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- [00:07]
A
The religion scholar James Kars once wrote that there are two kinds of games in life, finite and infinite. A finite game is played to win. There are clear victors and losers. An infinite game is played to keep playing. The goal is to maximize winning across all participants. Debate is a finite game. Marriage is an infinite game. Midterm elections are finite games. American democracy is an infinite game. In the last few decades, I think modern society has become very good at winning finite games, often at the cost of the infinite ones. The analytics revolution, which caught fire in baseball under the nickname Moneyball, led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments that I once called catastrophically successful. Seeking more strikeouts, managers increased the number of pitchers per game and average velocity and spin rate per pitch. Hitters answered by increasing the launch angles of their swings, raising the odds of both a home run and a strikeout. These decisions, I think, were all correct from a mathematical standpoint, but they made baseball dull. Singles plunged to record lows. Strikeouts soared. Hits per game fell to levels not seen since the 1910s. Similar analytics revolutions have come for the NBA with its flurry of three point shots, or 2010's big budget Hollywood with its devotion to comic book franchise installments. In all cases, the math got smarter and the products got worse. The finite games were won and the infinite games were lost. Lately I've been thinking about how this idea applies to our day to day lives, to to my own life. We are surrounded by metrics. Work metrics, fitness metrics, health metrics. Can these numbers make life richer? Sometimes. Can these numbers make us more productive? Sometimes. But very often I think metrics force us to play by the games we can measure rather than play the games we actually value. A personal example. I care a lot about my oura ring HRV heart rate variability. But I recently discovered that my HRV can be negatively affected if I stay out late with an old friend or have a cocktail with a buddy from work. A life lived purely by HRV maxing might be healthy, but it wouldn't be very interesting. There is in fact, no fitness tracker metric for good friendships. And a life lived exclusively to maximize HIV might be one in which I see my friendships wither. 140 years ago, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche criticized Christianity because he said it anchored its worshipers to an external system of values that stood in the place of our own motivation, our own instinct, our own identity. In a similar way, I think for many people, metrics, the quantified life has become our modern religion. A system of values that takes us over and can keep us from living the more authentic life we want to live. Today's guest is the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. He's the author of the book the how to Stop Playing Everybody Else's Game. We talk about metrics, the games of life, a little Nietzsche, not too much. And how to listen to the parts of ourself that cannot be reduced to numbers. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. C Thi Nguyen, welcome to the show.
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B
Hello. Hello.
- [04:22]
A
Tell me about rock climbing.
- [04:27]
B
Rock climbing is one of the best things that's ever happened to me in my life. And I think it's particularly, like, beautiful to me and interesting to me because I'm so bad at it. I mean, part of what happened was I was one of these people. I grew up playing computer games and reading, and I was like, life of the mind, screw the body. And I hated everything about embodiment. And I started to realize there's a problem. I did some yoga. And then at one point I actually, what happened first was I tried to learn to surf and I found out that seasick asthmatics should not try to surf. It's very deadly. And then I tried climbing, and I thought climbing was dumb. So I had this image in my mind where climbing was like muscle bros screaming like Arnold Schwarzenegger, just, like hauling himself. I thought it was like a pure muscle thing. And I found out it was completely wrong that rock climbing is this, like, delicate balance sport. What I found out was that it was kind of like solving logic problems, puzzles with your body in yoga, right? Like, you have to find your way through. And I think the really interesting thing to me was how much the scoring system in rock climbing mattered to me. And I kept advancing and kept being good until I hit a wall. That wall was partly because I'm busy, partly for my own athletic cap, and partly because I became a parent and I just couldn't advance. And when I kept to the scoring system of climbing, I became miserable. Right? I kept trying to advance to the next level and I just couldn't. And I ended up having to. I mean, first I got depressed and I, like the main thing that was keeping me happy was now miserable. And I kept doing it for a while, miserably, and then I finally started reformulating it to myself. And I was inspired by other people who would say things like, oh, you know, like, especially some older climbers are like, oh, I don't do difficult anymore. Like, I try to be graceful or whatever. And I started, instead of trying to go harder, to go more graceful. And that it's super interesting because that gave me the joy back and it involved reprogramming the scoring system to suit my needs. But I also have to admit that I never would have been in the position to reprogram it in that way if I hadn't kind of blindly followed it at first. And I just find that fascinating.
- [06:57]
A
So with rock climbing, you fall in love with an activity. You find a metric that at first seems to push you toward becoming a more advanced rock climber, but ultimately that metric becomes the single thing that you focus on. It takes over your life, it plunges you into a depression over the activity that you initially fell in love with. And then ultimately you find some kind of synthesis. You say, I'm going to find a way to adhere to my own values, but also live with this metric that exists. Tell me, how is your professional life being a philosopher? Like rock climbing?
