collect, but it also tells you your basic conception of victory. It tells you, like, if we open up a board game, we might find out that we're trying to kill each other or we might find out that we're cooperating with each other. Right. Victory could be shared.
- [18:01]
CT Nguyen
Like, so it just tells you we willingly opt in.
- [18:04]
T Nguyen
Yeah, we willingly opt in. And so I ended up. What I ended up trying to articulate was that the heart of games wasn't that they told stories. I mean, they can, but the heart of games was they shaped your action so that actions, decisions and stories like, came out of you. And the way I ended up putting it was that games are the art of agency. Right. They work in the medium of agency. And I was reaching for this and I realized that people would say like, oh, they would misunderstand because agency just meant for them like activity and freedom. And that's not a good conception of games because some games are incredibly good because they give you enormous agency. But some games are really good because they hyper constrict your agency. Right. Like soccer is interesting because it takes away your hands. Like Tetris is interesting because it's like poker, like limit poker, which is so interesting. It's interesting because at each stage you have almost. You're trying to do so much with such a tiny action space. And that's actually what's beautiful about it.
- [19:05]
CT Nguyen
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [19:06]
T Nguyen
Yeah. Reiner Knittia, who's like borrows from poker, has this incredible game called Raw. And you, like, you're Trying to affect people's incentive structure. You can only do it. And again, you're only opt. You have three coins and you get to bid them or pass and that's it. And you're trying to do so much. And I realized what I was using was an older notion of agency. So I think, Carol Rovain, that quote you read is a really natural version of this. And we have this in terms like when we say that you have a literary agent or lawyers, legal agent, ironically
- [19:38]
CT Nguyen
we now are ironic. We talk about it in the. In AI Agents.
- [19:41]
T Nguyen
Yes, right, exactly. So what it is for you to have a real estate agent or a legal agent is that when they're performing their job, they're acting on your reason.
- [19:52]
CT Nguyen
Yes.
- [19:52]
T Nguyen
Not theirs. Right. They're shifting the reason structure. And at first you might say like, oh, this looks really weird. Like, oh my God, like it's very. It's this bizarre one off thing that you do in games that you structure, you change your reasoning structure. But Carol Rovain, that amazing philosopher is pointing out, she says that we do this constantly. And it's something as simple as her example, because she's an academic is, you know, I'm on a search committee and I'm trying to hire someone and I'm not usually using my own reasons. What I'm doing is a lot of the time I'm not supposed to hire who I like, who I want to hang out with. Right. Who would be good for my projects. We're supposed to, as a department, decide what we care about. Right. And then when I'm on the search committee, I, if I'm acting really in that role, I look at those reasons and I switch into. I mean, this is again super familiar. So it's like, okay, here's another example. I think one thing that happens in games is that we cancel out a lot of our reasons. Right. Like that's a good look. So if my spouse and I are playing a game normally, my standard reasons are I love and support her right into that game. We're going to kill each other.
- [21:08]
CT Nguyen
Yes, yes.
- [21:08]
T Nguyen
Right.
- [21:09]
CT Nguyen
Subversion, almost.
- [21:10]
T Nguyen
Right. But we do this all the time. So for example, this is, this will perhaps be embarrassing and revealing, but also I think it's very true. When I started teaching, I brought my full human self to the classroom. And this meant I was kinder and more open to students or of my tribe who had my sense of humor, who had my politics, who liked the same music as I did. And that's a bad teacher.
- [21:38]
CT Nguyen
You were being authentic in A way that was detrimental.
- [21:41]
T Nguyen
Yeah. And I think what a lot of us realize is when you're in a particular role, you cancel out a lot of reasons. And I think like, imagine like going to like a government office. Yeah, yeah, right. And having the person treat you as a full person and giving you better treatment. If they like you, you don't want that. It's.
- [21:58]
CT Nguyen
It's ironically, in games we're doing it for play and these conducts, we're doing it for duty or obligation or whatever, but they're.
- [22:03]
T Nguyen
Yeah, yeah, but this is the idea. So John Dewey, the great American philosopher, says that in a lot of the arts, we take something we do in normal life and, and we concentrate it and crystallize it for beauty or interest for its own sake. I think there's this thing that we do always in normal life where we enter a role and we cancel out some of our reasons and we change the reasons we act on. And then in games we do the same shit for fun or richness or something else.
- [22:31]
CT Nguyen
And that makes us see the thing that maybe we were typically subject to. We're seeing the water a little bit when we play games.
- [22:36]
T Nguyen
Yeah, we, we do you mean like we become more aware that.
- [22:41]
CT Nguyen
Yeah, when we're doing that, usually that, that whole thing you just laid out, we're not thinking about the ways we're taking on different forms of agency in most of our daily lives. Like we're. I think most people's perception would be like, yeah, of course I'm not going to be like, I'm gonna be a little different when I'm at work. But they haven't fully. And I would argue many of the people who are most successful in modern society, the ones who are really good at this. Right. Maybe it's sociopathic, but.
- [23:00]
T Nguyen
Or I mean this is. Sure, this is probably leaking into the later part, but there's really good. There's two different things. Really good at role shifting versus being willing to completely transform yourself and get yourself stuck in a role forever. And I like one worry might be there's one thing which is playfully being able to shift into different roles. And there's another thing that this world might reward, which is psychopathically committing yourself to a hyper simplified role and never being playful with it.
- [23:33]
CT Nguyen
We will get to that.
- [23:34]
T Nguyen
Yeah, we will get to that.
- [23:34]
CT Nguyen
We'll get to that later on this note. Maybe then of agency. And I want to talk about values too because I think it's critical, but since you brought it up like the. Maybe, maybe one conception of this Would be that games can make it easy to act to my earlier point, which is like the you can just do things form of agency. And the other is that they make it easy to explore the possibility space of actions.
- [24:01]
T Nguyen
I think one thing that is important here to keep in mind the kind of two levels of agency involved in games. So there's the kind of. There's one kind of agency in which a game, a specific game provides you with one particular form of agency in the sense that we've been talking about, and it fixes it and you plunge into it during the game. You suddenly become a being of only balance or a being of only like calculation or a being of only like deceit and lying. Right. Each of game focuses you. And then there's another tier of agency. I think of the other sense you're talking about, the freeing sense, the exploring sense where games as a whole let you move between them. Right. They give you the freedom to. I get to mean I get to have a choice. You know, in a lot of my work life, I don't have this choice work life. After this interview, I'm going to be grading. Like I don't have any choices about this. Like there is a kind of agency that's going to be pushed into me. But for my break, right. I can choose. Am I going to play with yo yos? Am I going to run around the block? Am I going to have a quick game of online chess? And each of these is a completely different kind of action and a completely different feel of action. And I get choice of them because of the enclosed nature of games and because the clarity makes that role shifting easier. I think that's something really interesting about games. The hyper clarity of the rules and the points makes the role shifting easier. Yes.
- [25:31]
CT Nguyen
Okay. This is pointing at something I think is actually really important, which is what I actually think you just described. There is maybe part of the difference between incentives and values, which are two very different kinds of motivators.
- [25:44]
T Nguyen
Yeah.
- [25:44]
CT Nguyen
The first one is like I have to grade.
- [25:46]
T Nguyen
Right.
- [25:46]
CT Nguyen
And. And I want to come back to the agency point because I think that part of what I'm really interested in is the you can just do things form of agency is sort of acting. It's not acting based on incentives and it's kind of acting in the world of value. Maybe for a second. Like you say, incentives can provide some motivation, but they don't change your core values. Maybe to start, like, why do you think modernity tempts us so much to overweight towards incentives rather than Acting based on values.
- [26:14]
T Nguyen
Well, I mean, I don't. I'm not sure that's the right kind of formula question for me, because my worry is about. They're always going to be incentives. And my worry is when incentives become values. So an incentive, okay, So a value roughly is just, I think whatever is your core motivator, whatever is the ultimate guider of your action. Whatever sets your choices, whatever sets how you're going to change yourself. Your values are where all this springs from, whatever that is. Incentives are things the world gives you where it says if you do this, you'll get those resources. And so I think there's one way that you can keep the world at arm's length where you say, like, okay, the world is giving me certain incentives. It's saying I have to do things this way to make money. I have to do this things this way for people to listen for me or to get enough people to tune into this show to even hear what I'm saying. So those are the incentives. And then the reason I'm entangling with them, the reason, my reason for gathering those resources comes out of my actual values. Right? So that's one structure. The thing I'm worried about is when they collapse and we suddenly forget to think about what our values are beyond the incentives. I mean, this is. This what I'm talking about is the simplest damn thing, which is the one frame of mind is to make enough money to do what you actually want. And the other frame of mind is just be like, well, here's what I do. Here's the scoring system. I'm just going to max out on making money because. Right. And not thinking about the thing it's for. I think that's just that difference should be familiar to everyone. And that's the difference between, like having a firewall between your true values and your incentives and letting them be collapsed.
- [28:01]
CT Nguyen
Yes. I think maybe I was making too big of an assumption there and sort of assuming that when I said the difference between incentives and values, I'm thinking of values as sort of the things we do despite incentives, despite clear incentives. What do you think of willpower?
- [28:17]
T Nguyen
Tell me what you mean by that question.
- [28:21]
CT Nguyen
Do you know who like, David Goggins is? He's like the ultra marathon. He's the guy who's like, wake up at 4am and carry the logs. And one of my jokes is I like, I like, don't really believe in willpower. I think of willpower as this sort of like grittiness despite maybe even clear incentives that says, like, I'm going to do something hard.
- [28:39]
T Nguyen
Right.
- [28:40]
CT Nguyen
Because in the long run, it's going to pay off.
- [28:42]
T Nguyen
Right.
- [28:43]
CT Nguyen
And I've always kind of related to willpower is sort of like the people who require willpower are the ones who haven't found a way to harmonize their real values and what the world wants or something like that.
- [28:54]
T Nguyen
Yeah, I mean, that's pretty romantic. I get to be a philosopher, but let me tell you, I have to grade 10 more papers tonight, and that's going to need a lot of willpower. Yeah, I mean, I think. Let me try something. Maybe this is interesting to you. So when I was first trying to articulate, we should just introduce the value capture term. So one of the core ideas of my book is value capture. Value capture is what happens when you have values that are rich and subtle and developing, and then you get put in an institution or a social setting that feeds you clear, simplified versions of those values, like a metric.
- [29:33]
CT Nguyen
And then sort of the incentives and the values become.
- [29:35]
T Nguyen
You were just talking collapsing.
- [29:36]
CT Nguyen
Exactly.
- [29:36]
T Nguyen
Right, right. So I just. I just. And then they take over. So value capture is what happens when you go to school out of an interest in learning, and you get focused on gpa. It's what happens when you go on social media to connect to people and you get focused on likes, or you start a podcast to get ideas, and then you become focused just on subscriber count. Not as a means to communicate what you really want, but changing what you're trying to say to just max out your subscriber count. Okay, so I've been worried about value capture for a while, and I've been trying to figure out what's wrong with it. And here's a first pass. One thing you might think is the wrong of value capture is that the world is. That you're losing control of your values, that the world is forcing your values out of something you freely choose. I don't think that's actually the right one. And it partially one of the. Okay, if that's true, if that were the right account, then if someone were forced to and brainwashed into putting on a watch and just caring about their steps or forced to, like, pay attention to their BMI instead of their health, that would be a problem. But if someone freely chose and devoted themselves to weight loss over all else, that would be fine because it was a matter of choice. I think actually one of the most worrisome things is cases where people enthusiastically and freely to be value captured. Right. They're like, okay, they Embrace it. They lose the plot, right? And they lose the plot because in some ways it's easier, right? Because the world is giving you a quick, easy tracker and everyone else understands it. So the thing I'm really interested in is trying to explain. I bet. Okay, I'm going to do some abstract philosophy. I think you'll like this. I think it'll be interesting to you. One conception of what the human, human well being is. And I mean we. This might sound weird, but we've got to talk about like well, being and flourishing and what makes a good human life. Because what we're talking about is how oversimplified values screw that up.
- [31:42]
CT Nguyen
By the way. That's, that's part of, I think one of the reasons I wanted to set the table, at least on the more personal side, which is like we're going to talk more about all the kind of like global problems we have. But at root, like these things are intuitive, we forget them. The point of living is to live a meaningful, flourishing life. I think we can all agree.
- [31:58]
T Nguyen
So let me just say. There's so many things I want to say right now, but let me just say one quick way to do it. Like I'm worried about someone capturing your definition of meaning. I'm worried about someone. And this is why the willpower question is so interesting to me. Because I think if the world can change your sense of meaning, it can reorient your will. It can make you send all your willpower and all your grit towards some simplified. Right, okay. Does that make sense? So let me give you this bit of technical background that isn't in the book because it was a little bit too technical, but you might find it interesting. So there's a standard view in a lot of economics and rational choice theory and it's a prevailing view that guide social policy that says what people's well being is, is just the satisfaction of their expressed preferences and desires. Whatever they say they desire, whatever they
- [32:57]
CT Nguyen
say, give them what they want.
