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- [00:00]
Jasia Monk
Last night you spent two hours deciding what to wear to the party this morning. It'll take you two minutes to list
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Thi Nguyen
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Jasia Monk
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Thi Nguyen
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Jasia Monk
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Thi Nguyen
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Jasia Monk
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Thi Nguyen
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Jasia Monk
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- [00:30]
Thi Nguyen
I think there are two fantasies that people have when they approach metrics. One fantasy is that the metric captures everything that's important and we just need to optimize for it. And the other fantasy is a fantasy that I had lived in in the past, which is these things are just wholly terrible. They're evil. They miss everything to the point we should just get rid of them and enter some kind of non metric sized utopia. And what I've come to think is not only do metrics have a very powerful function and a very powerful cost, but those are inextric.
- [01:02]
Jasia Monk
Connect and now the good fight with Jasia Monk. One of the questions that I keep returning to is how we should think about the role of metrics in modern life. On the one hand, we need metrics. We need metrics in order to know when we're making progress and when we're not. In order to measure whether institutions are actually living up to their goals. They are an important motivation and accountability mechanism. On the other hand, metrics tend to flatten the genuine goals that we want to pursue into those artificial metrics. Metrics for universities, for example, have led to really adverse incentives in which universities spend enormously on the latest gym, but much less so on creating a meaningful pedagogical experience for the students actually learn. Another question that seems somewhat separate but turns out to be quite related, but I've been asking myself is about how to make sure that we have the right kind of relationship to the activities we pursue. When you start lifting weights at the gym, having goals can really help you make progress and motivate you. But when you cease enjoying the activity as such and only become obsessed with chasing those numbers, you might actually stop enjoying the activity all together. Well, my guest today is one of the most interesting philosophers who are at work today. His previous book, which won the 2021 Book Prize of the American Philosophical association, is called Agency as Art, and his new book is called the Score. Thi Nguyen is a professor at the University of Utah and we talked about all of those themes. We talked about why metrics are necessary, even as they're often misleading. We talked about how it is that we can make sure that we actually continue to enjoy activities like rock climbing that he engages in without allowing the tyranny of metrics to dominate the nature of that activity. I pushed him a little bit on whether one of the best forms of metrics isn't the price system, which balances supply and demand and actually allows for a much greater variety of activity than most scoring systems. And we talk deeply about the philosophy of games and about what that tells us about the world. It's one of the most interesting, surprising conversations I've had on the podcast in a little while. In the last part of this conversation, we talked about how we can act on those insights. How can we, for example, allow ourselves to be inspired by a book on the TV show by Julia Child and Jacques Pepin in which each of them give us precise recipes, which you often need for cooking, but they differ from each other and they debate the difference in recipes so we can understand what kind of choices actually stand behind those recipes. And T, who is a huge gaming obsessive, also gives me advice about what games I should try to play. I have ordered a bunch of those and will report back that you learn a lot about how to have fun, which is perhaps not what this podcast usually offers. If you want to listen to this whole conversation, if you want to allow us to do this podcast without being obsessed with metrics, if you want to support what we do here, please become a paying subscriber, please go to writing.yashamung.com listen and set up subscribe and set up this private podcast feed for the whole conversation. That's writing.yashamonk.com Listen. Tiny, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:57]
Thi Nguyen
Thank you. It is great to see you on your home turf.
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Jasia Monk
Yes, we've battled each other on NPR ones and I think a rather friendly
- [05:04]
Thi Nguyen
way that although it's always funny when, like, you know, two people like us are told to have a debate. And I think I grew up with debate and slowly drifted away from that format. And being told to debate again was like, very confusing.
- [05:17]
Jasia Monk
Yeah. And I feel like we both ended up with positions that were, you know, sufficiently subtle that the perhaps the audience didn't get the flying sparks they expected. But I thought it was a great conversation. You know, Tim Scanlon, the moral philosopher who's been on this podcast in the past, really hates debate because he thinks that it's precisely sort of antithetical to philosophy, and I wasn't meaning to start there at all, but it occurs to me that perhaps, sort of the way in which genuine intellectual disagreement and argument relates to the codified form of debate is actually what your book is about. You've been thinking a lot about the role of metrics in the world, and there's a simple argument for metrics and a simple argument against metrics. And after having reflected on your work, I've come to the perhaps obvious conclusion that both of those are too simple. Right. We need some metrics in order to be able to have productive processes, to be relatively efficient, to make sure that we actually are achieving something. When you are trying to bake bread for your neighborhood, whether at the end of this process you have two loaves of bread and most people starve, or 100 loaves of bread and most people can have breakfast, makes an obvious difference. On the other hand, there are all of these different areas in which the metrics we use end up either misdirecting our productive processes or robbing us of the joy that that activity should actually entail. Right? So on the most straightforward formal end, in some forms of central planning, you might end up with 100 loaves of bread, but they're actually inedible. But that's not well captured in the metrics. So as long as the hundred loaves of bread come out of the oven, it doesn't matter that nobody will actually be able to eat them. In a broader sense, you talk a lot in your work about you got into philosophy because you love ideas, and then you got caught up in the system of rating, you know, research journals and rating philosophy departments and trying to make yourself do the kind of work that's going to be prized by those journals and by those departments, even if that's more narrow than the things you're actually interested in. Right. You know, obviously there's a controversy around teaching at the middle and high school level, right? Like, we want to make sure that people learn to read and do math, but if you have overly narrow metrics for them, it might actually teach to the test and not to the real skill that we're trying to make sure that they learn. So how do we sort of think about this paradox of metrics where we clearly need them, but the moment we adapt them, there's this huge danger that we get caught up in being misdirected in our productive efforts or in just losing the joy of what made us engage in philosophy or in rock climbing or in any number of activities in the first place.