- [07:37]
B
Yeah, so this is like the most embarrassing story. And I put it in the book. So, you know, so I, I went in chapter one. I should say in chapter one. Yeah, it's in chapter one. So I have no one to blame but myself. I got into philosophy because I loved it. I was supposed to be something else, you know, Asian immigrants, kid, doctor, at worst a lawyer. Right. I thought I was going to be bound for all kinds of other things. I just kept getting pulled to these weird, fascinating questions, like, is beauty subjective? Like, what is the meaning of life? They were like big Spanish, like, how do I know? Like how do I know anything? Is there anything at the bottom of science that's like rock solid? All this stuff. I would like had these big questions. And then I went to philosophy of grad school. And in philosophy of grad school I encountered the rankings. There are two rankings that people care about. One is a ranking system of journals by status, and the other is a ranking system of university departments by status. They're on websites, they're public, you can find them and you get quietly enculturated to them. In graduate school, it's really common and you start getting focused. And what you get focused on is going up the rankings. And that's a very specific methodology. So high end philosophy journals typically feature a kind of very technical, very careful, very slow work on a set of fairly prescribed questions. I do want to say that a lot of this work is extremely important and it's very valuable, but it wasn't my jam. But I found myself working on it, which is kind of weird because it's not like anyone goes into philosophy for worldly success, like you basically burned your life and career opportunities by throwing yourself into stupid discipline. The only reason to do it is for love. And then suddenly I found myself working on things that I was bored by for like five years. And I also got super depressed. And I also, like bas, basically lost my love of philosophy and I was going to quit. And in this case, the thing that I did was I basically ended up having to ignore the ranking system altogether. It was too pervasive, it was too powerful. I had to get rid of it completely. I had to force, swear and alienate it from myself and basically go back to working on things I loved. And that involved basically giving up on any kind of status in the profession. Because what I did was I started working on the philosophy of games. That's not really a legitimate topic in philosophy. You're not supposed to work on that. That's not real.
- [10:23]
A
These two stories are the two stories that begin your book, the Score. And the reason why I find the story of your relationship with rock climbing and your career and philosophy so interesting is that I think when most people think about metrics ruling our lives, maybe we think about sports and Moneyball, maybe we think in my profession of media, about clicks or unique viewers. Maybe people who are accountants or in data analytics or thinking about their own KPIs that rule their life. I think not so many people, certainly outside of rock climbing and philosophy, would think that the cult of metrics has grown so much that it is even metastasized into those domains. But this shows just how pervasive this culture of measuring things has become. It is crept into every nook and cranny, it seems, of modern life. So I want to get into the history of how everything in our life became metricified or measured, I suppose, is the actual English word. But first, why don't we use this opportunity for you to simply tell people two things. First, the explicit thesis of your book, the score. What are you trying to tell people most explicitly? But then maybe, and this is perhaps a dangerous exercise, but as someone who's written books, as someone who knows people who write books, you're a thoughtful person, a literal philosopher. Sometimes the message that we want people to take away from our books is not a message that we make explicit. It's something that we. We hope to leave with people, even if we don't make it like the very end of the very first section of the book. So I would love for you to tell people what is the explicit message of this product, and then what is the kind of underground river message that you're trying to leave people with to tell us what metrics are doing to us and to our world.
- [12:19]
B
Oh my God, this is the most beautiful question. Okay, I got to think about this. So the explicit message is built around the idea of value capture. So one of the core ideas of the book is to characterize this thing that I'm feeling and seeing around me that I think a lot of people see and feel. So value capture is what happens when, when your values are rich and subtle or developing and then you get put in an institution or a society or next to a technology that gives you a simplified measure, typically quantified, and then that version takes over. Like me going to philosophy for love of philosophy and then aiming at the rankings or starting to exercise for health and fitness and becoming obsessed with BMI or VO2 max or some other simple method.
- [13:09]
A
HRV.
- [13:10]
B
HRV. I didn't even know what this was until pretty recently. Or in education. One of the things that I've become really obsessed with is this gap between wanting to educate students for wisdom, curiosity, reflectiveness, all this other stuff, and then coming the institution coming to be focused on a few easy measurables like speed of graduation and starting salary, which is often opposed to the measures of reflectiveness and ethics. I think the best way to describe the problem of value capture is that when you're value captured, you're outsourcing your values. Instead of developing your values on your own, you are taking them off the rack. You're taking them in a particular formulation that comes from somewhere else, that has other people's interests embedded in it. It's something I think I'm sure we'll talk about. And that is really inflexible. It's been formatted. Metrics are, are ways of valuing that have been formatted to work in large scale bureaucracies. And that is a very particular constraint. And so when you become value captured, you ingest that into your soul. I think if there's a message to the book, it's not ignore rankings, ignore metrics. Because the weird heart of the book for me is about the weirdness of the fact that scoring systems can be so valuable. They can inspire play, they can teach me how to love my body. It's that scoring systems are very specific tools that capture narrow slices of valuation and you can use them under control incredibly effectively. But if you get swamped by them, if you let them dominate your vision, then you are no longer contouring, deciding, choosing between modifying scoring systems for your purposes. You're letting them set your purposes. And I think the explicit message of the book is be incredibly careful about what you hook into your mind and soul. Be incredibly careful about what kind of external systems you let in unthinkingly to rule yourselves, and think about what's missing from those measures and so what's missing from your valuational system when you ingest them.
- [15:28]
A
I'm hearing you say two things. The first is that metrics are useful precisely because they compress complicated information, right? The concept of heart rate variability or my resting heart rate the moment before I fall asleep. These are useful because they can help me live a healthier life. Metrics compress information. That's the first thing I'm hearing. The second thing I'm hearing, though, is that metrics aren't just useful. Sometimes they're catastrophically useful. They're so useful that they pull our attention away from the thing that was our value before the metric existed, and they pull us toward this new value that is created by the convenience of the metric. So one thing that I want to do here. I'm sorry, maybe you want to jump in right there.