- [32:58]
T Nguyen
Yeah, give them what they want, they'll be good. And the view is something like, well, we can't be intrusive. We have to let people be autonomous. We have to listen to what they want.
- [33:05]
CT Nguyen
This is sort of like the neoliberal late stage capitalism, right?
- [33:08]
T Nguyen
But this is also like underneath all of economic theory, right? This is underneath actually a lot of political science. It's like very, very progressive, very positive, very help the world. Political science scientists often work with this view that what wellbeing is, is satisfying people's expressed desires.
- [33:28]
CT Nguyen
Also not Being paternalistic, critical, because it's
- [33:31]
T Nguyen
not, that's true, that it respects people's autonomy and respect and it is non paternalistic if you just listen to what people want. One of the most interesting criticisms of this came out of, I think 80s and 90s feminist theory and came because of a worry about what's called adaptive preferences. So it turns out psychologically, a lot of this comes from a sociologist named John Elster. So if I start to limit your opportunities, your preferences will adapt to the opportunities that are available to you.
- [34:03]
CT Nguyen
I'll lower my bar.
- [34:04]
T Nguyen
You'll lower your bar, exactly. So one of the things, it turns out, was that if systemically women can't find work outside the house and they're not permitted to work in the workplace, then people will adapt their desires to domesticity. So here's the worry, okay? We create a world where half the people are not allowed to work. They adapt their desires and to fit the limited situation we have, according to desire preference satisfaction theory, we've won, we've succeeded, the world is great.
- [34:39]
CT Nguyen
I mean, and you have a falling knife, right?
- [34:42]
T Nguyen
What do you mean?
- [34:43]
CT Nguyen
Like you have a fault, like theoretically, like if you wanted to paint a really, really cynical vision of the world, it's just this, that that scenario you just described just seeps into more and more of.
- [34:54]
T Nguyen
Yes, exactly. Let me just finish that. So I just did this for my students. It was like, look, so if your view is that, well, being a good world is one in which people's expressed desires match their situation, imagine you have, here's a case where most of the world, people in the world get $20,000 a year and their desires are to have $60,000 a year. There are two ways to satisfy everyone's preferences. Make the world better or get people to decrease their preferences. Right. Does it make sense why this is in the background? So this is, this is the part of the worry is they might look to you like, oh, it's great. If we just get people to collapse their values to incentives, then they will have a ton. We, we give them everything about. They want something really simple. They want straightforward things the world can provide for them. They. And then things are great. And I think part of the deep thing I've been convinced of is that desire preference satisfaction theories of well being aren't right. And this also means that strict autonomy about values isn't right, that you can have the wrong values. Right. And a lot of what I'm worried about is the systems by which you might be convinced to fully commit yourself to Very simplified values that diminish your self.
- [36:21]
CT Nguyen
Yes. And it's reflexive.
- [36:24]
T Nguyen
Did I get. Are we in the ballpark what you want to talk about?
- [36:28]
CT Nguyen
You might have the wrong values. Is something you said. What is this? What is the. This is a thorny question, surely. And it's clear that maybe the wrong values. We don't want flattened values. Right. What is the shape or the texture directionally of good values?
- [36:43]
T Nguyen
Okay, this is the most interesting question. Okay. There's one way I can imagine this conversation going in which you ask this question and someone else seated here would try to give a specification of what the right values are. That is not the way. One of the things I think that I've been convinced by is that the right values for a particular person to have are incredibly dependent on a lot of details about the particular person, Their particular context, their particular psychological profile, their particular place in the world. Elijah Milgram, a philosopher who's been really influential to me, has this view that you don't calculate the right values for you from the top down by, like, thinking about some abstract conception of the good and then, like, deducing it. You have to try them out and see if they work for you. And one of the things he ends up saying is we get these signals. If you have a value that works for you, you thrive. And if you have a value that doesn't fit you and your situation, you fall apart. And some of it's dependent on your personality, but some of it's dependent on the place you're in. There's this example. One of my favorite examples of anything comes from Jane Jacobs, the Rise and Fall of Great American Cities. And she has this moment where she talks about how she says a lot of people will come from rural areas to New York, and in rural areas, they'll come in with a value they highly value. Friendliness. Right. Like making eye contact, chatting with everyone you meet. And then they come to New York and everyone seems like an asshole because no one's making eye contact. And, like, if you try to talk someone up in the subway who got their headphones on, they'll, like, bite your head off. Yeah. And then you spend some time there, and you realize the value of friendliness does not work when you're in the subway with people all day long. The big city is so packed that you need to actually deeply value respecting other people's privacy. And it's not that one of these
- [38:52]
CT Nguyen
values, like an evolutionary fitness for that environment.
- [38:54]
T Nguyen
Exactly. It's a fitness. So it's not like one of these values is better than the other. It's that some values are suited for some context and some values are suited for others. And cross multiply the context sensitivity of values with the fact that different values will be good for different personality types. And then what you get is the view is something like value should be tailored to you. But this is not the same view as you have the freedom to pick whatever values you want. It's that your values need to be carefully tailored sensitively to your environment and place, often using as a guide the particular signals of your emotions, how you feel.
- [39:37]
CT Nguyen
This is kind of what I'm. I guess I'm glad you answered this way when. I guess I'm trying to ask when I say what is the shape of good values? I think is inside of that last statement which you made, which is the point here. Also, I think so much of this is running against like there's a broad feeling that we have like a meaning crisis, especially for young people.
- [39:54]
T Nguyen
Yeah.
- [39:56]
CT Nguyen
Your central contention is like one of the main reasons is people need to choose their own values. The history of the world is actually that like values are issued to you top down. And not necessarily in this like post modernity metrics or excuse me, incentives and values flattening. But in like the state tells you what to value, or the church tells you what to value, or your family tells you what to value. And so I guess there's like, I, I'm feeling some tension which is like, I think it's really profound. I. And I, I'm 10. Maybe, maybe it's because I'm a young person in 2025. I tend to agree that we should choose our own values. And yet that doesn't mean you should just choose any values. Right?
- [40:33]
T Nguyen
Right.
- [40:33]
CT Nguyen
Like there are good values. Right.
- [40:35]
T Nguyen
There's, I mean, in the background, like, hopefully it's all right. You're, you're, you're getting a particularly wonky philosophy techie version.
- [40:42]
CT Nguyen
This is what I was looking for.
- [40:43]
T Nguyen
Okay, good. There's. I just want to go back and say, like, I think we should be really careful about the difference between. You choose your own values and you tailor them to the specific context. Right. It's not just a matter of choice. I think this is similarly, like, I was just talking to my spouse about this. A lot of people want to collapse this to this distinction between objective and subjective. Like either values are objective or they're
- [41:06]
CT Nguyen
fully subjective, almost like morals and feelings or something.
- [41:09]
T Nguyen
And if they're objective, they're universal and if they're subjective, they're just you and your feelings. And I say, no, you can have better and worse values. You can get the wrong values, but whatever. The right ones are deeply tailored to what you are. So it's less about choice and more about sensitive detection. It's a mixture of. Does it make sense? It's a mixture of both invention and, like, listening. You can decide. You can. I mean, one of the things that Lij Milgram's this beautiful. You would love this paper. It's called On Being Bored out of One's Mind. Says you might have a theory that this is the right value for you. And you go to grad school and you think, I'm going to do this thing. And then you're just miserable and you're. That misery is a detection.
- [41:48]
CT Nguyen
And then you start relying on willpower, by the way.
- [41:50]
T Nguyen
Right. Then you start cranking through. And at some point. Right. At some point, you have to listen to the signal that this is a terrible value. You're not. Yes. Flourishing.
- [41:59]
CT Nguyen
Right.
- [41:59]
T Nguyen
Okay.
- [42:00]
CT Nguyen
Yes. Yes.
- [42:00]
T Nguyen
So. Oh, my God. We. What was the question? I. I gotten lost.
- [42:05]
CT Nguyen
I think what I'm trying to square is.
- [42:07]
T Nguyen
Is. Oh, from outside. From outside.
- [42:09]
CT Nguyen
Yeah. Yeah.
- [42:11]
T Nguyen
Okay. I think this is so. One of the reasons I also really like this kind of feminist 90s value literature is that before this, there's this kind of, like, fantasy. And I think some of it we inherit from existential philosophy that, like, look, your own true values, your authentic values come from you, and values from the outside are alienating and terrible. And that can't be right. Like, we get value. Like, we soak up our values.
- [42:38]
CT Nguyen
That's sort of the. Choose your values. Like sit in a cave and choose your values.
- [42:41]
T Nguyen
Like pure choice. There's this great. There's this great comment from a philosopher, economist named Audrey Kolnai that he says that there's some conceptions of value that are just too heavy and thick, that don't have any freedom in them all. But then the existential conception of value is too thin, it's too narrow. It's just pure choice. Like, just make something up. Out of what? Ignore the world. Just make something up. That can't be it.
- [43:05]
CT Nguyen
Yes.
- [43:06]
T Nguyen
So I think we get our values all the time. And even if a lot of our values. I mean, and I think, like, there's a simple version of this. Like, a lot of the way we learn to value things is by learning from other people who guide us through activities. This is a lot of. What games do. You show up, you start doing some weird new activity like climbing and you come in and you think to yourself, oh, climbing is for like getting ripped and getting a workout. And then people are. And then, I mean, and then someone tells you, like, you're climbing really brutally, like, try a little more sensitivity in your feet. And you're like, what? And then you suddenly learn that actually so much of the beauty on offer and so much of the value in this activity is something you never realized before, which is there could be like delicate poetry in your own movement. Right. And you learned this like I learned that from other people. Right. Pure existentialism of that kind of like choose your values kind doesn't have room for learning from other people when it's
- [44:04]
CT Nguyen
more top down too. Right. To go back to your Jane Jacobs or Chris Velogs, any of these ideas are about finding it through emergence and experience.
- [44:10]
T Nguyen
Right? Well, I mean, there's pure top down is the world tells you your values and take them on. That can't be right. Pure bottom up is like make it
- [44:17]
CT Nguyen
up Immaculate conception almost.
- [44:19]
T Nguyen
Yeah, yeah. And in between is something about learning and negotiation. But one of the differences is when they're not fixed from the top down, when you receive a lot of value and candidates and proposals from the world, you can balance them and reinterpret them from yourself. Like the world may tell you, you know, like taste, like, it's a bit like taste. Like, explain what you mean.
- [44:41]
CT Nguyen
Taste has been a common, a big discussion and something I've talked about with people and I think, I don't know, people in technology figured out taste mattered a few years, a year or two ago. And I think the conception of taste is often talked about as this like judgment. It's just the judgment. It's the judgment isolated. He has good taste because he knows what things are good. And taste, of course, intuitively, but also we forget is eating a lot of food first and foremost. It's a lot of inputs.
- [45:09]
T Nguyen
Yeah.
- [45:09]
CT Nguyen
Which is maybe the connection I'm drawing, which is part of what you're maybe illustrating is like perhaps what games can do and we can talk more about that, but other things might do too, is allow us to refine our taste in our bodies.
- [45:22]
T Nguyen
I see what you're going. I think taste is great in the following way. When you're developing taste in something, going it completely by yourself isn't going to get you there. And accepting external authority states isn't going to get you there. What you need to do when you learn about something like jazz is you listen, you learn, you let people point things and then you slowly start to also find your own way and refine your own tastes. And you do it through this intense exposure and careful attention to lots and lots of examples. And I mean, I think maybe that's one way to put it. I do think if the world is like forcing a very specific value conception on you, rigidly this is not good for human beings. But a thing that often happens, I think that we're losing in the metrified world is more open. The world might give you a bunch of values, honor, courage, loyalty, family, community, but it doesn't tell you exactly how to apply those concepts. It doesn't give you the precise borders and it doesn't tell you how they count against each other. So even if the world is generally communicating values to you, you have a lot of freedom of interpreting particular open ended terms and finding balances. And that's very different from the world saying, from you saying, I will value a higher subscriber count. That is a non interpretable, non plural, unidimensional thing, that there's no free play. And that's really different. I think, yeah, you have a, you
- [46:57]
CT Nguyen
have a thing where you say precise values embody a closed minded spirit about what's important in the world. And then conversely you write about poets using like a meaningful inarticulateness and how values can have these imprecise edges. Like do you have any, Maybe this is a lead into sort of the game role playing stuff. But like what, how do we, how do we move towards these fuzzy values? Like how do we sit with them?
- [47:21]
T Nguyen
I mean there's a sense in which they've been there all along. You just have to let them. I mean what we're talking about is basically the value of art. Like this is not unfamiliar, right? This is what poetry is like. The philosopher Elizabeth Camp, who's this incredible philosopher of language and philosopher of mind, has this beautiful set of essays about what metaphors are. She says what metaphors are is when you know this thing is like that thing, but you don't know exactly how. And you're kind of gesturing roughly being like, I'm not sure, but somehow your soul is like the ocean in some way, but I don't know exactly which way. And it's a way of pointing at something without defining its edges. I mean it is, it's so common to think the more precise the language the better. And there are two cases where this falls apart, both of which I'm fascinated by. One is when the world is actually vague and fuzzy as it boundaries. When the real world, when we're talking about something that is. I mean a lot of the times I think these stupid debates like is something a sandwich or a taco or a hot dog. The answer is those aren't well bordered concepts. They are essentially, we have to accept their fuzziness and we not pretend that we know things. The other case where we really get fuzziness is when we're uncertain and we want to express that uncertainty. We want to mark that uncertainty when we remind ourselves we're uncertain.