- [08:19]
Thi Nguyen
That's a great place to start. I mean, I think you're right. I think there are two fantasies that people have when they approach metrics. One fantasy is that the metric captures everything that's important and we just need to optimize for it. And the other fantasy is a fantasy that I had lived in in the past, which is these things are just wholly terrible, they're evil, they miss everything that's important. We should just get rid of them and enter some kind of non metricized utopia. And what I've come to think is not only do metrics have a very powerful function and a very powerful cost, but those are inextricably connected. Like their good functioning is related to their cost. I mean, I think when I started doing this, a lot of the times there would be conversations. So I started this in part because I was the liaison officer for my first philosophy department in which I had to report learning outcomes. And in philosophy, like a lot of the, the learning outcomes, it's very hard to report what you actually care about. In philosophy. Right. There's not a lot of good standardized tests that are accessible and understandable and obviously legible to say, state legislators who are worried that philosophy is BS and so the things that work.
- [09:28]
Jasia Monk
And that's true at two levels, by the way, which is a. What you might really care about is some understanding of deep issues in the world. I mean, that's why philosophers are in the game. Even sort of, if you have a relatively utilitarian understanding of what the purpose of studying philosophy as an undergrad is. The purpose is you become a really logical thinker who spots flaws in arguments and processes. And so philosophers actually do end up doing very well if they go into all kinds of traditional areas of business because they have that skill set. But even measuring, measuring the first thing is impossible. Even measuring that is really, really hard. Right?
- [10:05]
Thi Nguyen
Yes. I remember one time I was running through this with a bunch of students in a tech ethics class and we were talking about the metrics that were actually being used in the university. They were like graduation speed and grade point average. And I think around the time that I pointed out that the way that my incentives were to get better student evaluations and to make my students grades go up, which I could just do by making the test easier, one of my students raised their hand and they were like. So I thought the original problem that we were starting on is that university metrics didn't capture subtler issues of virtue and community. But now it turns out they don't even Capture learning skills. I think there's, I mean, and I think when you start to worry about this stuff, there's one standard response, and that response is, oh, these are bad metrics, this particular batch of metrics, but we should just find better metrics. We need to do more refined work to find better metrics. And I had this suspicion, and a lot of this book comes from trying to chase down the suspicion that there were some areas of human life that did not metricize well or inherently unable to be measured at institutional scale. And I mean, and I want to point out one thing here. There's two different questions. One is the question of whether some part of life is essentially unquantifiable or essentially untrackable by, by a very subtle and sensitive science. And that's not the question that I'm really interested in. I'm interested in what are the typical measures that will rise to the top of the attention of a large scale institution, and what will that typically miss? And I think that the thing that I figured out, which I learned a lot from science technology studies, a lot of scholars in that field who've been thinking about this for a really long time, is that the best way to think about metrics is not just as some kind of like magical welling up of accuracy, but as a specific, very designed, very functional and very narrow tool that does one specific thing. Do you know the science and technology stuff at all?
- [12:18]
Jasia Monk
No, not as well. So explain to us what is the specific thing that metrics should be doing and what is the universe of things that they shouldn't be trying to do.