- [16:16]
B
You should finish. But I'm excited.
- [16:18]
A
What I want to do here is force you to make the case against metrics by my defense of metrics. So I got into journalism by initially being an economics reporter. And there are a lot of economic statistics that I would argue have extraordinary value. Poverty is a rate, it is a statistic, and I think it is a moral good to push the poverty rate down. Real income, that is wages that are adjusted for inflation, is, I think, something that we should want to rise. And therefore it's important to look at that number and watch it rise, hopefully quarter after quarter, year after year. So clearly, metrics, numbers can be incredibly useful not only to make legible that which was previously illegible, but also to coordinate actors to get many different people in many different places say, let's focus on pushing the poverty rate down, let's focus on raising average incomes. How can metrics go awry, if indeed they compress information usefully, coordinate action between actors that aren't initially coordinated, and even encourage action, therefore providing some kind of agency? Why do you see, despite metrics clearly doing some things that are useful, potentially them being dangerous in many circumstances?
- [17:37]
B
Okay, I think there's so many ways to answer this, but the fastest answer, the fastest preface, is they're useful because they compress information. They are dangerous because they compress information. And that these are the two. I don't know if this is right. Like the Two cutting edges that go together intrinsically. And I think to understand the heart of what metrics are doing for us, I mean, it's really easy. And I often am guilty of this, of just pointing out terrible metrics. They're just crap metrics that we know about. Like my new favorite is a friend of mine who's a student advisor says that the new metric for his student advising system is being judged by. By how many keystrokes go into the student advising computer system per minute. That's how they're advising. Obviously that's terrible. But I think it's really good to focus on the best metrics we have, like the ones you're talking about, to really understand the core difficulty. There are a few ways to put it. So one is to say it's not that these metrics aren't measuring something real and they aren't objectively tracking something that we want to know about. It's that they speak so loudly that they threaten to drown out other nearby qualities that are also incredibly valuable but are harder to measure. And I think there's a particular kind of quality or character to what's easy to metrify. And so I think maybe you'll have examples of this from economics. But an example I think about a lot is in health policy because it's extremely easy when you're making recommendations about how much saturated fat to consume. Correlations to lifespan to heart attack rate, those are clear measurables. And then there's the other stuff, like the deliciousness of Brie, the joy of a perfectly ripe cheese, the traditional involved. Right. The happiness of it. And these are much harder to quantify. Even such instrumental things as greater mental health or decreased stress, all of these are harder to count at scale. And so my claim isn't that it's not important to. My claim isn't that lifespan and heart attack rates are unimportant. It's that they tend to auto win fights against this other stuff and that this other other stuff tends to be weighted not at all in large scale social conversations and in some of our inner dialogue, precisely because it's harder to measure.
- [20:25]
A
That's such a profound idea. It sparked a lot of different thoughts and I'm hoping as I close my eyes now that I can find a way to recapitulate them in my response to you. So first you reminded me of sports. I wrote a piece a few years ago now called the Dark side of Moneyball about how the Moneyball revolution in sports, which was the surge of analytics initially in baseball but eventually in basketball and other sports made sports more efficient. Teams got smarter about how to win. In baseball, for example, teams focused more on base percentage, on walks and hits. And as a result, in the last few years we've seen the rise of what are called the three true outcomes of strikeouts and walks and home runs. Teams have gotten smarter, but the overall product of baseball, I think, has gotten more boring as the teams got smarter because there is no metric for what makes for an exciting baseball game. So the individual actors coordinated on how to make game strategy more efficient, but there wasn't a metric for how do we make this game more fun. And so by creating metrics for some things, attention was pulled toward how to make the game more efficient, but tension was, one could argue, pulled away from how to make the overall game more fun. When I think about that principle in individual lives, I think about the idea that it's very easy using my and I am now showing the camera my Oura ring. Very easy to see what having a drink, especially after 7:30pm does to my resting heart rate and to my HRV. I can wake up in the morning and look at my iPhone rendering of my orphan Oura ring data and see, oops, my HRV absolutely frigging sucked last night. I can see therefore, what a night out with friends does to my body. What I can't see, what isn't made perfectly measurable, is how much fun I have when I do the inconvenient thing of staying out too late with my wife, with my neighbors, with my friend I haven't seen in three months and I'm so happy to catch up on. And if I was the sort of person who over indexed exclusively on the next morning rendering of hrv, rather than focusing on the feeling of being with the people that I loved, my own life would develop the exact same problems that I think sports, like baseball, has developed, which is that the metrics have essentially replaced. This is, I think, is the very point of your idea of value capture. The metrics have replaced my values. I'm the sort of person who says my values are friends, but if I optimize for HRV, my value is gonna be never going out after 10pm ever. And so there's this tricky play that I think your book is forcing us to execute here, which is how to live in a world of more easily measured outcomes, but also allow what we most value, even when it can't be measured, to remain the thing that we most value. Is that a decent recapitulation of what you're grasping at here or is there another way you'd like to put it?