- [48:53]
CT Nguyen
And we do that by having uncertainty. Almost.
- [48:55]
T Nguyen
What'd you say?
- [48:56]
CT Nguyen
We want to sit in the uncertainty.
- [48:57]
T Nguyen
Right. I mean, a paper I'm writing right now is about the term vibe. And I think, I mean I think it's on the point of that. Like good vibes really. It's very openly fuzzy. It's like there's something good going on. And I can't put my finger more of these.
- [49:12]
CT Nguyen
Auras was the word last year. Right. It's interesting that society seems to be, or at least young people seem to be trending towards more of these words that are. It's the. It's the finger pointing at the moon or something.
- [49:22]
T Nguyen
Yeah. I think we're. I do think new slang. I mean this is, this is a paper I'm writing right now actually. I think new slang terms are often people trying to find language to express something that's important. And the rise of vibe and I think you're right about aura is people wanting to point to the need to sit in unclarity. Yes.
- [49:41]
CT Nguyen
And it's not because it's not real. It's actually very real.
- [49:43]
T Nguyen
It's very real.
- [49:46]
CT Nguyen
Maybe, maybe a lead into one of the earlier conceptions we were talking about of agency. Like you're sort of like central idea of games is that they allow agential fluidity. We humans have an enormous capacity for agential fluidity. Imperial trained me in this mode of getting people to do what you want by giving them a piece of the action. And it's not just training some tech practical skill. Imperial, which is board game, gave me a whole outlook, a whole attentional focus.
- [50:12]
T Nguyen
I love that.
- [50:13]
CT Nguyen
Like, why does this begin with attention?
- [50:15]
T Nguyen
Yeah, I think attention, attention and value are so interlinked. Right. What you value is what you pay attention to. I think one of the core things, one of the ways that games work is that the scoring system guides what you're trying to do, which deeply guides your attention. And so setting the scoring system is a way for a game designer to sculpt your attention. Right. So it's like Rock climbing, the goal is to go up. The rules are don't use any rope. And suddenly your attention has to be on tiny details of the rock and the way you balance. Right. Like so.
- [50:51]
CT Nguyen
Which you've never paid any attention. You never looked at that crevice before?
- [50:55]
T Nguyen
Yeah, never looked at it. And suddenly it's also. I think it's really. Interestingly, it's like an amplifier. Like, if you're inattentive to your balance of the rock, you'll fall. And so that game is constantly, like, not only telling you to pay attention to, but refining your attention by slapping you over and over again.
- [51:10]
CT Nguyen
We were talking about this earlier with the Yo Yo. Yeah, it's like, what a great way
- [51:12]
T Nguyen
to just lock in, right? Yep. Like, there it is. It is. I. Some people are. My spouse is very good at attending to herself. I am not. And so I find. I think this got cut out of the book. Godfrey Devereaux, one of my favorite yoga writers, says something like, the reason we do hard yoga poses is because it's a tool for meditation, because it amplifies a wandering focus. Because if you're trying to meditate just seated and your focus wanders, you won't notice because your focus has wandered. But if you're in a hard pose and your focus wanders, suddenly you wobble. Right. And you feel it is so. So a lot of the times, a lot of games, there are deception games where all the kind of normal board play is taken away from you and all you have is to stare at someone's in the face and try to read their face. There are other deception games where you're not even allowed to look or talk to other people.
- [52:10]
CT Nguyen
And your mind.
- [52:10]
T Nguyen
Yeah, yeah, you're moving stuff around. Well, the mind's a cooperative game. It's something you're moving stuff around the board and you're trying to signal and deceive people by like, like showing. And each of these things, like, focuses your attention on one particular modality of the world. And I think it, like it, like, refines it. And I mean, I think hopefully it's clear that, like, the downside of this is if the world says, like, if my university says, what matters is student graduation rates. Not. That's what we measure. And we don't measure happiness or wisdom or ethical growth. We just measure graduation rate, then the entire institutional attention becomes hyper focused only on those features that immediately poop out. Lock in a measurable outcome. Yeah, lock in is like. Lock in is such a useful term. Now it's like this is scoring systems can be give you the most beautiful part of lock in and the most soul deadening society destroying parts of lock in.
- [53:11]
CT Nguyen
What's the difference between recognition and perception?
- [53:14]
T Nguyen
Oh my God. Thanks for hitting that one. I don't know.
- [53:19]
CT Nguyen
This is obviously very related.
- [53:21]
T Nguyen
This is from. I think it's from Dewey.
- [53:25]
CT Nguyen
My favorite bit, just maybe as a prompt is you say we recognize and categorize something, we stop. Perception keeps going.
- [53:31]
T Nguyen
Yeah, yeah, this is from Dewey. So one of the things he says is that, I mean a lot of what this is really about is how we categorize things and the clarity of our categorization system. Like the whole point is the whole point of a fuzzy term like interesting or rich is that you have to ask yourself when you do an activity whether it's interesting, whether it's rich. You have to deliberate and fight and interpret. And the interesting thing about a lot of these other terms are associated with metrics for reasons I'm sure we'll talk about later is that they're very mechanist, easy to apply and so it's very easy to stop. I mean the example I've been thinking a lot about is the example of screen time, right? So if I target I want my child to be involved in creative or interesting apps, I have to make a complex decision. With screen time, I don't, it's automatic. But also screen time is a lousy category. Is it lumps together like, I don't know, my kid coding on Minecraft with the worst YouTube shorts ever. Anyway, so I'm wondering. So the difference in recognition and perception is that in recognition you apply a category and then you stop looking at the thing. The category is the end of thought. And with perception you apply the category and that helps you look at it and you keep looking further and further. And I think of like, I don't know, like a version of this is. I know people where if you do something odd, they look for an explanation for it and when they can put a name to it, they just stop thinking. They're like, yes, oh, check, he's just goofing off. Or oh, that's like, that's vacation. And then they stop thinking about it, they've categorized it and that's done. Perception is the ability to look at something, have a name for it, put it under a category and then keep looking at it first. Peculiarities and differences.
- [55:32]
CT Nguyen
I see it.
- [55:33]
T Nguyen
Yeah. One thing you might think about recognition is the problem of recognition is that categories are very abstract and it just assumes that when you say like, oh, that's a coder. Oh, that's a business person. Oh, that's a gen zer. Right. It assumes that that's all the information you need to know. And it stops.
- [55:49]
CT Nguyen
Yes, there's no more information here.
- [55:51]
T Nguyen
Yeah, it stops at a very specific level of abstraction, typically a level of abstraction that's been established socially. And it doesn't worry you? I mean. I mean, you're. You pegged this from the very beginning. This whole book is about the puzzle of why scoring systems are fun in games and so soul deadening in institutions. And the answer is often that in games we have a playful exploratory attitude where we keep looking. Not always, but sometimes. And the big interesting puzzle is why the nature of metrics as they occur in large scale institutions tends to promote this closed, dismissive vision that categorizes things very quickly and then stops looking.
- [56:38]
CT Nguyen
Playfulness and perception are maybe on some kind of continuum, like. Or some kind of similarity of vector space.
- [56:43]
T Nguyen
This is. Okay, let me just vomit a bunch of associations at you because this is super interesting and I haven't figured out all of this associational network, but the modernization I really like is Jerome Stolnitz's. What Stolnitz says is in normal life we have a very practical vision. We have a goal and we go through the world and we classify things according to our goal. And we just stop looking at things and at features of things that aren't immediately related to our goal. It's very filtered vision, which is almost animalistic.
- [57:16]
CT Nguyen
Right. It's like evolutionarily, I think that gives
- [57:20]
T Nguyen
animals a bad rap, man. That's very corporate. I think that's. Oh. Huh.
- [57:25]
CT Nguyen
I'm thinking of. I guess what I'm thinking of is like survivalist.
- [57:28]
T Nguyen
Right? It is very survival, but it's not necessarily natural. To your point, I suspect that many animals play far more than many.
- [57:37]
CT Nguyen
It's a good check.
- [57:39]
T Nguyen
Many modern. Whatever. Okay. Then he says. Stolnit says that. And this is his translation of the Kantian thought that aesthetic vision is vision that is stepped back from purposes and goals. And so it's a tension that roves freely over all the features of everything, open to whatever there might be there to find. Yes. He actually has this great moment where he says, like, what aesthetic vision is, is you let the object take the lead and show you what there is to love about it instead of having your own goal. Right, right. So this is like. This is network, like where the more hyper clear the goal and the focus ahead of time, the more your Vision seems to be closed and dismissive and non exploratory the more you pre specified what's important to you. And then this other thing, call it art vision, call it aesthetic vision, call it beauty orientation, call it play, where we seem to be one of the characteristics seems to be a kind of openness of vision to new best value. Yeah, you'd be surprised. Like why the fuck not, right? Fuck around and find out. But good.
- [58:47]
CT Nguyen
What a nice lead into maybe a critical part of what you talk about. How games can allow us to explore this fluidity is the process and outcome stuff. A couple of things from you. In games, the value of the outcome is inseparable from the value of the process. In normal life, we struggle in order to attain some goal that we really want. In striving play, we adopt a goal to get the struggle we really want. Really nice packaged bit there. And then finally when I started trying to exercise, I had only the barest conception of what it could do for me. I didn't realize how much I would find in it, how much else I would find in it. I think we've talked about this, but maybe I'll ask again just in case there's anything else. Is like what is. What about process allows us to maybe just what is the link between process and values? What about process allows us to sort of fluidly explore values?
- [59:39]
T Nguyen
I mean, I think it's. This is going to harken back to something we said at the very beginning of the conversation, but I'm worried about that that already adopts a modern frame that has crapped on processes too much. So I think, I mean, okay, let's go. Let me. I'll take a running. I'll take a few steps so I can take a running start again. One of the core ideas animating this book is Bernard Suits definition of a game. For Bernard Suits to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of striving to overcome them. So one way to put it, this is in the quote that you read is that for Suits, the struggle and the constraints are an intrinsic part of the goal.
- [60:26]
CT Nguyen
It's not the end themselves.
- [60:28]
T Nguyen
Well, there's a space, there's some variable, there's a little wrinkle there. So Suit says in practical life, what we care about is the outcome in and of itself. So if I'm trying to get to a particular spot in the city, I just want to get there. Any method will do. If I'm playing a game, if I'm running a marathon, I Have to get there by prescribed means. I'm not allowed to take a taxi. I'm not allowed to take a shortcut. It only counts as crossing the finish line if I did a particular way.
- [60:54]
CT Nguyen
You have a great line in there, by the way, where you say cheating in a cosmic sense, which is so good.
- [61:01]
T Nguyen
So what this means is in games there's some incredibly powerful connection between the struggle and the goal. Now that's just one. I've added my own little wrinkle to this. I think in games there's two kinds of play. Achievement play and striving play. Achievement play is playing for the value of winning. Striving play is playing for the value of the process. Notice though that an achievement player in a game still cares about the struggle. They want to have won that struggle.
- [61:32]
CT Nguyen
Right. And they wouldn't cheat because it would disqualify the achievement.
- [61:36]
T Nguyen
Yeah, it would mean that they didn't do the. Like they want to win, but it doesn't matter. Like someone that just wants to win the marathon is not going to take a taxi because they wouldn't. Then they wouldn't have won the marathon, but they still want to win. The striving player, which is one kind of game player, one motivational state is the person that wants to win for the sake of the process.
- [61:57]
CT Nguyen
Winning is actually just this thing that it's a constraint that has to exist for the process to be good.
- [62:01]
T Nguyen
Yeah, exactly. So it's like, I mean a lot of the times I think about, like I think about how I play board games with my spouse. So my spouse and I are good at very different things in board games. Once in a while we'll find a board game where we're matched and then we'll have a delicious struggle. And then I will find a strategy guide afterwards. And I think here's the argument from the book. If I'm an achievement player, there's only one logical thing to do. Read the guide.
- [62:26]
CT Nguyen
Win Crusher.
- [62:27]
T Nguyen
Right, Crusher. But I don't because that would make the game boring. So what's interesting is galactically I'm avoiding making moves in life that would make it more likely to win. But during the game I have to try all out to win to have fun. So I'm like kind of, I don't really care about winning because I'm not like reading the strategy guide. But in order to have the process I want, I have to try really hard.
- [62:53]
CT Nguyen
You're taking on a form of agency, of course.
- [62:55]
T Nguyen
Yes, I am adopting a win oriented kind of agency. To have the pleasure of an interesting struggle. Okay, let me go back to your original question. So you said, what is it in the process that helps us explore values? I think what I want to say is the process is where all the values were in the first place. Right. Like it's only this weird delusion
- [63:18]
CT Nguyen
that there are values without process.