- [12:27]
Thi Nguyen
So I think one of the clearest formulations I got was from the historian of quantification, Theodore Porter. This is the first moment where I felt like I was actually on the track of understanding what was going on. And he puts it this way, he says, so he was interested in why the historical tendency of politicians and bureaucrats and administrators to reach for quantitative justification compulsively, even when the metrics were known to be bad. And his explanation was something like this. Look, there are two ways of knowing about the world, qualitative and quantitative, and they're good at different things. And the problem comes from reaching compulsively for one, even when it's inappropriate. So qualitative reasoning is rich and subtle and context sensitive, but it travels badly between people from different contexts because it requires a huge amount of shared context and shared background to understand. So, standard example, I'm a professor, I write student evaluations. They're long written, paragraphs that address like, multiple, multiple dimensions and use, like, the language of philosophy and the language of, you know, intellectual virtue or whatever to talk about what's going on in the student essay. And these evaluations won't be easily comprehensible by distant people, by people in the business school and the CS department. And their evaluations won't be comprehensible to me. And crucially, they won't aggregate well, specifically because they're so multi. Like, each of each person writing qualitative evaluation is able to quickly, on the fly, decide what are the dimensions that matter. Do I want to talk about rigor or creativity or care or expressiveness? And we don't have to settle on the same one, right? So they don't, they don't aggregate. So this will be useless to, like, someone in HR that has to hire a student if they're confronted with every resume with like 5,000 written evaluations. So what Porter says is quantitative numbers in an institution are designed to combat these problems on multiple fronts. And the way they combat them is by pre designing a shared, stable, context invariant kernel, some chunk that is understood approximately the same across the institution or across the world, and we stabilize it. And to make it easily comprehensible across many contexts, we have to make it very thin. So again, here I think the obvious example is letter grades, right? Everyone agrees that an A what an A means A B means a. C means approximately. So we can approximately all collect information into the same bucket and it aggregates instantly. And Porter's insight here, I think, is the very thing that makes metrics social socially powerful is the design process that removes context and nuance, right? The thing that makes it travel, right? So he calls this the portability theory, right? Data is a design.
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Jasia Monk
There's a trade off between the portability and the richness of detail and, and capturing. The more you capture, the less portable it is and the less legible it is. And so you're always going to be choosing in between those two constraints, right?
- [15:36]
Thi Nguyen
And there's two dimensions under that. One is the less shared context we need, the easier it is to travel. And the other is the more freedom people have to reinterpret an evaluation and decide in the moment what matters, the less it'll be able to aggregate. And so you eliminate both of those, right? We prefix the dimensions of evaluation and we remove enough nuance to make it travel. So this is called the portability theory. And he has this beautiful moment, I think you in particular would like this, where he says something like, because information is a specific thing, a way, a kind of human understanding that's been prepared to travel to distant strangers and be understood in different contexts. And I find that so profound. And I think that stabs right at the heart of this inescapable tension. Right? The reason metrics have social power is that they're denuanced. And that's not something that we can hope to get around. Instead we should expect that there's this constant trade off and the things that are most legible at scale will be the least nuanced. And we're going to have to use those to interact with each other. But also we have to be constantly aware that they've achieved that kind of social centrality precisely because they're denuancing. Then it becomes hard because that's exactly the terms that everyone can understand instantly. Again, as Porter points out, because that was the design goal, right? We achieved the design goal and then
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Jasia Monk
we understand what the design is meaning to achieve and also what it leaves out. And we can try and compensate for what is lost in other ways. I have two thoughts that come out of the really rich things you've been saying. The first is that you can sometimes see people who hate the idea of metrics, by and large, who have adopted systems of information sharing that explicitly don't rely on metrics, fall back into the logic of metrics because of the inherent need for it for those information flows. And I'm thinking here of the fact that there is a kind of codified language in recommendation letters for graduate programs in the United States. And truth be told, I don't know that codified language well enough, which is a problem for my students probably. But you write a rich letter of recommendation where you explain what's so great about the student and why they could grow up to be an amazing scholar. And then in the last line you're supposed to say, I recommend the student to you. I strongly recommend the student to you. I enthusiastically recommend the student to you. And basically we've adopted this implicit set of norms where that that modifier use there whether you leave it out, whether you say strongly or we say enthusiastically or unreservedly or adamantly, I don't know what the damn adjectives are. Actually has become a metric. That word is actually what carries the most important information and the whole damn method. So we're pretending that we're engaged in this deep act of qualitative description. And actually the thing that matters is the one thing that that is basically a secret code for 1, 2, 3 or 4 or 5. Right. That's basically just a code for a number that you're expressing, which is like how exceptional or non exceptional is this student? The other thing that I was thinking about is that there's a basic problem in democratic theory, which is that you need rules and you need a constitution and you also need norms. And you know, some people say, I had a student who argued this once, well, you know, if we need all of these norms for the system to survive, if people have to, you know, refrain from playing constitutional hardball of various kinds, everything breaks down. Why don't we just formalize all of these rules? Right? But that's just never going to work. Right? There is just not a way to formalize all of the rules. Some norms are going to stay norms about being able to be hardened into rules in that kind of way. And there seems to be an analog here where you can probably improve metrics in various ways. And there's definitely better metrics and worse metrics. Some metrics are terribly designed and some metrics are pretty well designed, but we can never fully get around the metrics. And the metrics are always going to lose something about the world. Chronic migraine 15 or more headache days