- [23:35]
B
Beautiful. And I want to add to it. And there are two directions I want to add to it in. So let me try to remember them both. The first is to talk about your baseball example and fun. And the second is the larger question of what is easy to measure and what drops out. Because I think it's really important to see what that character is. So let me talk about baseball first. One of the core parts of one of the big things that started my whole weird venture down understanding games philosophically was a moment from my mentor, the philosopher Barbara Herman, Kantian ethicist, in the middle of a grad seminar where she just casually said like, you know, I think you're just confusing a goal and a purpose. And I was like, there's no difference between a goal and a purpose. And she said, of course there is. When you have friends over for cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun. And I think that structure is so common in games where the goal that you aim at in the game is separate from the reason you play the game. I have a name for this kind of structure. I call it striving play. So striving play is when you're trying to win, not because winning is valuable, but because you want something about the process. And I think it's really clear. I think party games make this particularly clear because when you have your friends over, unless you're a complete asshole, if you try to win but you lose and you all had a great time, you don't think the evening has been wasted. Right? So I think the crucial thing here is to understand the structure of games. You have to understand that for some people, winning is the purpose. Their goal and purpose are one. If they just want to win, they just want to win. But for some of us, I rock climb to clear my mind. And what's interesting is I cannot clear my mind by trying to clear my mind. So the philosophers have a name for this. This is a self effacing end. You cannot clear your mind by trying to clear your mind. What's interesting is you try to clear your mind by trying to climb the rock as hard as you can and forgetting that you're trying to clear your mind. Right.
- [25:41]
A
It's like falling asleep.
- [25:43]
B
Exactly.
- [25:43]
A
With insomnia, I can definitely testify to the fact that one of the worst strategies for falling asleep is attempting to fall asleep.
- [25:50]
B
And similarly with party games, one of the worst way to make a bunch of people chill and relax Is to shout them. Now it's time to be chill and relaxed. And one of the interesting features of humanity is you can give people a dumb party game and they can try to do some dumb communication task, and the more they lose themselves in that task, the more fun they had. But notice in this case, what we're doing is moving through layers of evaluation. We're diving into the scoring system, we're focusing on it, and then we're stepping back and we're saying, from the standpoint of our larger purpose, was it fun? Was it chill? Did it relax me? And what I think your analysis of baseball is is that baseball has a scoring system that was set up from some larger purpose, but then we forgot. It's a weird case where it's kind of like value capture by the inner part of the game. It's like if you became so obsessed with charades that you just studied it and became a charades asshole and just like inflicted your charades skill on people, you've missed the larger point. And I think part of the reason it's easy to miss, I mean, it's not. The thing I'm talking about is not so hard. It is not an arcane thing to play charades and afterwards ask yourself, was that fun? And be totally fine with losing because it was fun. That is a thing all humans know how to do. But when we enter larger social institutions, it becomes so much easier to be like, no, no, here's a score. Winning the baseball game. And I think baseball is more complicated because by the time you get to the professional stage, clear economic incentives are tied to the win. One thing about charades is there aren't economic incentives tied to the win. So it's easier to detach yourself from. It's easier to make victory just this temporary interest that you can throw away. But I think there's this larger lesson, which is in institutions. Often what it looks like is we set up a metric for a very good reason. We're trying to track something it's hard to track. We really want to do genuine research and debiasing. And we know that we can't keep track of everything that's important. So we set up some small, simple proxy like graduation rate or bmi. My day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink. Then straight to the gym, Pre K pickup back home to meal prep. Time for my fire station shift. One more Celsius. Gotta keep the lights on when the three alarm hits. I'm ready. Celsius live fit. Go grab a cold, refreshing Celsius. At your local retailer or locate now@celsius.com
- [28:26]
A
Jackson Hewitt handles your taxes and your stress. Inhale our no surprise price of 1. 49 or less. Exhale Paying more for complicated taxes Taxes you won't inhale New tax law knowledge. Exhale Missing out on your biggest refund? Certainly not. Don't miss paying 1.49 or less. Rest easy. Jackson Hewitt Scott Taxes guaranteed limited time offer for new clients on federal terms. Participating locations only. Turns@jackson hewitt.com 149 I want to pick up the thread with games here. You have a beautiful quote in the book from Bernard Suits. Quote to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the activity of overcoming them. End quote. I love that. And the way I want to get into games, which is just such a rich territory, is to ask you, before we dive into this, to explain the difference between gaming or games and everything else in life, what is it that makes games separate to the rest of life?
- [29:32]
B
This is, I think I find this question so interesting. And that Suit quote, his definition of games, is a clearer answer than I found anywhere else. So one way, I mean, the fast way of putting it is that in suits, the fast way of putting it is to say that in suits, the obstacles are the point. But I think a richer way of putting it is that what Suits is saying is that the goals in a game are inextricably connected to constraints and obstacles and rules on getting to them. So the way he puts it is, okay, let's say you're running a marathon in some sense, you're trying to get to a particular point in space. But that's not actually what you care about. Because if you actually cared just about that, you would take the most efficient means. You could. You would call an Uber, you would take a bicycle, you would take a shortcut. But that doesn't count. I think that's crucial. That doesn't count as crossing the finish line. What crossing the finish line is, is doing it while following the rules, while following the constraints that force you into a particular kind of action, right? It counts only if you did it in a specific way. And I think what this reveals for suits is that game life is ones where the process, the specific process, are central to the value and central to the way of life. So the contrast for Suits from game life is practical life. In practical life, there's something we want, there's some outcome, there's some product, and we just want it by itself. And we don't care how we get it. So we proceed by the most efficient means. Games we know that can't be how we value things because we're taking on these obstacles and we're putting them in the middle. And then we're doing something really weird. It's not just that we're being as inefficient as possible. It's that we're trying to be as efficient as possible inside an unnecessary efficiency that we've thrown in our way. And the reason we want to do that has to be because there's something incredibly valuable about trying to, like, dribble and dodge and, like, get that basket while people are trying to block us. Right. Or that there's something particularly valuable about ascending a cliff without using, like, ropes or ladders or spikes, but just with your hands or feet. Right. It has to be that. That is the valuable thing. So, yeah, go ahead.