- [63:20]
T Nguyen
Yeah, I mean, this is just from Aristotle. Bernard Suits, by the way, the game scholar I love, was an Aristotle scholar, and he attributes his notion of games very openly to Aristotle. What Aristotle says is that the value in human life comes from rich exercise of our capacities, our intellect and our body and everything, and our social capacities. And that outcomes, tools, resources that we make, they're useful insofar as they allow the exercise of the capacities. But in many case, what we're trying to do, we're aiming at an outcome. But the thing that is valuable is the activity, the process. Right. And then, and there are some, I have some theories about why we've somehow been persuaded that processes are unimportant. And all that's important is countable outcomes. The products you make, the money you make, the increased measurements that are applied to your scale and not the actual. I mean, I mean, if I actually wanted to rack up the numbers of success in games, I would play intellectual games because I am physically mediocre. I'm a terrible climber. For how long I've been trying to climb, I cannot justify it in any outcomes oriented way. The only way to justify it is to think, no, this is valuable because I get to be moving, because I get to be. Because the process of skill refinement, even if I never end up at most mediocre, the process of refining the skill is valuable in and of itself. I think my response to the question of what is it about processes? Why is it that that's the place to explore value? My response is something like, that's where the value is in the first place. How did we get to think that you had to look in stuff and piles of things that you made for the value?
- [65:09]
CT Nguyen
One of my favorite examples you use that links to this is the difference between a recipe and a dish. Do you want to talk. I think this comes from John Thorne. You want to talk about that just briefly for the listener?
- [65:19]
T Nguyen
Yeah. So John Thorne, who's one of my favorite food writers, who it turns out was a philosophy major as an undergrad,
- [65:24]
CT Nguyen
some kind of link, some kind of
- [65:25]
T Nguyen
connection, has this marvelous distinction between a recipe and a dish. He says a recipe is a dead thing. A writing down of how Something was made by someone once, and a dish is a live thing, an idea of balance in a creative cook's head that gets remade anew each time. And one of the things, I mean, a creative cooks who are making dishes are typically actually better cooks. This is a lot of people, I think my generation, your generation, mostly cook from recipes. And we wonder why our parents generation was better. And it's because they don't have a fixed recipe. They're like, adapting to.
- [66:05]
CT Nguyen
You have a great line in the book where you say you were mad that your mom wasn't giving you a quote, unquote, real recipe.
- [66:11]
T Nguyen
Yeah, she was giving me this thing where she was like, yeah, you gotta taste this. And you have to adjust. You have to taste the pineapple and see if it's sweet or sour today and adjust your vinegar and sugar. And I was like, this isn't real cooking. The answer, mom, yeah, give me the recipe that I can follow. And of course, now that I cook, I'm like, no, that's the real thing. It's not a recipe. The recipe is not the real thing. But I think the reason this is related to processes is I think a lot of people, I've been really interested in this thing that people have that's like the perfect cookbook with the perfect recipe for the perfect dish. And what that often has you do is following something precisely and measuring things precisely. But it's been engineered so you don't have to make decisions and you do often get a good outcome, but it's a very fixed outcome.
- [67:03]
CT Nguyen
I think there's something profound in that sentence you just said that applies to much of what we've been talking about today.
- [67:07]
T Nguyen
Yes, yes, exactly.
- [67:10]
CT Nguyen
Which is the challenge. That's the trade off is man, it would be nice to have somebody make the decisions for me to simplify things, to reduce the complexity and be able to get a pretty good outcome.
- [67:19]
T Nguyen
But so let's think about what you get and what you don't get. Because I do think for me, cooking is the perfect metaphor. Here's what you get. For a clear, mechanical recipe, it's easy. You don't have to make decisions. You don't need any experience. If you follow it correctly, you will get a pretty good result and a semi reliable result. And here's an important part. The more the ingredients are fixed, the more it'll be reliable. The more you're using the same canned tomatoes and the same flour that's been standardized and is stable, the more you'll get a reliable outcome. But it'll be kind of the same one. When you cook from a dish, here's what you get. A, it'll take a while to learn. B, you will slowly, over time, develop the capacity to see the decision space and move around it to see when you can make it crispier or saltier or softer. C, you'll be able to adapt to changing ingredients and roll with the fact that the tomatoes today are really sour and not sweet. You know how to compensate for that. And four, instead of being in the mode of rigidly following someone else's roles, you'll be constantly engaged in your senses and decisions, out of your sense of tasting. Being something like, mmm, that's good, but it could use a little bit. You'll be engaged in that process.
- [68:39]
CT Nguyen
You might enjoy the cooking.
- [68:40]
T Nguyen
You might enjoy the cooking.
- [68:42]
CT Nguyen
The funny thing about all this, too, is the. When I was hearing you list the pros and cons of the first one is the. The most valuable. One of the most valuable parts of the recipe is that you're way less likely to waste the food and your time. Right. Goes back to what we talked about earlier.
- [68:57]
T Nguyen
Yeah, yeah.
- [68:58]
CT Nguyen
We're so afraid to waste.
- [68:59]
T Nguyen
I love that. It is. There's a perspective from which. Oh, you'll get it right each time. You won't waste something. Here's another perspective from which you could have had a lovely hour being engaged and making decisions and being free with your senses and tailoring something to yourself, but instead, you spend an hour following someone else's.
- [69:19]
CT Nguyen
Being a robot. Yeah. You don't get to cook. You don't have to cook. You get to cook.
- [69:24]
T Nguyen
Yeah. I mean, John Thorne says this. He says something like, we have persuaded ourselves to turn into the restaurant mindset where we've turned ourselves into our own menial laborers. And we go into the kitchen, close the doors, and follow the rest of it precisely in order to have a guaranteed good outcome. Where instead, we could invite our friend into the kitchen, cook together, get a little drunk together, make decisions together, taste together, and the outcome might not have been perfect, but we lived. But you live. You did the thing with the person and the thing.
- [69:54]
CT Nguyen
We were there.
- [69:55]
T Nguyen
And. And. And we have somehow been persuaded that the value isn't there.
- [70:00]
CT Nguyen
We've covered this a bit, but I wanted to hit it briefly. You talk about object, beauty and process beauty. You say in games, the beauty shows up not in the game, but in the player. Game designers work a step back. They shape the general contours of our action, not the precise details. I know you've also done A lot of work on aesthetics broadly, and aesthetics come up in bits and pieces. You talked about a little bit the rock climbing or maybe the beautiful experience of cooking. Why? How do we underrate the virtues of aesthetics? Right?
- [70:27]
T Nguyen
I mean, I think this is A, with games, it's a double underrated. A, we're underrating aesthetics, and B, we're underrating the aesthetics of doing instead of objects. But I mean, I don't know, like, we are in the world where people that are really good at optimizing industrial processes make a ton of money, and that people have soaked their soul into making commodities completely beautiful, moving, emotional, personal. Indie comics can like barely survive. I mean, as. As a world, we underrate it. And I think being. My suspicion is it's because the aesthetic value is one of the harder things to count in an objective way. There's not a good metric for aesthetic value, and I don't think that's an accident. It's because whatever aesthetic value is, it is by its nature subtle and variable.
- [71:21]
CT Nguyen
And it's also not recognition, it's perception.
- [71:24]
T Nguyen
I mean, yes, it is. It is. Aesthetic value is about the value of perception. And here's the thing about perception. In that sense, it is slow as fuck. If you want to be really efficient at hitting some simple top target, you should be a recognizer and not a perceiver, because you will move quickly, you will ignore everything that's irrelevant, and then you'll be able to optimize for your target. And that is great, as long as there's nothing of value in what you threw away and decided to ignore.
- [71:57]
CT Nguyen
You mentioned earlier Autotelic, which is a wonderful word, kind of one of the more compelling philosophies for how to live. Finding love for its own sake, finding your passion. You actually earlier reacted to my willpower comment about maybe it being a little unrealistic or naive or idealistic. We aren't suits. Suits writes about a theoretical future utopia where we live in a world of abundance. We have. We live in a pretty abundant world, but not a profoundly abundant one. Great things are clearly not always playful. You do all kinds of things that suck and are hard to get to, either whether it be the aesthetic process you want or outcomes that are important. And yet, I think, like aspirationally, we all hope to get a little closer to me doing this now is a little closer to things I to the auto telic than things I've done in the past. So I'm curious, like, how you've. What your relationship in your career has been to this sort of like finding the love and the joy and the internal motivation with also managing the real messy external things like is this just a thing we strive to until we die? Is it like I think people out there want to believe it's incrementally more possible. Perhaps the answer is not to naively think you can just purely be autotelic, but.
- [73:10]
T Nguyen
Right. I think you're kind of asking me about whether technological progress is good. Is that what you're asking or are you asking?
- [73:18]
CT Nguyen
It certainly leads into what we'll talk about next. I don't know if I, I, I, I suppose I'm maybe more asking just for a personal reflection on a friend of mine who I interviewed. He has this frame that's inspired by Christopher Alexander. This idea of unfolding into a life that fits you.
- [73:33]
T Nguyen
Yeah.
- [73:34]
CT Nguyen
Kevin Kelly talks about don't be the best, be the only. The goal of life is to become yourself by the time you're on your deathbed. A playful orientation to life, a way of finding beauty. All this stuff we just spent the last hour talking about certainly feels kind of the way to directionally how to get there. And I'm curious as someone who is spewing these ideas in, in a profound way and also has to live in the messiness of being a professor and all these like is it just, is that just the struggle? Like how do you relate to this?
- [74:03]
T Nguyen
I mean the, I mean every profession has its grind and you got to do the grind. And the question is whether you devote yourself entirely to the grind or whether you make space for. I mean my career through philosophy was really, it's like this value capture stuff is in part just coming out of me pulling myself out of a bad trap in my own career. I went to philosophy because I loved it it and then the same thing happened as everywhere else. I went to grad school and I got the metrics in philosophy. There's like, you know, status rankings for universities and status rankings for journals. And you're aiming at getting a lot of journal articles published in highly ranked journals. And it becomes really clear how you would game that out, which is to write fair, to hyper specialize in a small domain, write very technical small move articles and like get published by being a super specialist. And I should also say that a lot of really good work happens that way. But that path made me almost die of boredom and but I was doing it, I was walking that path. I went in the course of my professionalization from someone who was like deeply excited about philosophy to somebody who by the, and I left high school. I mean, by the time I left grad school, I was like grimly doing philosophy. And I hated do. I, like, didn't look forward to it. I had to work on things I wasn't interested in. I was writing things I wasn't interested in. And like, I had to have a dark moment of the soul. And I think I was actually saved, I don't know, by my impatience and my intolerance of boredom where I was just like, I can't do this anymore, I have to do something else. And now, I mean, still, it's really fun here to talk here. And there's this fantasy that you might imagine where I spend all my life talking about. I mean, I get maybe at best a quarter of my life to think about this stuff. The rest of the time it's administration, it's teaching, it's grading. It's like going through policy changes in the university to figure out if there's some horrible trap that's been laid for us by some fundamental. There's a lot of grind. And I think you always have to do the grind. But a previous version of myself, instead of carving out this little spot where I could do what I wanted, threw the rest of me into the grossest part of the grind too. I mean, does that answer the question?
- [76:36]
CT Nguyen
Yes, but what a privilege to have the 25%.
- [76:40]
T Nguyen
Yeah, I will say getting 25% of my life to think about this junk is like pure play. I recognize that I'm one of the luckiest people in the world that I get to just play and roam weird ass ideas for some small part of my life.
- [76:59]
CT Nguyen
We've talked around it a bunch and we already talked about the value capture stuff. I think the best place to start is metrics. And the reason maybe it's particularly relevant for me, I think the world I've spent a lot of time in, meaning the tech and business worlds particularly, they have a classic kind of guiding principle, measure what matters. Of course, the implication of doing so is that we tend to only value the things we can measure. A few excerpts choice excerpts from you in the book on metrics. Metrics are technology that standardize attention. Data is engineered information and metrics are engineered values. Public metrics get rid of intuition. They force us to justify ourselves in the cold light of general comprehensibility. They kill opacity. And finally, scoring systems don't just discover a convergence that was already there, they produce convergence. There have been many benefits to living in a quantified world. I think we our speed of progress Our collective understanding, collaboration, all these things. And yet you who basically spent a third of this book just ripping into the ways that metrics are ruining us for lack of. Maybe that's too strong a language. Why, why can't we tolerate. Why can't we just tolerate? Maybe to go back to the first part of the question or the conversation, why can't we just tolerate a quantified, metricified world at a global level and leave the subjective value qualitative stuff for our personal life?