- [20:04]
Thi Nguyen
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- [20:06]
Jasia Monk
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- [20:09]
Thi Nguyen
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Jasia Monk
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- [20:56]
Thi Nguyen
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Jasia Monk
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- [21:02]
Thi Nguyen
These are two incredibly different and incredibly important questions. Let's do the let's talk about your letter of recommendation example, which is so good. First, because I think that's Simpler. The second half is actually, this is something I really want to talk to you about because this is to me the most interesting thing that thinking about this stuff has thrown up about explicit rules. But let's go back to your letter. I think it's such a good example. And at first it's a good example because it shows the twin needs. Right? So we have one need for richness and complexity and the other need for clear, simple things that cross cut and just like cut through complexity. And this is, this is not like an. This is the basic nature of communication between limited beings, right. That we want. We want richness, but also we. We don't. We have so little time. It's also in general, I think like this is also a feature. I think, I mean, we've been talking just about the metric side, but when you think about. Since I think so much about scoring systems and games and rankings, one of the things we know is how incredibly motivating clear and simple numbers are as scores and goals. So it is much easier to motivate yourself to run if you have a number that you're trying to hit and you're trying to make that number go up each time. And I think. But the thing that I am constantly worried about is so in the running case, I'm worried about just making that number go up forever without stepping back to wonder if that's the right proxy. Right. I think it's very good for some people to do that for a while and then reflect like, is this still the right target? Right. There's something similar that happens with a letter of recommendation. I think there are two different ways to react to the case. You have one way it's treated as just the right thing. We both have the clear, simple communication and we have the rich context and both are accessible. And you. And I think like, so when I do admissions, a lot of the times we use the really. We use a lot of the simple language to do like the really. The really first rough pass. And then when we actually have to make decisions, we. We ignore that and we look at the text and we're like, okay, what we're looking for is someone that is like, has these qualities and Right. So the letter of recommendation system you're talking about makes both kinds of information available. But in some context you can also imagine institutions that are like, okay, we're just going to isolate the simplified information and pull that out of context. I think this is a really easy way to see this happening. Is like rotten tomatoes, right? So a lot of times you get a movie review that is rich and detailed and complicated in the bottom. And I think a lot of people are trying to do this. They put the number rating at the bottom because they don't want you to look at the top and be like, oh, it's this. They want you to read the text and then see the approximation. And then you have a different system that steps in and strips out the
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Jasia Monk
simplified aggregates and it aggregates it by translating a Rich,500 word review saying this is good, but I was disappointed with that, et cetera. And it just decides is it good or is it bad?
- [24:13]
Thi Nguyen
Yeah. So I think there's so many different ways of interacting with the systems and some systems make it really easy and make the qualitative stuff really prominent and the balance between them prominent and other systems are really good at extracting the quantitative and suppressing the other rich information. And that kind of informational ecosystem is what's really important. It's like what we try to do. But also sometimes it's really, sometimes when you have both, you have a choice. But sometimes the system has done the pre filtering for you and the rich qualitative information is very inaccessible. And then that system encourages engaging only with the thin number.
- [24:51]
Jasia Monk
That's very interesting. So how should we think about both what makes for a good rather than bad metric and for what makes for a system in which the metric has an appropriate role versus a system in which the metric is given too little role or too much role?
- [25:10]
Thi Nguyen
Yeah, that's a superb question. I mean, so A, it seems really doubtful that any metric is good or bad across the board. It's highly contextual. So here's one of my favorite examples. I think a lot of us know that BMI body mass index is a terrible way to conduct your like people that just try to make their BMI go down. That's lousy. But that's not what BMI was built for. BMI was built as a large scale public health measure. That was like a kind of litmus test. Right. If across an entire nation BMI suddenly jumps five points, suddenly we know that something has happened. Right.
- [25:48]
Jasia Monk
And it's supposed or it goes down a lot. Right. Which is not states, but like if BMI suddenly craters, well, you probably have, you know. Well, perhaps we've just discovered DLP once, but most likely it's because there's a famine going on. Right. So it's really useful at that level.