- [31:49]
A
No, it's funny that you said that. Cause you made me think. Before I was a writer, I was an actor. And I loved acting. I loved the opportunity to pretend to be somebody else. I can't explain why that was so fun for me. But it was just the most exhilarating feeling to pretend to be someone else for a bounded period of time. And in a way, I wonder if you accept this additional definition. Games are an organized process by which we and other people enter into a space where we become a little bit someone else. We become the person that the game wants us to be. And just to explain what I mean by that, my friends in dc, my best friends in dc, we have game nights from time to time. And there's two very different kinds of games that we play in game night. One game is Hanabi, which is a cooperative card game in which you play cards from 1 to 5 in different colors. And the other games we play are Wingspan and Settlers of Catan, which are competitive games. And when I think about my own heartbeat, when I think about the degree to which my face gets flush throughout the game, these games work me over, right? The cheap way to say it would be that I don't just play the game, the game plays me. But at a much deeper level. I am electing to have my body, my hormonal disposition changed by a set of rules that I and my best friends are electing to participate in. And I become as collaborative or as competitive as the game makes me become. And there's something interesting about games that essentially we become this different person that's defined by a set of rules that we elect to participate in the most
- [33:37]
B
Interesting thing about games for me is that they teach us how incredibly fluid we are. We think that we're these pretty static beings that want the same kinds of things, but you can literally open up a game and it will tell you whether, in my case, my wife and I are going to be trying to kill each other or supporting each other. And then we just do it. We go all in and we just do it.
- [34:00]
A
It works you over completely.
- [34:02]
B
Yeah, yeah. So there's a few different approaches to this. So one of the ideas from the literature on games is this idea from an anthropologist, Johann Nzinga, which is. He calls it the magic circle. And he thinks that the essence of play. And here he unites games with theater very explicitly. Game, sports and theater, for him are part of the same thing. And a magic circle is an alternate space and time that you enter into where you change roles and actions, change their meaning. And I think this is a fancy way to describe and highlight something that is really, really obvious, which is just, again, my wife and I love each other, and then we go play a game and we try to kill each other, and then we pause and we make each other drinks. Then we go back to the game,
- [34:44]
A
we try to kill each other.
- [34:46]
B
And it's also that it would be really weird. Imagine, like, if after the game were over, we fought because, like, how could you? I was gonna win. And then you. No, no. Like, this is.
- [34:57]
A
Why didn't you sell me the wheat? I clearly needed the wheat. You sound like it's funny. Another, like, maybe hallmark of games is how stupid fights about those games might sound outside of the context of the game. Right?
- [35:10]
B
Yeah. Because you get absorbed in this technical specificity. But, I mean, I think the thing that really highlighted this for me is this moment from my favorite game designer, Rainer Knittia, who's this board game genius in Germany. And he said that the most important tool in his game design toolbox is the scoring system, because it sets the. The player's motivations in the game. It just tells you what to want and you suddenly want it. And in games for me, what this turns out to be is that the game designer is an artist and the game designer is an artist of alternate selves. For you, right, the game designer is changing your abilities and changing your goals in unison and designing obstacles altogether. And when it works well, it gives you magic, beautiful, fascinating action. But it's also, I mean, in some sense, my worry is this is also continuous with what metrics do to us, because what we've learned is that we enter a Setting, and someone's like, here's the ranking system. And you're like, okay, I didn't care about that before, but now I care about it. And I think, I mean, I kind of think that games are using this fluidity for the good most of the time. Not always, but most of the time. Right. That they are using our capacity to just see a new system of desires written down in an explicit rule set and just plunge into them. And then other systems are using that in an authoritarian way to pass and push values down onto us.
- [36:49]
A
I wonder whether you accept this framing that there are games that we elect to play and there are games that we find ourselves playing by accident. You told a story about rock climbing and philosophy. You entered into one activity, one thing in the magic circle, I suppose, which was a sport, but then you found yourself playing a different game, which is to maximize the difficulty of the rock climbing route. Rather than to have fun inside of your body, which might have been your initial instinct, which might have been the game, I suppose, that you wanted to play, that you set out to play, you found yourself pulled toward the game you didn't want to play. And it reminds me of this idea. I don't remember if this is like an Andrew Yang quote or whether it's just something that people say among lawyers who hate their own careers, that for people who get into the legal profession, it's a cake or pie eating contest and the reward for winning the contest is the ability or the necessity to eat more pie. That you work and work and work and work and work, and then you become partner, and guess what? We're here to reward you with 10 times more work. That seems to me to be an example of. And maybe you wouldn't characterize the legal profession as a game, but an example of a game that someone finds themselves playing even when they didn't necessarily set out to play it. So I wonder how you frame this distinction between the games that we set out to play, the settlers of Catanborg that we help to lay down, and then we sell the wheat versus the games that we find ourselves almost falling, fallen into, and then participate in, find ourselves ruled by a set of rules that we didn't even know we were enforcing on ourselves.