- [78:31]
T Nguyen
I mean that would be great if we could do it. And I think the worry is that there's this constant intense suction we're constantly being. I'm not saying get rid of metrics, I'm not saying metrics are bad. I mean metrics are clear, comprehensible, accessible and portable. And we can unpack all what that means in a bit. But that's good for a lot of things. And if we just treated them as these simple, low quality but useful proxies that were usable in limited ways, as limited heuristics, as like guidance mechanisms for large scale activity, great, cool. But instead what we get we find over and over again. There's lots of empirical evidence about this is that when you put a metric in a space everyone starts to care about it and hyper orient to it. I mean here's a really interesting example. We all know that BMI, body mass index is a terrible health measure that varies from person to person. It was originally not, I mean it's been horribly abused. It was originally proposed as a useful proxy at the population level. So bmi, I mean we all know that people, some people are perfectly healthy at high bmi, some people are perfectly healthy at very low bmi. It's a huge personal variant. BMI was originally introduced as an epidemiological measure to see like, oh, if you have a whole population, a whole country and suddenly there's a huge BMI shift, that's probably a sign that something's going on. And it works great for that. As a rough first proxy at the population scale, looking at national populations and shifts in nutrition for national populations, it's a way to identify among our like food, large scale food destination deserts, you can use it for that. But of course what we find is people, once you get that number out there, tend to hyper orient towards it.
- [80:28]
CT Nguyen
It's like a personal scoreboard for that.
- [80:29]
T Nguyen
Yeah, it becomes a personal scoreboard and its proxiness is lost. People forget about the fact that it's this just really rough population level measure. And I Think that is the worrisome thing. I mean the thing you said that I really want to talk about is this measure what matters. I think, I mean, I'm going to vomit forth a lot of bad examples of metrics and I think the standard response is, oh, those are just bad metrics, let's fix them and get better metrics. And the thing that I'm worried about, the thing that I spent a lot of this book arguing, is that metrics are by their nature unable to measure certain things. That metrics, not that metrics are bad, but they're very good at measuring very particular kinds of things. Really roughly. There's going to be a lot more to say about this. Where they're good at measuring are things that it's easy to count together. The things where everyone can recognize the borders, everyone can pick out the same things and count them in the same way. That is very. So lifespan measured in years, easy to measure. Whether or not some intervention leads to death or not or save lives, easy to measure. Right. Changes in graduation rate. That's just counting how many semesters a student gets through and whether they easy to measure another. I mean, I think another example, one of the things that's really interesting in the history of attempts to diversify various institutions is early people in these efforts were always like, we need to diversify among all these dimensions. What this should not become, please God, don't let it become a quota where you need a certain number of women or a certain number of minorities and then years down the line, because that's because diversity along lines of intellectual style, creative style, background, cultural background, that's very hard to measure. Number of women hired, very easy for everyone to measure together. Right. So the worry is that the basic intrinsic nature of metrics is very conducive to targeting some things and does it really well. Like it is no accident that large scale data collection systems have given us miracles like antibiotics because antibiotics lead to a highly measurable result. Bacteria goes away, you stop being sick, eat. But there are whole other spots of human life. And here I want to put art, beauty, wisdom, happiness, richness, connection, friendship, all these things are very.
- [83:07]
CT Nguyen
But also critically, I would add, like as you talk about in the book. Health. Yeah, Like I, I just, I think it's important to acknowledge like art people might be like. But there are a lot of things that are really important, even if you view them as not that subjective that apply.
- [83:22]
T Nguyen
Yeah, No, I think this is. We should navigate to help last. I think it's one of the trickiest Examples. But I think one of the things I'm really concerned with with is when you have something really rich like flourishing and well being or even physical health and then you have near it a simplified proxy like how long your life was or how low the heart attack rates were. And that proxy begins to capture our sense of health and then minimize and then we start forgetting about the other stuff. And like, I mean again, it's not that, it's not that lives lived isn't important and it's not that we can't target it. It's like in the war of trade offs, what the metrified world seems to do is get us to hyper focus on what's easy to count at together and kind of like drown or shout out the subtler, quieter, more variable things. Yes. Okay, now let me give you, I think you're teeing me up for the vomit, so let me give you the vomit. So basically when I was trying to figure this out, I was basically I spent a lot of years trying to figure out the question of whether there's something intrinsic about metrics that made them institutional metrics that made it really hard for them to capture a lot of what was really valuable for human life. And I found a bunch of scholarship that really helped me. Two key figures here are Theodore Porter and Lorraine Daston. So Theodore Porter is a historian of quantification culture for the geeks among you in philosophy. He was deeply influenced by a philosopher of science and Ian Hacking. And what Porter ends up trying to figure out is why politicians and bureaucrats become so motivated to justify things quantitatively, even when the quantitative measures are obviously bad. And his answer is to think about the two different kinds of knowing. He thinks there's qualitative knowing and quantitative knowing. And he says that qualitative ways of knowing are rich, open ended, context sensitive, dynamic, but they travel really badly between contexts because you need a lot of shared background to understand them. And then he says quantitative ways of knowing and here big asterisk. We're not talking about quantification in principle, we're talking about institutional quantification. We're talking about how bureaucracies and large scale organizations count. He says the way that institutional quantification works is we identify a context invariant kernel, a little nugget that everyone understands the same. And we create this by removing high context detail and so create something that's portable that everyone can understand. And now we can all understand what each other means by this single thing and we can all collect into it and it can aggregate. So my Standard example from my life is qualitative assessments are the long paragraphs I write in response to student essays that can talk about their relative originality or clarity. It can assess what they're doing. In particular, it can pivot based on what they want on the person that's more creative. I can focus on their creativity. And also it can do all kinds
- [86:25]
CT Nguyen
of things really meaningful to that student,
- [86:27]
T Nguyen
very meaningful to that student, very meaningful, maybe to other philosophers, very hard to interpret for someone in the business department, school department, law school, whatever, incomprehensible to someone hiring in Silicon Valley. And also crucially, it doesn't aggregate. And I think this is really important. And it's by nature, right, if a lot of different people are being open and responsive and context sensitive and issue thousands of different qualitative responses, right? Because of the fact, the very fact that these responses are dynamic and tracking different qualities, it means that they don't aggregate. The variability in the open endedness is what makes them not able to aggregate. The fact that we fix the meaning of A, B, C, D in the letter grade and we hold it the same is what makes that information travel well and what permits automatic aggregation. So here's Porter's insight that I find so compelling and terrifying, which is that institutional quantification is socially powerful by design. And the way it's been designed to do so is that nuanced context and sensitivity have been stripped out of it. It is an artificially created, easy communication mechanism. And what it's missing is the source of its power.
- [87:47]
CT Nguyen
That's the feature. It's not a bug.
- [87:49]
T Nguyen
It is the feature and the bug. This is the trade off view, right? It is like this is, I mean, this is literally the thought that keeps me up at night, that this is the thing that gives it social power is its very insensitivity. Yes. So that's stage one. So that's something that. So, so what is blotted out. Any kind of value that requires a lot of context to understand or a lot of experience systematically removed is systematically removed. Right? Okay, that's one, that's one. The other, the other main lesson is from Lorraine Daston. Lorraine Daston is this incredible intellectual historian, one of the most important intellectual figures in the last like 100 years. She has this incredible early work about the nature of objectivity and how it changes. And you would be so interested in this and this, this book that really basically broke open the secret heart of things for me on rules. And she says that, and what we're talking about when we're talking about scoring systems and metrics is rules for evaluation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're rules for counting. They're rules for saying, here's what we pay attention to and here's is what makes. Here's what makes the number go up. Like, it's rules for what counts. So she says there are different conceptions of rules, and older conceptions of rules are. She says the dominant older conception of rule was what she calls a principle. And a principle is an abstract generalization that admits of exceptions and requires discernment and judgment to apply. Because you need to know when you might be in an exception case.
- [89:33]
CT Nguyen
The exception proves the rule kind of structurally.
- [89:35]
T Nguyen
I, maybe I have never understood the phrase the exception proves the rule.
- [89:41]
CT Nguyen
I think the essence of the point of it is that when you find an exception, it helps you model that the rule is almost always typically taken.
- [89:52]
T Nguyen
I get that. I mean, one way to put it is. So one of my favorite examples of a principle is in creative writing, I learned show, don't tell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people break that. But also, if you understand why they break it and when, you will understand why the rule generally holds. Yes. And also I need to break it.
- [90:08]
CT Nguyen
And the point isn't to throw out the rule. The point is that the rule should hold until it doesn't.
- [90:11]
T Nguyen
Right. And. And there's no mechanical way to say that you have to get a vibes thing. Exactly. I mean, in some sense, wisdom is vibes. Okay, that's the next paper I'm writing. Wisdom is vibes. I mean, exactly, exactly the point. Right.
- [90:27]
CT Nguyen
So that's a principle.
- [90:29]
T Nguyen
That's a principle. Second kind, she says, is a model where like, basically a role model. Like, so she says The Rule of St. Benedict was just the person. St. Benedict. To rule yourself that way was to think about what they would do in that situation.
- [90:42]
CT Nguyen
Oh, okay.
- [90:42]
T Nguyen
So both these rules require judgment, expertise every single time.
- [90:47]
CT Nguyen
There's no automatic way to apply it.
- [90:49]
T Nguyen
Yeah, there's no automatic way to apply like, you know, what would Jesus do? Exactly. Because it's. Because the model. The roles are often complicated and subtle. And as a result, those two have
- [91:05]
CT Nguyen
some travel and some scale. There are principles there, but like, they are harder to repeatedly.
- [91:11]
T Nguyen
Right. You need to teach for someone to really learn. Show, don't tell. They have to learn it in a context. I learned to apply it in a context over several semesters in a creative workshop, apprenticeship, whatever. Yeah. It's the kind of thing that travels. Exactly. In an apprenticeship culture.
- [91:27]
CT Nguyen
Yes, yes.
- [91:29]
T Nguyen
Then the third kind of rule she says is an algorithmic rule or a mechanical rule. And she says, this is something that's meant to be applied unthinkingly, automatically, with no exceptions, exactly as written. And then she says, the thing that I found to be utterly mind blowing, which is, she says, people thought that mechanical rules and algorithmic rules arose with computing machines, but they didn't. They arose about 150 years earlier in an attempt to cheapen labor. So you didn't have to hire experts who had judgment. You just hire equivalent, you know, basically making labor fungible. They make labor fungible. They make it so you can hire anybody and fire anybody because the rule's been made explicit. So, I mean, again, think about Life. Like recipes, McDonald's has mechanical rules, which means they can hire anybody and slot them in and fire anyone in Korea,
- [92:21]
CT Nguyen
in Mexico City, in la.
- [92:23]
T Nguyen
Right. Doesn't. Doesn't matter where you are. And note also, it works particularly well when you standardize the inputs. When you standardize the bread and the flour.
- [92:30]
CT Nguyen
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [92:32]
T Nguyen
So in that case, what it is to be a mechanical rule is to be a rule that's applicable consistently by anybody.
- [92:42]
CT Nguyen
When you say mechanical rule, you mean algorithmic. Same thing.
- [92:46]
T Nguyen
She shifts back and forth between them. In my book, I use the term mechanical just because I think the term algorithmic has already shifted in its use a little bit, and I didn't.
- [92:55]
CT Nguyen
I think it also harkens back to the incentive stuff we were talking about a little bit earlier, which is when values and incentives combine, you get mechanical
- [93:01]
T Nguyen
value sets, you get use something mechanical of cool. So here's the next way to put it. I should say one more thing. I think you'll find this interesting when you're talking about this. And a lot of her examples are mathematical. People freak out because they're like, wait, Mathematics is by its nature mechanical. And I think you have to understand how much of mathematics is not mechanical. So a lot of the times. So in many cases, what you get is a complex choice of which procedure or formula you're going to apply. You have to decide, am I going to do statistics, am I going to do Newtonian mechanics, am I going to do modeling?
- [93:42]
CT Nguyen
They might be mechanical within those, right?
- [93:45]
T Nguyen
It might be mechanical within those. So maybe here's the easiest example. I've been trying to find an example here for a while. So let's say that you want to split a pie in half. What methodology do you use? You could split it by weight, you could split it by angle, you could split it with the I cut.
- [94:04]
CT Nguyen
You choose which is so wonderful.
- [94:06]
T Nguyen
Right. And each of them is a different. So by weight is good for nutrition. Like if you're counting calories by angle, is good for visual appearance. I split, you choose is good for a sense of equity and fairness between two kids. Each of these is a different procedure. And the point is, there's actually. There's nothing not. Here's another way to put it. Half is kind of already itself a subtly complicated thing. And half by angle is different from half by weight is different from half by deliciousness or appealingness. Right. And so there's a complex choice of procedure. But if you mechanize it, then, by
- [94:42]
CT Nguyen
the way, if we lived in a nuanceless world, a detailless or a world of perfect detail, you could do. You could mathematically figure out half of a circle. But no pie is perfect. Like. Like introducing all of. Right. It's such a good example.
- [94:56]
T Nguyen
I mean, it is if things. The more. I mean, this is gonna. This is gonna point to the stuff we're gonna say later, I think. But the fewer complex, overlapping details there are, the more everything is evened out and the same. If all pies were completely identical and there was no variation in texture in them, there wouldn't be a problem there.