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Thi Nguyen
Yeah, right, yeah. And so as a used in the context of knowing exactly the degree to which it's a rough measure that's just a start to an investigation that's supposed to be the first alarm bell for people to go looking to see if anything's actually going on. No problem shifted to another context where people treat it as just the all important goal that expresses a singular person's health. Terrible measure. One thing, I mean, another way to think about what metrics are doing is that they are getting us objectivity for a very specific sense of objectivity. And this is the case where we're really close to the thinking about the law, right? Like, so there's a simple sense of objective. There are lots of senses of the term objective, but one sense of the term objective is that something is repeatable across multiple actors, right? That, that different. This is usually, I think, the standard in the law. So Theodore Porter calls this legal objectivity, right? We want different people looking at the same case to apply the same rule the same way. Like a standard example for me is what we actually care about in a lot of cases, intellectual and emotional maturity. But that doesn't have legal objectivity. 18 years of age does have legal objectivity. So even if that's imprecise, we use that. So, so many of the things that we can get metrics about, I mean, I think one worry, I think a lot of people, a really common worry you hear right now is that metrics are deeply biased. And that's true some of the times, but other times I think the deeper problem happens when the metric is perfectly objective, but only tracks easily countable features. So an example for me here is like a lot of the times public health really, public health thinking really concentrates on lifespan and mortality rate and doesn't put into the equation things like happiness, community, tradition. I mean, I'm thinking about everything from like decisions during COVID to like, you know, recommendations about whether you should eat high fat cheeses. Right. And again, it's not to say A, if the science is good, it's not like those numbers are false, and B, it's not like it's unimportant. But also there's this kind of large scale systematic biasing where large scale public attention gets shifted towards the things that are very easy to count in a legally objective manner.
- [28:19]
Jasia Monk
That's a great distinction. I recently had Atul Gawande on the podcast and he was talking about a very similar topic which is that we're great at extending the lifespan by a few months at the end of people's lives. But a, most of healthcare spending is on those few months of Life. And B, the quality of life that people have in that time tends to be terrible. Right? They're constantly in the hospital, they're in significant pain. You know, you're drawing out the process of dying, often much longer than patients would want it to be. And so, and that is obviously downstream from the fact that, you know, the metric of is this patient alive, is this patient dead? Is pretty easy to measure, despite some hard cases. You know, the metric of, you know, was it a good death or a bad death? Right. Like, on the whole, did the life go better for living those extra eight weeks in pain, half conscious in the hospital or not? That is incredibly hard. And so, you know, that is a very, very important consideration. One quick thought about the discrimination is that I think that criticism often measures against the baseline of perfection rather than a baseline of the available alternatives. So I know that's what you had in mind. But there's a line of criticism of the SATs for admissions. I didn't do standardized tests growing up. It's not a part of European educational culture. And so I find them to be slightly bewildering. But all of the studies indicate that, yes, SATs are somewhat discriminatory against certain ethnic groups, against certain sociocultural backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, but they're far less discriminatory than the alternatives, which are things like personal statements for which you can now have your best AI model, do your work, or you would pay for the most expensive tutor that rely on having parents who have the money to send you on volunteering in Paraguay so that you can generate the great story for the personal statement. So the question there is just, yes, I'm sure they're biased in all kinds of ways, either more or less biased than the alternative we're going to get. And to just criticize them without that I think is sort of simplistic. But I actually want to get at something else which is thinking through a kind of hierarchy of failure modes of metrics. Right. And so the first failure mode is a kind of really stark one, which is incredibly important in politics and economics, of we're just measuring how many screws come off the assembly line, but we're not measuring whether they actually are usable screws. And this is how the Soviet economy went bust. That's important, but it's relatively obvious. The second is the kind of unintended consequences that are slightly more subtle. So one of my critiques of the American grading system coupled with great inflation is that it makes students incredibly risk averse. But if you're in a system where if you have a really good grade, it really pulls up your gpa. If you have a really bad grade, it pulls it down. Then you can afford to take some classes where you might underperform because you can also take classes where you really overperform and your overall GPA isn't affected that much. If you're in a system where good students basically get an A on every course and you take one, one course where you get a C minus, it completely screws up your entire gpa. So you just cannot afford to take that course. Nobody meant with great inflation to make it more risky to take hard courses, but that is the impact of that. So that's a more subtle way in which there's a failure mode, but that's still relatively obvious. I think what's really interesting about your work is a third kind of thing, which is that the moment that there is this metric, it changes the nature of the activity. And liberating ourselves in our own mind from the metric can sort of make us rediscover the beauty of that metric. And the example you give is of your attitude towards rock climbing and how that changed over time. So perhaps you can talk us through that.