- [38:44]
B
There's a sense in which there's a really easy thing to say here, which is games are great when you choose them and games are terrible when they're forced on you or snuck into you. But I'm not quite sure that's right. And the reason I'm not quite sure it's right. Is because a lot of dangerous gamifications to me look like cases that are voluntary where someone picks up something fully. People who get on social media often are fully aware that it's a game like system that will change their motivations and they do it anyway. So I'm not. I mean, I think it's a re. Okay, I think the thing you said is maybe I'm just being like a fussy academic philosopher here.
- [39:28]
A
No, I love your edit. No, please keep going. Don't apologize for a half second. I love the way that you're pushing this.
- [39:34]
B
Yeah, I mean, let me go back and first push up what you said. So I think one of the most important things I learned from a lot of the historians I'm reading here in this field called science and technology studies is this idea that a lot of the times there are things that people make about that are decisions that people make that go into information infrastructure and when they enter information infrastructure, we forget they're there and we forget that there were decisions people made and then we just think that's the way the world is. So one of my favorite examples. This is new, it's not in the book because I just ended up talking about it in class because of a reading. A philosopher named Felipe was in a discussion of values in measurement, about how measurements themselves can be value laden and political talks about the idea that intelligence is a measurable quality. I think when people talk about IQ tests, they already know something like, oh, IQ tests are biased. They're biased on racial grounds, they're biased on gender grounds. But there's another even deeper underlying thought that he's pushing, which is the very idea that there's one thing, one quality that's intelligence, that's measurable and that we can point to and say that's the general quality that cross cuts everything and lasts over your life. That's a very specific way of thinking about the world. There's very different ways of thinking about the world. You could think about the world as one in which there's hundreds of different capacities which are important in different contexts and which were measurable independently. Right. But instead we've done this thing where we've squashed them into one thing and we've made decisions about how they're ranked. So I think it took me a while to realize this, but our intelligence testing and measurement system tends to highly weight logic and mathematical ability and tends to weight barely, if at all, emotional sensitivity that's built into the scheme. But if that enters your background infrastructure, you just might walk around and think like, oh, that's just what intelligence is. There weren't any decisions that were made in that. That's just how nature is. That's what intelligence is. And I should just accept that. And so I think a lot of the stuff you're talking about is completely right. That in many cases, in many cases, what's going on is that the world has given us a scoring system and it's programmed it in a particular way. It's focused us on a very specific kind of easily countable thing. And it's often focused on a particular kind of thing that serves somebody else's interest. And then we uptake that. And if we don't realize it, we won't even realize that we've made a choice. We won't even realize that someone's chosen for us because we don't even realize the choice space. We don't realize that you could have conceived of an intelligence in a different way. Right. You don't even conceive that you could have thought about health in some way that's different from HRV or whatever.
- [42:29]
A
We talked a little bit about how there are games that we choose to play and there are games that we find ourselves playing, even if we didn't necessarily sign up for those rules. What to you makes for a bad game, or maybe even a better way to put it, is what are the kind of games that we should avoid?
- [42:48]
B
I have the ultimate non answer for you.
- [42:50]
A
Fantastic.
- [42:51]
B
I don't think there's a way to characterize a good game in general, because I think what makes the space of games good is radical freedom of choice. The fact that you can pick the game that suits you, your place in life, your mood at that moment. The fact that you can. I mean, I spent a long time. I spent like an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out the difference between games and metrics. And the core answer I came up with is so simple, like, I can't even believe it. It's that you can house rule poker, but you can't house rule gpa. Right? You can.
- [43:35]
A
What do you mean by that? For the folks out there who don't know poker.
- [43:39]
B
Yeah. It doesn't matter which game you're talking about. What I mean is you have an enormous degree of freedom over games. So if I tried running, I hate running. It turns out it's super boring for me. And so I started rock climbing. Other people I know can't stand rock climbing, and they love the Zen out of running. And that's fine. And I at some point stopped chasing difficulty in rock climbing and started chasing elegance, and that's fine. And some people might play poker and like the kind of classic, no limit, incredibly intense style and other people might want something goofier and they can introduce house rules and that's fine. And the reason it's fine is just not accidental. It's because games are essentially a space that do not require cross contextual compatibility. That's the crucial difference in games and metrics. GPA is powerful. Page views are powerful precisely because they're held stable at scale. If you screw with them, they lose their communicative power. But scoring, unless, I mean, again, this isn't true of all games. If you're in a large scale professional organization or you're trying to climb the leaderboard of the world chess rankings, this doesn't apply. But if you are casually playing Mario Odyssey and you want to speedrun it or you want to go on ultra easy mode, because that's the thing that suits you, you can do that. And I think, I mean, do we talk about Hobbes so far today?
- [45:02]
A
No, we've not talked about Hobbes. No.