- [95:14]
CT Nguyen
Yes, yes.
- [95:15]
T Nguyen
But they're lumpy and delicious.
- [95:18]
CT Nguyen
Almost like people.
- [95:19]
T Nguyen
Yeah, exactly. Pies. People are like pies. Pumping.
- [95:25]
CT Nguyen
Delicious.
- [95:25]
T Nguyen
Yeah. So here's the second stage. What metrics typically. Not always, but typically prefer mechanical rules for counting, which means that they tend to recognize differences between things that are easy for anyone to recognize and highly accessible, and they tend not to pick out distinctions between things that require high discernment. So one example is. This is a very complicated example, and this is an example I find interesting because it tells us that mechanical procedures are sometimes great. So you might think that the right to vote is tracking something really complicated, like intellectual and emotional maturity. But that's something that requires a lot of discernment. So we offer a mechanical rule. 18 and 18 does not track intellectual maturity.
- [96:22]
CT Nguyen
We have chosen inside of choosing a team. We have made a set of compromises around, like, this is the best we can do.
- [96:27]
T Nguyen
Right. And in this case, I think it's totally great that we make that compromise. Right. We make. There's a case where the cost of not getting it exactly right to intellectual maturity is lowish and the cost of bias is so high. But it's not always like that.
- [96:42]
CT Nguyen
Right, Right, right, right.
- [96:44]
T Nguyen
Here's something else. I think I'm getting more of a vibe of the things you're Into Michael Endicott, who's a philosopher of law, has this great moment where he says, when you're switching between discerning judgment and mechanical judgment, you're actually trading off between two kinds of arbitrariness.
- [97:00]
CT Nguyen
Yes, I remember this. So good.
- [97:03]
T Nguyen
With discerning judgment, you let in the bias, individual bias. With mechanical lines, you shut that out, but you introduce instead the bias of arbitrarily sharp lines where things are fuzzy and complicated and gray.
- [97:16]
CT Nguyen
What a profound example that that example travels so wide, it's. Yeah, no, I mean we are deluding ourselves into thinking that one example, one choice is arbitrary and the other is objective.
- [97:27]
T Nguyen
Right? This, I mean, this is over and over again where I've ended up thinking about metrics is not. Metrics are bad. But there's this complex set of trade offs and costs and we forget we have a fantasy that there's not a trade off. And in this case, what we're actually talking about is the trade off of accessibility. And you can see it back in. It's like the recipes trade off again, right? If you make a procedure more accessible and you make everyone follow that procedure, you also cut off expertise and sensitivity.
- [97:57]
CT Nguyen
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [97:58]
T Nguyen
And you. Sometimes you want to do it, sometimes it's worth it.
- [98:01]
CT Nguyen
I want to talk a little bit, a little bit about eligibility and legibility, trust, on that note, maybe. And you talk about this as kind of one of the core dilemmas we have in this like, world where we have a huge world. Science is really complicated. You have amazing work on conspiracy theories, which we'll have to say for another time about how what's so appealing about them is that they make the world like, fit into your head. But in the real world, there's so much complexity. We have to specialize. You say a few bits I love. First off, from the outside, posers and visionaries can be awfully hard to distinguish, which maybe perfectly illustrates almost the problem. And then you say you have this great section on transparency is surveillance. You say, we limit the harm that bad and incompetent people can do, but we also limit what good incompetent people can do. Transparency leashes both kinds of people, forcing them all to operate within the public's comprehension. Back to accessibility. And then finally, we often assume that expertise is just technical experts are there just to run their machinery, like the McDonald's people. The fungibility. But the goals and values guiding it all are always obvious and accessible to everybody. But this is a mistake. Expertise involves gravity.
- [99:07]
T Nguyen
Gra.
- [99:08]
CT Nguyen
Seeing more deeply into what our True goals should be grasping the subtle values of the terrain. The whole reason you go to a doctor is that they understand things you don't. Like this is, this is a profound problem that like, I don't think has obvious answers, but I do think like at root it's about the success. It's almost about. We were talking earlier, like how much we can compress and how much we can make accessible. Like, like we are at an all time low in institutional trust. Y and so like the. I, I guess the challenge is like to go back to all the metrics of like there, there are all of these benefits we get from the, from living in metrics world. Y and yet metrics world kind of, I think makes us want to trust philosophers and academics and doctors less. Like, what is maybe. I know this is like a very long winded question. What does trust need to scale? Maybe, is my question.
- [100:07]
T Nguyen
Oh my God.
- [100:08]
CT Nguyen
That feels like the antidote to the metrics.
- [100:12]
T Nguyen
The whole reason we were talking about Dastin and Porter is to understand what metrics miss about values. So what Porter teaches us is that large scale institutional metrics typically remove high context. And what Daston teaches us is that large scale metrics typically remove expertise. And they both in some way are about different kinds of sensitivity and specificity. They tend to emphasize the things that everyone can see consistently and recognize consistently. So metrics world, there's no room for context. Yeah, there's no room for context. What metrics world I've experienced. Here's the simplest, dumbest version of this. Our department was just cut again. Like the philosophy department being defunded in favor of AI programs and the business school. And part of it is because we've been labeled an unproductive department, even though lots of people like highly ranked department, you know, lots of important publications, lots
- [101:10]
CT Nguyen
of waste, dare I say it.
- [101:13]
T Nguyen
Well, actually, here's the interesting thing. The reason is that the measure of productivity in my university has become grants, research expenditures.
- [101:22]
CT Nguyen
Right, right, right, right.
- [101:24]
T Nguyen
Philosophers don't need grants. There's a sense in which actually we're very efficient. You just need a book budget and a little. You don't need a lab. But because the metric has become research expenditures and that metric can't make the contextual shift of being like this little group over here.
- [101:41]
CT Nguyen
Shouldn't be measured by grants.
- [101:43]
T Nguyen
Yeah. Should not be measured by research expenditures because you don't need grants. Right. That's an oversimplified example.
- [101:51]
CT Nguyen
Sure.
- [101:52]
T Nguyen
I think maybe a more interesting example. The reason I'm worried about this is because this is the answer for why metrics can't capture values. Because values are context sensitive, highly expert, and metrics by their nature target what is portable, consistent and accessible, what is legible. An example that I found really fascinating here is the example of Charity Navigator. So Charity Navigator was a nonprofit, is a nonprofit watchdog that was designed to tell us which charities were good and which charities were bad, which were good and which were wasteful. And it's by the way to go
- [102:38]
CT Nguyen
back to the posers and visionaries. Like the root of this by the way is that there's a whole bunch of people. If you don't quantify, the world will abuse systems.
- [102:46]
T Nguyen
Right. This is exactly. So the whole reason we want transparency is there are fakers out there. There. Right. And then we impose a method of transparency that makes them, that tries to root out the fakers by seeing who can succeed on some publicly legible target. But that will take out two groups of people, it'll take out fakers, and it'll take out people who are trying to target something important that isn't quantifiable, but not legible or not easily quantifiable. In fact, another worry you might see is then the fakers will simply adapt and game.
- [103:18]
CT Nguyen
Yes.
- [103:18]
T Nguyen
The very now clear.
- [103:21]
CT Nguyen
You have this great concept in the book of the gap, which is almost like the gap between what we can measure and what actually matters.
- [103:27]
T Nguyen
Yep. The gap is the gap between what is easy to measure and what actually matters. And I think the Charity Navigator case is so interesting to me because for a long time what Charity Navigator used, and I was convinced by, and I let it guide my charitable giving was a throughput rating. So the throughput rating is efficiency. Yeah. A ratio of how much money is given to the nonprofit versus how much it expends out on the other end. Right. Seems good. As it turns out, it means that
- [103:59]
CT Nguyen
don't hire anyone really talented.
- [104:01]
T Nguyen
Exactly. So it assumes that a non profit research is just there to redistribute resources and not to do internal resources, not to hire experts, not to make decisions. Right. So, but here, here's. Here's the interesting. Here's. I think it why it matters. Here's. I didn't emphasize as much as I should have in the book because I think. But I think this is super interesting. In order to actually judge nonprofits actual efficacy, you'd have to understand the specific domain of each nonprofit. If you wanted to compare nonprofits that worked on housing versus nonprofits that worked on food, you would have to actually understand the complexity of how you improve an ecosystem, how you improve, like nutritional delivery services. But throughput rating is a matter of accounting. And that's the same between each nonprofit. And so there is a single way to judge them all in an apparently objective mechanical accounting system.
- [105:00]
CT Nguyen
And do it efficiently and fast.
- [105:02]
T Nguyen
And do it efficiently and fast, but at a. And so it highlights what is mechanical and similar, which is accounting. And it ignores what's actually important but highly variable.
- [105:17]
CT Nguyen
So how do we scale trust?
- [105:20]
T Nguyen
To me, I think this is super. The charity navigator example is super interesting to me because it's an attempt to scale trust or it's an attempt to get around the problem of trust by finding some. Okay, here's the problem. It was an attempt to eliminate trust. That's what we're talking about.
- [105:34]
CT Nguyen
Right, right, right. Which is. Which is very different, by the way. Trustless systems. I have a question later I wanted to ask you about. Markets like trustless systems are interesting and can be really valuable for the world, but they can't replace trust.
- [105:45]
T Nguyen
Right. This is. Here's one. One way to put it. While I was thinking about transparency metrics, a transparency metric which is made to make institutions accountable to the rest of the world to see if they're biased or not. Yeah, they're trust eliminators. Right. They try to. Instead of trusting an expert about their specific domain of what's important, they look for some public way of counting the goods. But what that means is that they're now forcing institutions not to use their expertise about what's important, but to only focus and target.
- [106:22]
CT Nguyen
Only be automatic.
- [106:23]
T Nguyen
Yeah, the simple, easily accountable values. The simple, easily accountable targets. My favorite examples of this was like when Congress put the National Endowment of the Arts under oversight because they were afraid of bias, they started measuring artistic success by box office receipts.
- [106:40]
CT Nguyen
Yes. Engagement. What a way to measure. Thanks, Netflix.
- [106:43]
T Nguyen
Exact. Exactly.
- [106:44]
CT Nguyen
Way to measure art.
- [106:45]
T Nguyen
But that's there. Box office sales, ticket sales, page views, engagement hours, all of those are mechanically countable. So the problem is. Here's one way to put it. The problem of the world is that there are different domains where people understand the special value of different things. And to actually access that, we need to trust people. Yes, but we need to trust people beyond where we can go. Because that's the whole point of trust. Right. That people are.
- [107:13]
CT Nguyen
And the point of specialization.
- [107:14]
T Nguyen
Right. Then the point of specialization. I mean, the whole.
- [107:18]
CT Nguyen
The whole
- [107:20]
T Nguyen
paradox of transparency and accountability is the whole reason we want experts and specialists is because we don't understand them. And then we're like, then you can only attempt to explain the things that we can understand. Right. That's not possible. There is a tension between transparency, accountability, accessibility and trust and expertise and sensitivity. There's another trade offs for you. So your question is how trust scales? I don't know. No, the problem is that I understand how trust works on small scale intimate life. I understand why it's hard to get trust in people at large scale and why we substitute things like metrics. And I understand why that creates an enormous degree of loss. And I don't have an answer. I don't have an answer. But let me tell you two things I find fascinating. There are two moments from my favorite texts that I've been obsessed with and I think if I can understand them, then we will understand the heart of the modern world. One is from Theodore Porter, this quantification guy. And he says because what data is, what information is, is understanding. That's been a special. Is a special mode of understanding and knowledge that's been pre prepared to travel and be understood by distant strangers.
- [108:37]
CT Nguyen
You even use the word engineered to do that.
- [108:40]
T Nguyen
And then over there's this other text I love. One of my favorite pieces of philosophy is Annette Byers Trust and Antitrust where she starts by complaining. This is a feminist philosopher from in the 80s. She starts by complaining against social contract theory. And she says there's this mistake people make where they think that morality can be bounded on contracts where contracts are envisioned as like voluntary agreements between free people. And she says that's something only rich dudes in a gentleman's club could have imagined would be the root of morality. Morality depends. Begins independence and vulnerability and relations between parents and children and dependent. And she ends up saying that the heart of trust is vulnerability and that part of the mistake is trying to secure that vulnerability perfectly. Because what it is to trust someone is to be vulnerable.
- [109:32]
CT Nguyen
Yeah, I need a contract to trust you.
- [109:35]
T Nguyen
Exactly right. Okay, this is where she's going. Okay. What she ends up saying towards the end of this beautiful article is she says the real reason social contracts are a weird place to build your morality is because it's a very specific metaphor. Because contracts are a specific social technology to make fines and expectations explicit to ease and secure one off transactions between distant strangers.
- [109:59]
CT Nguyen
Yes, yes. Which by the way is beautiful. It's a lot of immense scale. But the whole premise is actually not about trust.
- [110:04]
T Nguyen
Yes. So I mean I kind of think if you can find, I think that buyers comment about social contracts eliminating trust and using one off transaction between strangers. And Porter's comment About how data information has been prepared and engineered to travel to distant strangers. Those are like two pointers to the heart of the modern world.