- [32:24]
Thi Nguyen
Yeah, and this is, I mean, you have your finger right on. I think that the kind of philosophical tension that I find incredibly rich here, which is, let me first say you had a question a while back that I didn't give an answer to, which is like, what are metrics systematically good and systematically bad at? And a general characterization we can give is that large scale metrics are systematically bad. There are two claims. One is when the demand is that they're highly usable at scale and highly public, they systematically eliminate high expertise and high skill judgments. And the other half is given that they have to be applied in a stable way, they are systematically bad at highly variable qualities. So the philosopher Elizabeth Barnes has this great case. I talk about her in the book. One of the things she says is that health is the kind of thing that we're systematically not going to be able to measure. And her argument doesn't go via expertise. What her argument goes via is that health is interest relative. And so what counts as a healthy knee for an Olympian who needs four years of max performance versus someone that wants to walk pain free for their life. Those are different notions of health because they're indexed to different interests. And so that's another, a whole other category of things that metrics are going to be systematically hard to capture. But you asked about games, and I think this is a really so When I wrote this book, part of the reason I wrote this book was because I had run into a puzzle that I didn't know if anyone else was interested in, but I couldn't stop thinking about, which is I had written a bunch of stuff about games, and I'd written that stuff because I had first gotten frustrated with a lot of attempts to praise games as a kind of, like, cinema, where all they talked about were the cutscenes and the dialogue and the graphics, and they didn't talk about the freedom or the quality of action. And I really wanted to talk about that, like, how it felt and how rich the decisions were and how interesting the decisions were. And one of the most interesting things I found was this moment from the great German board game designer Reiner Knittia, where he says, the most important part of my game designer toolbox is the scoring system because it sets the player's desires. And, you know, I was a game player and I was like, yeah, that's exactly right. And I'm also a philosopher. And I was like, oh, my God, that's so true and so deep and put that starkly, so weird that I think, like, what a game designer is doing is they are describing an alternate self with alternate desires and alternate abilities. And you just open up a rulebook and you're like, okay, I'm collecting sheep, or, okay, I'm killing my opponent, and you just want it.
- [35:15]
Jasia Monk
And in a way, it's a way of exploring a form of agency. Right, where it's like, what it's like. I mean, that's not what most people think when they start to play Settlers of Catan. Right. But it's like, what is it like to be somebody facing these constraints and having these goals, and you're experiencing that modality of agency as you're playing Settlers of Catan. That's your argument. To be clear, I'm echoing.
- [35:40]
Thi Nguyen
Yeah. The way I ended up putting it was that the artistic. Maybe this is like a too geeky philosophy of art way to put it, but, like, the medium that the game designer works in as an artist is the medium of agency itself. They're giving you different action abilities and different desires. There's one of my favorite examples I was just. Was because I rock climb, but I also paint. And I was thinking about the fact that when I'm at the bottom of a cliff and I look up at the cliff, my practical experience of the challenges of that cliff change completely depending on whether my goal is to climb it or to paint it. Right? Those are those like completely change my relationship to all, like to all the parts of the cliff. So, so half of what I had written was about how scoring systems are an essential part of, of this agency bending, freeing, liberating practice of play. And the other half I was writing about was exactly what you were talking about, what we've been talking about so far, how metrics as a scoring system narrow and sharpen our values down to a nub and make us unfree. And I was trying to figure out.
- [36:48]
Jasia Monk
And so there's a puzzle here, right? Like why is it that in one context, scores are what allows us to experience the joy of playing a game and even the kind of deep forms of acts of different kinds of agency that might come with that and your philosophical gloss. And then in the other area, the KPIs that your boss wants you to follow, even if you think they're kind of stupid, is what makes you feel so radically unfree in your job or the imperative to chase a high GPA to get a good job is what means that you don't take true pleasure in the process of your education. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola in original and cherry vanilla that Pepsi taste you love with no artificial sweeteners and 3 grams of prebiotic fiber. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola, unbelievably Pepsi.