- [45:04]
B
Okay. This is the thing that truly blew my mind. While I was researching the book, I was talking to some people and a political scientist casually mentioned to me that a lot of this was in Hobbes. And I was like, what? And what he taught me was that what a lot of people know about Hobbes is that Hobbes thought morality came from political power. And the person that got to dictate morality was the tyrant who had the most political power. But what most people do don't know is that Hobbes goes on to say what political power is. And he says it's not military might, it's not strength of arms. The ultimate power in the world is power over language. Because if you can tell people what success and failure mean, then you can control their actions from the inside. And this is what scoring systems are. They are ways of telling people what success and failure meaning. And in games, in the natural ecosystem of games, we have granular, low level control over those meanings. Games are a system that let you play around with meaning. And that just means try on different games, try on different scoring systems. Wander that world metrics are a system that make authoritarianism and centralization a meaning determination, easy and possible. So the answer is not like some games are good, some games are bad. It's that there's a natural flexibility to navigate the space of games, to tailor something to Suit your peculiarity in the game space that is inimical to the kind of central rigid structure of large scale institutional metrics.
- [46:45]
A
I want to offer what I suspect is a shallow interpretation of what you think people should do with this and with your book. And then I want you to deepen it. I think there's an easy sort of tweetable summary of what should individuals do that's something like play the games you want to play. Be aware of and protective of the games that play you without your permission. And similarly with metrics, it's okay to outsource to metrics that which is inessential to you. If you go to Wirecutter to look up like, what's the best coffee mug that heats itself, that's not exactly like outsourcing your soul to a machine. That's probably just a good way to get a good coffee mug. But make sure that you protect from the hegemony of metrics that which is core to you, to your soul, to your art. How would you deepen that as a summary of the takeaways for your book?
- [47:46]
B
I mean, that's a pretty good takeaway. As to our takeaways go, that's pretty primo. On the one hand, I think there is this kind of core tension that's hard to get out of between accessibility and inaccessibility. But there are also weird tweaks you can do. Let me just tell you about the weirdest thing I did. So on the one hand, I'm a professor. I find GPA really authoritarian and gross. But also, when I try to ungrade my classes and not use grades in my classes, students just stop coming because they're in an environment where grading counts. So I have to live inside the grading system. And yet I don't want to just grade in an unthinking way. So I just tried the following experiment. You know, it's chatgpt era, like total chaos in the university. No one knows what to do. And the last time I taught technology, ethics and political philosophy, I walked in and I was like, I don't know what to do about ChatGPT. So here's what we're going to do. We are going to go through a process. We're going to read a bunch about the impact of automation on us. We're going to read a bunch about what education is for. We're going to read a bunch about AI and then you're all going to design the assignment and grading structure of the class, argue it out, and then vote. And then we're just going to do what you pick. So in one sense it still has to plug and like the output of this has to be formatted in a GPA system. But also to the degree that I was capable, I could give students some degree of design control over the exact criteria for scoring in the class. And they did something super interesting with it. They actually ended up turning a lot more of the grades. Not about the final output, but about a kind of in class set of workshops that we built together in which they had to construct in groups analyses and argue it out. And it worked really well. But it was a reformulation of the scoring system in terms and four goals that we all agreed on together. And it wasn't me just telling them what to do. And that kind of thing is possible. I'm not sure it's possible at the largest scale, but it's possible for some of us.
- [50:09]
A
No. It connects to the thought bubble that I just had, which might be the last and somewhat insane place to take this conversation. But I'm gonna attempt something potentially ruinous here and attempt to talk about philosophy with an actual philosopher, because I think only took one philosophy his freshman year. Do you consider yourself a fan of Nietzsche?
- [50:31]
B
Complicated views. Complicated views.
- [50:34]
A
All right, so you don't mention Nietzsche in your book the Score. But reading it, I hope you take this the right way. I kind of thought of you as a kinder, softer, less authoritarian Nietzsche because one thing that Nietzsche did, and from my limited reading of Nietzsche, he did many, many things. One thing that he did is he rejected the teachings of Judeo Christianity because he thought it offered a system of values that kept us from our instincts. That essentially it, for example, made us be kind not for the sake of kindness, but for the sake of getting into heaven. So independently and authentically, we were all assholes, but we would pretend to kindness for the sake of heaven. He said it'd be far better if we just behaved like our actual true instinctive agentic selves. And he despised external forces of morality and invited people to reject those traditions and get in touch with their own instincts. He called them the Dionysian impulses. And create a life in a system of values that was true to us and not just true to whatever system enforced itself on us. And in a way, although Nietzsche is famous for criticizing systems and not being particularly clear about what we should do instead, I take a lot of Nietzsche as essentially being a lot of weird poetry that sums up as get in touch with your instincts. Again, don't be who Christianity wants you to be. Don't be who external systems of values want you to be. Be the kind of person that is most authentic and even playful and artful that you can possibly muster. And in a way, what you're doing without being, I think, explicitly Nietzschean, is saying, let's have more art, let's have more play, let's have more instinct, right? Let's have a class whose grading is determined by the instincts of the class and not determined by the administration that I happen to be employed by. Don't be played by the metrics and the games that you find yourself sort of fallen into. Develop your own sense of what is valuable to you and play that game that you choose. And so I guess I wonder, and again, I might completely regret ending the podcast this way. I wonder, even if you completely disagree with my summary of an aspect of Nietzsche, whether that too is a way of grasping at what you want is a reemergence of instinct which comes from the self and cannot possibly come from a metric or from the rules of some game that we've fallen into.
- [53:13]
B
This is an amazing question. Let me give you four answers each.
- [53:17]
A
Fantastic.