- [110:30]
CT Nguyen
Well, maybe it's just the last thought on it. I guess my reaction to the scaling trust thing would just be, and I'm sure you even talk about some of the challenges here from the velocity standpoint would be like we trust the other experts. Maybe just quickly, what are the things that go wrong when we defer. Theoretically the doctors should all regulate the doctors, but that we run into the same problems you're describing even in those cases.
- [110:54]
T Nguyen
I mean the problem is that we have to trust experts from distant expertises. And then we have. I mean this is, I was working when I was a graduate student, the problem I was obsessed with, which I think is still a version of the problem I'm obsessed with, it's a problem that's actually as old as Socrates. The problem is how does a non expert recognize an expert? And the dumb way to think about the problem is to think, oh, there's some class of special experts, but really most of us are non experts in 99% of the world and experts in at most 0.01% of the world. So we're constantly having to recognize non experts and figure out who to trust. But we're constantly having to overextend ourselves and become vulnerable. And then we try to secure it with hyper accessible metrics which imagine away the complexity. They suppose that there's some easily accessible moment, some test for real expertise. But I think the worry is if there's not a mechanical easy test for expertise, then we're plunged in the, I think the true awful existential dilemma of the modern world, which is we are surrounded by people that are true experts and sensitives about forms of value and forms of life that we know nothing about. And we're surrounded by posers and fakers and exploiters. And the difference requires expertise as we don't have.
- [112:23]
CT Nguyen
The challenge of so much of this that I think maybe leads into what we'll talk about next is we want security, we want objectivity, we want answers. We don't want to have to consider the possibility we might get scammed, right?
- [112:39]
T Nguyen
I mean this is, I had this moment moment, I was talking about this stuff about trust and vulnerability. And I had a student from the back of my class like big guy, tank top, he's like, this is why I never trust anybody. You can't trust any, like they might screw you over. You can never trust anybody. You always have to take care of Yourself. And I was like, how'd you get to class today? And he was like, I drove. I said, did you go on the highway? He said, yeah. I said, how many other drivers and car mechanics have you trusted with your life today? And he actually had a meltdown down. One of the things Annette Beyer says is that trust is so intense and deep that we forget how much we're trusting. Because trust to us is like water to a fish. We just swim in it all the time, so it becomes invisible to us.
- [113:22]
CT Nguyen
Are you an optimist in the cosmic sense?
- [113:26]
T Nguyen
I don't know. You tell me. Does that make sense? But I think so. Sometimes I walk my students through this exercise of trying to figure out how many people they're trusting with their lives in this moment, sitting in this building. And like what it introduces is vertigo. Because you suddenly realize how big your trust is. And you realize. And I think there's this fantasy that we can secure it and know for certain. I mean, there's this in philosophy. I think this is Descartes fantasy. Descartes fantasy. You could start over from the beginning and only believe in things you're sure, by trusting only yourself. And that is.
- [114:05]
CT Nguyen
Yeah, if we just rebuilt the whole world.
- [114:07]
T Nguyen
Right. By the way, without science. Funny again, this mentor, Elijah Milgram, in his book the Great Endarkenment, his joke is that he thinks the great enlightenment undid itself because it started with the idea of intellectual autonomy and rethinking things. And that created so much science that intellectual autonomy became impossible. Right. And that the idea that we can think for ourselves is an old out of date illusion.
- [114:39]
CT Nguyen
The best count, and this is a whole separate. You ever come across David Deutsche, his articulation of good explanations, it maybe rhymes a little bit with your articulation of good science. Let me see if I can find it. I think you talk about it as being like having a good error metabolism.
- [114:57]
T Nguyen
Yeah.
- [114:58]
CT Nguyen
It's like something that's a sort of somewhat atomically verifiable by an intellect. Like an intellectually reasonable person. Maybe that's our best hope. And then otherwise we mix up. I mean, I. Maybe part of what I'm left feeling here is like on one hand holding a loose grip, which is just like actually objectivity is not something we're ever going to have. We are going to have trust, we are going to have failures. And also trying to make more of the world. Have good arrow metabolism. Right.
- [115:26]
T Nguyen
Okay.
- [115:27]
CT Nguyen
A lot there too.
- [115:29]
T Nguyen
I think I have found the best tool to fuck with your mind.
- [115:31]
CT Nguyen
Okay.
- [115:33]
T Nguyen
Lorraine Daston's first book is about what objectivity means. And she ends up saying they're very different senses of objectivity and they mean very different things. And the notion of objectivity she thinks that we have settled on in the current era, modern era, is what she calls a perspectival objectivity, or what it is to be objective is to be a kind of fact that being recognized, no matter what person is looking and what kind of person they are. So in this case, objectivity and truth come completely apart. Objectivity is the land of highly accessible, consistent judgments. But that isn't necessarily. And there are some things that. Where it's easy for us to get objective about out again the world of the easily countable. And there's some things in which a perspectival consistency is incredibly hard. But they might still be important things.
- [116:29]
CT Nguyen
They might still be true.
- [116:31]
T Nguyen
They might still be true. Right. So part of the. I mean, this is, this is the whole. I mean, the reason we're talking about all this stuff is because the dream of metrics is that by narrowing things down to entirely objective mechanical rules, we can secure our intellectual behavior and we can secure our judgments. So we will always know for certain we're right. Theodore Porter actually says the reason that bureaucrats and politicians reach for numbers is to avoid responsibility.
- [117:05]
CT Nguyen
Right.
- [117:07]
T Nguyen
Not having to make a judgment or exercise their discretion, they take themselves out of the apparent stream of judgment. Say, like, it's not, not me, it's just the numbers.
- [117:15]
CT Nguyen
I don't have to trust you. We have a contract. Same thing.
- [117:19]
T Nguyen
It's a dream of. If all that was important was easy to count together instantly and we could recognize it, then we could be secure in making decisions together. There would be a mechanical method, but it's not. And if, if you have subtle values that require context and sensitivity to detect, but you are so obsessed with the dream of security and so obsessed with the hope of objectivity that you will only reason using easily accountable metrics. Then you achieve security at the price of. Of any sensitivity. Yeah,
- [118:12]
CT Nguyen
We have a little time left and I want to hit. I think this ties well into this last kind of section about the way that value judgments are hidden everywhere.
- [118:21]
T Nguyen
Yep.
- [118:22]
CT Nguyen
Which maybe is just. It's another thing adding to the point you were just making, which is the real live objectivity.
- [118:29]
T Nguyen
Yeah.
- [118:29]
CT Nguyen
Yeah. Well, I think first off, it's worth noting you have a great line. You say standardization may crush souls, but it also saves lives. Lives. You are, you are decidedly not anti progress, not anti science, etc. And yet you say, when we start using any technology, we're always outsourcing some of our values. Why are technologies not value neutral?
- [118:51]
T Nguyen
Yeah, this is. This is because, like, part of this is the second attack on this dream of objectivity, which is that many of the metrics we think of, they look objective, but there's also a value choice hidden at their core. So this is this massive. This is, I think, a basic insight from the philosophy of technology and from a field called science and technology studies. So there's a presumptive view that seems really strong in our culture that tools, Technologies are value neutral.
- [119:18]
CT Nguyen
Yes.
- [119:19]
T Nguyen
That, you know, people just make. Scientists and engineers just make tools and just empower people, and then the people make the choices. And this seems, once you look at the actual details, obviously wrong. So there's some classic examples. I mean, some of the easier examples are straightforward bias. Like, technologies can be biased in all kinds of ways. One of my favorite classic examples is Robert Moses and the New York bridges. Do you know this example?
- [119:46]
CT Nguyen
I know a bit about Moses, but I'm not sure I know this specific one. He
- [119:53]
T Nguyen
managed to keep out what he perceived to be the rubbish from the good parts of New York by carefully setting the standard height for bridges and overpasses as slightly lower than the average bus. So buses. Right. So there's an easy. That's an easy. That's like case one to commit. Like, so you can encode a bias. But maybe that's.
- [120:15]
CT Nguyen
Let's back up for a second. Because just to say, like, the counterargument would be like, that's not a technology.
- [120:20]
T Nguyen
Exactly.
- [120:20]
CT Nguyen
Maybe buses are. But.
- [120:22]
T Nguyen
Yeah, so I was gonna say decision. That's an easy first example, but that's not the real thing. So Langdon Winner, who's one of my favorite philosophers in this space, he has this beautiful article called Do Artifacts have Politics? And he says, but he says one of the interesting things is that technologies actually shape and push society into certain directions, often irrespective of what their designers and users hope. So his example, one of his first examples, is the printing press. So one of the things that he thinks is really interesting is that oral communication is deeply decentralized. Like, you know, if I say something to you and you say something to them, and he's.
- [120:59]
CT Nguyen
There's no centralizing power. Right, Right.
- [121:00]
T Nguyen
Like each of us can change the news.
- [121:02]
CT Nguyen
Yes.
- [121:02]
T Nguyen
The printing press, no matter the democratic and anti elite hopes of its inventors, the printing press concentrates communicative power and communicative authority.
- [121:12]
CT Nguyen
It requires capital. Capital.
- [121:13]
T Nguyen
Yeah. And whoever has Enough capital to have a printing press. Yes. And then it's instantly demon. That's the official news. So he thinks that.
- [121:19]
CT Nguyen
Well, this is the challenge of technology too though, is like so many technologies, they actually start this way and then they democratize. And so we can convince ourselves of these ideals, of the, all the ways that we'll democratize access to power. And yet this, this, this, you could jump way ahead to 20, 25. The slope of how artificial intelligence is adopted matters a lot, not just its ideas.
- [121:40]
T Nguyen
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so in a very abstract sense, like many technologies have world shaping powers. In the specific case of metrics, one of the things I find really interesting is people think that metrics are neutral and objective, but metrics capture. So to have a metric to count something, we need a categorization system to count it together.
- [122:13]
CT Nguyen
Right? Yeah. Counting can't be value laden, can it?
- [122:17]
T Nguyen
Right. Counting can't be value laden, can it? So Jeffrey Barker and Susan Leigh Star have this great book called Sorting Things out where they look at classification systems and what they're really interested in is the interestedness of the classification systems that are the foundation of, of data and metrics. Okay, so here's a simple example. What they say is every category. So we can't keep track of everything in the world. We need to reduce the granularity in order to store it and aggregate it. But there are decisions about where to reduce that granularity. So a simple example. U.S. census has categories for black, Caucasian, Asian, Latino. That is very interested in the difference between Asian and Latino and uninterested in the difference between South Asian and East Asian. It forgets the granularity there.
- [123:04]
CT Nguyen
And by the way, that has seeped into how people believe about like we just say Asians, right?
- [123:10]
T Nguyen
We just say Asians. Similarly, they're really interested in medical record keeping. So they, they, they had this astonishing moment in their book where they look at the ICD10, which is the classification manual that's the basis for mortality and accident statistics that are the, that are used for large scale epidemiological and medical research. And they point out, for example, that in the falls category there are separate codes for the following urban falls, there are different codes for fall from a balcony, fall from a stair, fall from an escalator, fall from a bed, fall from a commode, fall from playground equipment, fall from hospital equipment, fall from. Right, there's about 10. And then for rural falls, there's fall from a cliff and fall other. Right, so you can read the interestedness. So metrics seem Objective.
- [124:04]
CT Nguyen
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [124:05]
T Nguyen
But they track.
- [124:06]
CT Nguyen
We have forgotten the value judgment that was made way back when.
- [124:09]
T Nguyen
Right. We've forgotten. There's so many of these cases where we forget the value judgment that's made way back when. One of my favorite examples. This is a geeky example, but I suspect you'll be interested in it. A lot of Theodore Porter's book is about the history of the cost benefit analysis. And he notes that cost benefit analyses look really objective. But. But at the starting point there are all kinds of weird ass interested decisions. So here's two examples. One of his examples is if you're trying to do a cost benefit analysis of say how much you spend on a national park, you have to insert into your analysis the value to a visitor of a recreation day. You have to give. Attach a number.
- [124:49]
CT Nguyen
A dollar. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [124:51]
T Nguyen
And then you set one. So you'd like, you know, in 1914 they said it was like 14 cents per visitor day. That's the value of their aesthetic experience,
- [124:57]
CT Nguyen
is the value of one person visiting a park.
- [124:59]
T Nguyen
Yeah, right. And then you run that and then it looks objective at the other end. But one of the inputs is. And we just made up.
- [125:06]
CT Nguyen
We just made it up.
- [125:07]
T Nguyen
We just made it up and expresses our sense of valuation. My other favorite one, and I think this is one of my favorites. So one of the most important numbers in any cost benefit analysis is the discount rate.
- [125:21]
CT Nguyen
Okay.
- [125:22]
T Nguyen
Do you know what this basically, yeah. So the discount rate is. Is the relative amount you discount the future compared to the present.
- [125:31]
CT Nguyen
It's essentially how we keep the present, or excuse me, the future from being wildly overvalued.