- [37:39]
Thi Nguyen
And I think the thing that thinking about that way really pressed on me is for a long time I had the theory that scoring systems and institutions were bad because they were hyper explicit. Because instead of allowing room for discretion, we'd written down exactly the application conditions. And then it took me like a year to realize. But no, games are a precise counterexample. What makes games, what enables the flexibility of plunging into alternate agencies in games is exactly that there are scoring systems that are hyper explicit that tell you exactly what get points and that's what makes it so easy to flow into them. So I started thinking about this and I was thinking about my experience with rock climbing. So rock climbing is. So rock climbing is the thing that saved my soul during graduate school. I was like burning out and depressed and working all the time and I started rock climbing. And the interesting thing about rock climbing for me is I, until I started rock climbing was a very anti physical person. I mean like I was against it. I was like, this is dumb, I'm not going to do it. And I thought exercising was a thing, was basically for one, I had a very simplistic view of exercise. I thought exercise was a thing you did to burn calories to lose weight. That was like, you know, idiotic. But that's what I thought. And then rock climbing I think tuned me into something else. And it tuned me in because of the scoring system. It told me to climb harder climbs inside a ranking system in held in rock. Like every rock climb has a community established difficulty rating and the internal scoring system is climb harder stuff. And interestingly to climb harder stuff I had to learn how to control and perceive my body finely. And over the course of that I learned that movement was beautiful and that subtle movement was incredibly beautiful and often beautiful in a way that was very similar to the beauty I found in philosophy. This kind of fine grained subtlety, but also really different. And I got that because of rock climbing scoring system for a while. And then after like five years, that scoring system stopped being useful to me partially because I'm just a mediocre climber with like very poor athletic ability. When I like plateaued using that scoring, that scoring system was really good as long as I keep could keep improving. But another stage of my life as a parent academic who's not that athletic, it kind of destroyed the joy of climbing to stay on the same scoring system. And so what I ended up doing was creating an alternate goal set for myself. I started aiming to climb moderate climbs as elegantly as I could. And like I refound what I loved again. And I think this is a little microcosm of the complexity of scoring systems. First, I think they can actually profoundly help us by cluing us into an activity. And here, I mean this is something I think that you might find. One of the things that helped me understand this the most was a book from Tal Brewer called the Retrieval of Ethics. He's a Neo Aristotelian ethicist. And the Retrieval of Ethics is about how subtle the value of activities is, how it's very easy to miss from the outside, what's important and how the only way to find it is by actually doing it. And so what you actually do, he says, is you go through this process of kind of doing a rough and inept version of the activity, roughly guided by some simple description. And then that helps you see more what it's about and that so you re change in your mind what your sense of what's valuable and how you guide yourself and you do it and you get a more refined. So this happens to be in climbing, this happens to be in philosophy, this happens to be in cooking each of these things. Over time you come to see the subtle value, but you need a blunt, simple version at first. And I think one of the upsides of clear scoring systems is they're really good starting conditions, they get us into the activity, but they also. Right. They're also fairly inflexible and fairly blunt. And if you get stuck in a scoring system, you can lose sight of the thing that matters. So I think in some ways it's interesting how similar this is to what we said about metrics. Right? They're very useful as clear, blunt, accessible systems. They get us onto things quickly, they're very communicable. But if you get stuck in one and you treat it non flexibly, then that's when the problems start to accrue.
- [41:58]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, I was just going to say that sort of earlier we were talking about social problems, right? Problems of incentivizing the right accident of social allocation and so on. Right. And now it feels like the exact same tension is emerging from the perspective of I'm engaging in an activity like rock climbing or like cooking or like knitting or like whatever it is that you have a passion for. And sort of the poles of a complete absence of metric and maternity of metrics end up being similarly undermining. Right? So if you have no metric at all and the bakery only produces two loaves of bread, that's not great. If you have a wrong metric and produce 100 loaves of bread, but they're in edible, that's bad as well. In the same way, if you go. I started weightlifting for the first time in my life about nine or ten months ago and if you just go and you weightlift a little bit every day, you don't get the joy of it. Part of the joy of it is to see the progression that you're making is to be pushing yourself. And it's really hard to push yourself unless you're keeping a little bit of track of what was my weight in this machine 10 days ago? And am I sure that I can't make this couple of extra reps or perhaps jump up, you know, 10 or 20 pounds for this session? Right. So actually you need the metric in order to experience the joy of it. But if you just become obsessed with a metric and you're no longer progressing and you're just frustrated and you're not enjoying the actual beauty of it. You speak movingly about the beauty of climbing, being really sort of being in tune with the movement and being elegant and so on, and you just want to get up, you forget about the fact, but what you actually love about is the arrogance of movement, then you go wrong as well. So you need to have and cultivate this kind of complex relationship to metrics in an even broader sense. I was thinking two archetypes. One is the striver student, which you and I have taught many times in our lives. I'm sure. I was really struck when I was a grad student teaching for the first time, and I met with my students at the beginning of term to get a little bit of a sense of who they are and so on. And one of my students said, oh, how's your term going? And one of my students said, oh, not very well. I feel like I'm falling behind on extracurriculars. And that was different from the attitude that people had had at my university when I was an undergrad. You know, we just did a lot of theater just because I enjoyed it. There wasn't a sense of like CV building. It may be the case that perhaps doing a lot of theater helped people get jobs in investment banks because some partner was into the theater and they thought that was cool or something. That's just not the mindset with which people were doing it. And I got to Harvard where I did my PhD, and that was the mindset of a student. And the sad thing is that they probably did love theater or whatever it is they were doing, but they no longer were doing it because of that. They were doing it because they wanted to fill the point in the cv. And that changed their relationship to what they were doing. And I'm sure that actually robbed them of some of the joy in it. Now, on the other hand, of course, we also know from high school and so on, growing up, the smart, talented person who doesn't have any goals, right? Perhaps they come from a rich background or perhaps they're just a bit of a stoner or whatever, and they're just given to play in the moment over time, and then 20 years later, they're no longer playing, they're just stuck. The complete lack of any form of trying to achieve in some kind of regimented way that is measurable by and large doesn't mean that there's still great creative spirits once they're in their mid-40s, it means that actually they haven't developed any talents and they're stuck in the mode of a 16 year old with constraints of an adult human being. And so I think there's something interesting here where the comparatively more obvious points we were making about social systems actually apply at. If I really want to be enjoying rock climbing, cooking, weightlifting, knitting, whatever it is, whatever passion it is that listeners to this podcast have negotiating for yourself, I do want A metric. And then I don't want the metric to override why it is that I do the activity in the first place. It's really a complicated thing to not solve because I don't think it's solvable, but to maneuver between.