- [53:17]
B
Increasingly elaborately weird. Okay, so you're picking up on a real thread, but it's a thread that it's not just Nietzsche. It's a whole bunch of people. It's like Nietzsche and Sartre and de Beauvoir and Heidegger and the existentialists Foucault. It's this big, rich tradition and it is coming out in a bunch of different sources. And I think the best way to talk about it is just talk about some of the details. So one suits our philosopher of games. He had this view at the end of the book where he says he has this following argument, weird ass argument. He says, imagine Utopia, where technology has solved all our practical problems. What would we do with our time? We would play games or we would be bored out of our minds. So games must be the meaning of life. What he actually is doing, he's offering this like, so Sutto is an Aristotle scholar. So part of what's underneath this is Aristotle's view that meaning in life comes from activity and not just outcomes, right? It's the doing, the exercise of our capacities. But there's a wrinkle on it. And my best. Okay, here's a story of maybe the best teaching moment of my life. So I told this story. I was teaching Introduction to Philosophy and I taught suits. And I told this argument about suits and the meaning of life. And one of my students, it pissed her off. So Much. She's a pre med. She's like super productive. And she was just like, the idea that games or the meaning of life is the most repellent, disgusting, like lazy thing I've ever heard in my life. Okay, fast forward a month. At the end of class, we're doing a review session. I talk about Aristotle and this idea that meaningfulness comes in rich, difficult activity. And then we talk about Kant again. You know where existentialism comes from? The idea that meaning comes from whatever you choose, that you are free to choose what's meaningful to you. And then the same student who hated TUT so much was like, is there any way. I love Aristotle so much. I love Kant so much. Is there any way to synthesize the two of them? And I was like, yeah, what you would think if you synthesized the two of them was that meaning in life came from difficult activity, that you voluntarily chose yourself. Is that a theory we have? And then she screamed fuck no from the back of class. And the rest of class collapse into laughter. Because it suits. Because what suits view is, is a fusion of Aristotle and Kant. Existentialism, the meaning of life comes from activities, but they're the activities that suit you and they're the ones you choose. And I think that's one deep thread under this. The other deep thread I think that you're picking up on is this idea and I think it winds through a bunch of people, including Nietzsche, that
- [56:24]
A
a
- [56:24]
B
lot that meaning is so peculiar and localized that the root to it is going to involve a rich tapping into your, I wouldn't say instinct feeling to your sense of like happiness or joy. So I learned this from Elijah Milgram. Elijah Milgram is a super interesting philosopher who in turn was super influenced by Millen Nietzsche. And Milgram's version of this is to say that, that the values we have, we don't just figure out in the abstract. We try them out and we see if they work. And part of that is the feedback we have of our happiness and our sorrow, our boredom and our engagement. And that's how we triangulate on what the right values to have. And that's how we throw away some values. And what that looks like is being like, I've been trying to do this job for a while and here are the values of this job. And it just sucks. I hate it. I need to find something different. Okay, let me now take you to two stories I've been obsessed with. And I think I'm super excited because this is a connection I've never made before, but here we go. Okay, let me tell you my favorite thing that was cut from the book because people decided it was too gross. Okay? So while I was researching this book, I started researching pickup artist culture, right? I mean, because pickup artists are people that compete for sexual success. And literally, it's called scoring, right? And there's a really. Actually, a bunch of anthropologists and sociologists have studied pickup artists, and what they revealed was super interesting to me. So a lot of pickup artists, it turns out, don't compete for, you know, the kinds of things they don't compete for. They don't compete for good relationships. We know the kinds of things they compete for. Most number of numbers in a night. Most number of sexual encounters in a night. Fastest speed from meeting someone to sexual encounter. And one of the things I read about. So a sociologist named Eric Hendricks said that one of the things he found when he embedded in pickup artist culture to research them was that a common refrain in pickup artist culture was that you had to stop caring about pleasure or happiness because these would just get in the way of scoring higher. And I had thought that I would find out that pickup artists were evil, but at least enjoying themselves. But it turns out that something much more insane and inhumane has happened, which is cutting out a connection to pleasure and happiness in order to score higher on a meter that's built around public accountability. One more story. One thing I found out about from a philosopher of food, Megan Dean. She does a lot of research about the philosophy about understanding things like food culture and anorexia. And she told me about a line of research that showed that a lot of people who are coming back from anorexia, one of the biggest problems was if you tell someone who's been anorexic for a really long time to eat until they feel full, they can't because they have forgotten how to hear the signal of being full because they've spent so much time oriented towards external calorie counts that they've lost contact with the internal sensation and the information of society of how satisfied they are or how full they are. And I think this is my long winded answer to say part of the thing that you're talking about is the idea that a rich, full value system comes from, in significant part, a dialogue with yourself, where a lot of the content of that dialogue is listening to weird, subtle, quiet emotions, signals of boredom or interest and pleasure. And something happens where we become so fixated on the accessible and clear external signal that we lose contact with the kind of rich emotional feedback system that might have led us steer better for those external measures.
- [61:04]
A
That was a beautiful answer. I don't know that I can summarize it because I'm pathologically obsessed with summarizing things. I'm going to try anyway. It seems to me like you're saying that perhaps not the meaning of life, but a meaning of life is both the individual cultivation of a value system and the day by day struggle chosen struggle to live by it. But you need both. You need to be both the author of the value system, the author of the game, so to speak, and the person who chooses day after day after day after day to play by its rules. Yeah, something like that.
- [61:52]
B
Yes.
- [61:55]
A
Tin Nguyen, thank you so much.
- [61:57]
B
Thank you.
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A
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