- [125:35]
T Nguyen
Right. So by the way, P.S. if you set the discount rate to 0, what you get is long termism. Right, right, right, of course, yeah.
- [125:47]
CT Nguyen
You would all.
- [125:47]
T Nguyen
Yeah. 17th century economists and like Adam Smith worked this out. He's like, well, if we set the discount rate to zero, you get all these absurd effects for any minor change in the future through compound interest. And sorry, any minor change in the present will be justified because of swamping effects in the future. So you got to have some discount rate.
- [126:02]
CT Nguyen
The present has little, basically no value.
- [126:04]
T Nguyen
Right, yeah. So you have to set some discount rate because there's no correct, we made it up. Right. It is. The discount rate represents a value choice about the relative value of the future versus the present. And then someone sets it at the bottom of your calculation and then it gets hidden and then things look objective.
- [126:25]
CT Nguyen
By the way, you could, I mean you could so easily imagine how arbitrary discount rates Might affect our broad sensitivities for how much the future matters. How much. Because it goes back to the adoption of technology thing like, is it okay if we build this technology? Because in 20 years everything will be great.
- [126:41]
T Nguyen
Right?
- [126:42]
CT Nguyen
Or we'll have many amazing abundance. And in the. So much of our thinking is we. It's almost like we're avoiding the messiness of these ethical questions.
- [126:51]
T Nguyen
This is, this is exactly, I mean, that is exactly the goddamn point. So the phrase I have in my book for this effect, I'm currently calling it objectivity laundering, like money laundering is. You take dirty money, you pile on calculations. Here you take a subjective choice and then you pile on calculations. I think that's, I mean, the whole thought in the background. The opening thought for this book was something like Games are beautiful because they simplify things. For once in your life, you don't have to worry about conflicting values. There's a victory point scale. You know exactly how much things are worth. You know exactly who wants on. And it's so tempting to export that
- [127:26]
CT Nguyen
oversimplify the rest of the world. Simplicity contained is great.
- [127:29]
T Nguyen
Yeah, simplicity contained is great. And if you manage to convince yourself that your metrics measure all that matters matters, then you won't experience the tension of what you're missing. You'll think, oh, it's easy. And then actually you'll be much more efficient at achieving and optimizing for your metric because you don't get any drag from worrying about all the other stuff. Stuff all you had to do was delete from your vision. Yes, everything else that was important.
- [127:54]
CT Nguyen
Maybe that ties in. One of the last things I want to talk about, which is many people in my audience are technologists. I, I joked with you when we first met. You are a philosopher and think a lot about games, both of which are kind of like wildly low status or especially games. But maybe philosophy too, in a, in an area of technology that should almost certainly be learning a lot from, from those two domains. Why, why can't we do ethics from first principles? Maybe it's just a super simple starting point. You joke to me about that and I think it's profound.
- [128:24]
T Nguyen
That's a really intense question.
- [128:26]
CT Nguyen
Maybe a better question would just be like, what, what is your caution there to people who think ethics can be simple?
- [128:32]
T Nguyen
Okay, if ethics is about treating people well and fairly and doing it well, then doing it well will involve deep attention to the particularities of people and their contexts and sensitivity to the emerging complexity of what matters. This is, I mean, this is again from Aristotle I learned this stuff from Martha Nussbaum's version of Aristotle, which is like what practical wisdom is, is being soaked in the moral and value complexity of particular situations and being able to
- [129:08]
CT Nguyen
see all it's perception, not recognition.
- [129:11]
T Nguyen
Yeah, it is. Exactly. It is. I mean there are some abstract print things, I could say that like morality, treat people well, right. But as an actual thing that guides action. If what actually matters to people, what actually hurts them, if what actually helps them is highly dependent on interaction with particular context, particular personalities and particular values, then it's going to require enormous sensitivity and context. And if you expect not just to have a general vague principle of morality, act well and be sensitive.
- [129:44]
CT Nguyen
Sure, right.
- [129:45]
T Nguyen
If you actually expect a decision procedure that will resolve ethical debates and you expect it to be mechanistic, then you will start to concentrate on those moral features that are easily countable. Yes, yes.
- [130:00]
CT Nguyen
And you will ignore the others.
- [130:01]
T Nguyen
And you'll ignore the others.
- [130:03]
CT Nguyen
What do you say to. We, we actually didn't talk about it. You, you give an example in the book that I love, which is you talk about how maps are value laden as a technology as well and how super simply maps have elevation because somebody made a decision 100 years ago for battles and they don't have sound quality. And critically, the answer here is not to not use maps. The answer is to not participate in, not, not to not participate in the world. And so like, like we've benefited so much from compounding and a ladder of abstraction, particularly in technology, benefiting from the work that others have done in the past, even if they were value laden.
- [130:39]
T Nguyen
Right.
- [130:40]
CT Nguyen
Technology, I think to a fault, loves to solve for hero metrics and simplicity and like solve for X. But like, even for technologists who are mindful of the ethical thing, who want to build quickly and with impact and with, with global coordination, like, what do you say to those people? Like, part of this is maybe listening to the conversation, read the book. But like if you, if you were to maybe a different way to ask this question that's like a little silly, is if like I could give you 30 minutes in a room with Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon. Oh no, like what you would try to persuade them of, which I realize is different question than like thoughtful person who's listening.
- [131:15]
T Nguyen
Don't give me that question.
- [131:16]
CT Nguyen
Okay, but like what, what would you try to have them? You, you even, you have another bit where you talk about reflexive control. And part of so much of what I think this is is like remembering, remembering to put on a Mindset that gives way to these things while still operating in the real world and benefiting from all of these.
- [131:33]
T Nguyen
So there. It's interesting. A lot of the times I've been asked this question about how we're supposed to survive as individuals, not as your technologists. So what I say about the individual question is often something like it's, it's very much like the maps thing. We have to use maps. But what we should hope to do is be aware that different maps reflect different values and choose our maps with care and sometimes make our own. And maybe an echo of this is at the structural level. If you have controls over the structure, then one thing to do is to try to make a map for everyone and force it out. And another thing to do is, and I mean this will sound super simple but like help create a variety of maps.
- [132:23]
CT Nguyen
Yes.
- [132:23]
T Nguyen
And help people figure out there are choices or there could be choices make tools that let people build the maps they need and want and be to be careful. I mean. Okay, let's focus on. I want to focus on a simple case. I've been thinking a lot. I've been running into people from the technology space who are concerned about the world and they have a particular world of what's wrong with way of what's wrong with the view of what's wrong with the world, which is that polarization has screwed up a lot of politics in the world and so they're trying to solve for it by optimizing. And the way a lot of people are trying to solve by optimizing it for it is to reduce polarization by algorithmically boosting content that's equally agreed upon by both sides. I think they think this is a value neutral way of proceeding. I think it's a way that clearly emphasizes politically centrist and in particular, I mean here's the uncomfortable version of it. Imagine you went back to 1830America where half the population still believes in slavery and then you had your bridging content moderation algorithm that boosted the things that everyone both sides agreed with. Right. That is a very value laden, very choicey. I mean, I think there's this fantasy. I'll speak directly. I've been thinking about this and I think there's this weird fantasy in the technology world world that you're going to be able to make, not have to make moral decisions, not have to make political decisions, but somehow improve the world and change it for the better and never have to think any complicated thoughts about what better is. Does it make sense? Like there's this, it's a little bit,
- [134:16]
CT Nguyen
I think it's a little bit oversimplified, but directionally, I think you're right.
- [134:19]
T Nguyen
Yeah. I mean, I, I, I mean, maybe we might be thinking about different people, but I have big, A lot.
- [134:24]
CT Nguyen
I like anthropic and AI labs. They talk about ethics. It's not that it's not part of the discussion at all. So I think we've moved. But, but I think that the push that I hope a conversation like this helps people is, is like you need to perceive this way more. You need be, well, way more thoughtful about all of the places that values are laid out.
- [134:44]
T Nguyen
Right. Yeah. I mean, I. If you think that there are some values that are easy and you can optimize for them.
- [134:52]
CT Nguyen
Yeah.
- [134:53]
T Nguyen
Right, Cool. But if you think values are tangled and complicated and you might be missing a lot of it, and anything that you do is going to vastly change the value land in a substantive way. And there's no easy, neutral way to make the world better without making value and political choices. You might have to be a lot more careful.
- [135:14]
CT Nguyen
Man. I have so many other things I want to ask you. I think we have time for just two more, maybe three. Very quickly, you mentioned me. You have another idea that you think you'll probably spend the next five to eight years working on. Could you give us just the teaser?
- [135:31]
T Nguyen
We've already done it. The biggest, most interesting question for me is that it's like the question about data spun up whenever we coordinate and we have to communicate. This will require making decisions together about what to ignore together and what to track together. And how do we think about the essential pluses and minuses of coordinated communication, like not just data, but for everything, for our concepts. So cool.
- [136:03]
CT Nguyen
You said we give things power by believing in them. What do we need more belief in?
- [136:10]
T Nguyen
We've answered this already. Play. I mean, in particular. Maybe I was gonna say play or humility, but I kind of think they're the same thing. I mean, my. I guess one way to put my worry about metrics is that the metrics, the attitude of optimizing for a metric encodes behind it the attitude that we know what's important and we just need to max out for it. That there's no process by which we might wander the world figuring out what we've missed.
- [136:43]
CT Nguyen
Yes.
- [136:43]
T Nguyen
And I think, I think the spirit of play is, like, encoded in it. A spirit of humility because you're trying out shit, even if it looks weird and silly, ready to be surprised, and you're open to being surprised.
- [137:04]
CT Nguyen
I have just one last question which obviously relates near the beginning of the Grasshopper. There's a line from the grasshopper, and he says to two of his disciples, I have the oddest notes notion that you are grasshoppers in disguise, that everyone is really a grasshopper. How do you remind yourself that you're a grasshopper?
- [137:25]
T Nguyen
I have sometimes. I've had some professional success lately. And I used to be the person that walked into the room and, like, no one wanted to pay attention to me because I was the one working on the dumb stuff, like games. And now I'm getting to the thing where I can see the past path of becoming, like a senior person, where everyone, like, wants to listen to you. And I, like, I can start to trust myself too much. I can start to become overconfident. And the way I respond in my context, the way I remind myself of the fact that we are all just clumsy, playful, idiotic mud things these days. I bring really weird toys. I bring some yo yos. I have a new one. I've got these, like, really silly spinning tops and I play them with people and fail. And there's something really weird about doing something dumb and hard that you're bad at with other human beings.
- [138:28]
CT Nguyen
Being a beginner.
- [138:28]
T Nguyen
Yeah, being a beginner. Being so soaked in the oddity of it, not being particularly good at something, Being soaked in an activity where you don't know exactly what it's for, and exploring it with people that I don't know reminds me that I don't know much about anything.
- [138:49]
CT Nguyen
What a great way to end it. T, thank you very much.
- [138:51]
T Nguyen
Thank you.
- [138:52]
CT Nguyen
Thanks for listening. I hope you were inspired by my conversation with T. And before I leave you, I'd just like to thank Notion one more time for being the presenting partner of Dialectic. If you missed my announcement of the partnership late last year, I wrote up just some thoughts on both what patterns had emerged as I had 35 conversations last year, as well as the things that stand out to me about the show, what I feel when I'm doing it, the audience, and more. Those three themes were ideas turning into action, notion, craft, and soul. And I wrote about those and I also wrote about why I think the overlap in those values with Notion made them such an amazing partner for me. I think they're a company and brand and product that embodies that as a tool that you can use to turn your ideas into something real, whether it be solo or with a wide range of collaborators. It is a tool that is filled with craft at every level of detail. And I think I really admire the way that the Notion team has been able to scale Craft. It's not something that's easy to do, and all of these years later, it's something that still goes into so much of what they do. And then finally, soul again, probably a thing that's hard to pin down, but something that you can feel and something that is kind of enriched in humanity and aspiring to do your life's work, to do something great. I'll link to that in the description if you'd like to read it. And once again, thanks to Notion, I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. I hope you were inspired by my conversation with T. And before I leave you, I'd just like to thank Notion one more time for being the presenting partner of Dialectic. If you missed my announcement of the partnership late last year, I wrote up just some thoughts on both what patterns had emerged as I had 35 conversations last year year, as well as the things that stand out to me about the show, what I feel when I'm doing it, the audience and more. Those three themes were ideas turning into action, craft and soul, and I wrote about those and I also wrote about why. I think the overlap in those values with Notion made them such an amazing partner for me. I think they're a company and brand and product that embodies that as a tool that you can can use to turn your ideas into something real, whether it be solo or with a wide range of collaborators. It is a tool that is filled with craft at every level of detail. And I think I really admire the way that the Notion team has been able to scale craft. It's not something that's easy to do, and all of these years later, it's something that still goes into so much of what they do. And then finally, soul again, probably a thing that's hard to pin down, but something that you can feel and something that is kind of enriched in humanity and aspiring to do your life's work to do something great. A link to that in the description if you'd like to read it. And once again, thanks to Notion, I'll see you next time.