- [46:35]
Thi Nguyen
I mean, what you're really talking about, and you put it really beautifully, I think is about our complex relationship with clarity and with very like intensely clarified expressions. It's, it's again this rendition of exactly what we're talking about with the letters of recommendation. This is why games are so fascinating to me, not just as a player of them, but as, you know, a philosopher who thinks about like human agency and reason. Because one, okay, so a lot of this started because in two different places I saw the same distinction when I was in graduate school. My advisor, Barbara Herman, Kantian ethicist, once in a grad seminar, like I said something and she was like, oh, you're just making, you're failing to distinguish between a goal and a purpose. And I was like, those are just the same word. And she said, no, no. When you have your friends over for a night of cards, the goal is to win and the purpose is to have fun. And you know deeply that even if you, you know, unless you're a very weird kind of person, if you lose but had a great time in that context, it was a good evening, it wasn't a wasted evening. I think that difference is extremely important. And games illuminate this fascinating thing about us, which is again, our purpose is to have fun or to relax or something a lot of the times. But the only way you can do that is by hyper focus on a goal, right? Like I climb to clear my head and I can't clear my head by trying to clear my head. I can clear my head. And same thing like fishing. One of the reasons I fish is that hyper staring at the surface of the water searching for rising trout gets this meditative stance which I can't get at directly. And so we both need these very, very hyper clear goals to get us into these kinds of mental states that we can't approach more easily anyway. And what games are, are kind of like pre. They're prepackaged mental states, right? They're like, here, do this and then suddenly you'll be hyper focused on balance. Or here, do this, suddenly you'll be hyper focused on complex logical interplay between geometric patterns in chess, whatever. Here it is, it's pre packaged. And the prepackagedness is both the strength and the weakness, right? The strength is that Someone else can make it and sculpt it and we can just take it up and we don't have to. Like here it is described so precisely. And the weakness is that it's prepackaged that someone else made it. But this, I think, is the true heart of the difference between games and metrics. And I think I thought about this for like two years and then I found the answer that satisfied me. And it's so simple and dumb. It's that you can't change metrics easily and you can change games easily. That's, that's like. I think in some sense the big difference is if you don't like this particular game and this scoring system, you can shift to another one, or you can modify it, or you can house rule it. And nothing in the typical social structure of games is forcing you to play mainstream Dungeons and Dragons or forcing you only to do CrossFit. Like there's an ecosystem of incredible variation and in particular there's nothing. I think this is, to me the most philosophical point. If I'm playing Mario and I'm not good at it, and I play main normal Mario and you're incredibly good at Mario and you decide to speedrun it and I get 100 points and you get 10, and we ask ourselves, how could we possibly compare these points? The answer is we don't need to compare them because there's no structural demand for cross comparison in our interaction with games. And that's the huge difference with metrics. The power of metrics is cross cutting stabilized social interaction, which means that to perform that function, we can't mod, we can't disattach, we can't splinter, we can't house rule, they lose their function.
- [50:23]
Jasia Monk
It's interesting. That rings true to me. And I was thinking of a kind of example which explains why it rings true, or, you know, which illustrates one way in which it rings true. You know, often an experience that people will have is that they start doing something as a hobby and they're good at it and they love it. It's one of the things that gives them most joy in life. And then because they're good at it, it turns out that they can monetize it in some kind of way and they can make a living off it. And at first they're excited. You know, like the thing that I most love can become the thing I spent my waking hours doing, right? I can turn this into a job. And what's better than that? You're an amateur musician, suddenly you realize you can live off doing music, or you're really good at video games, and suddenly it turns out that if you're streaming the video games, you can make enough money of that to have a comfortable living, Right? Like, you're ecstatic. But in the process of that, you often encounter people who've done it. For the first two years, you're happy. And then after five or 10 years, they start saying, oh, I've lost the joy in it. Because. And one way of saying is that, well, you know, it's no longer a hobby, it's a job. But I think the reason for that is that this kind of distinction has gotten lost. That earlier, you know, you wanted to win, there was a goal, but your purpose was to have fun. But now your purpose is to make an income. And so you have to win, because if you don't win, when people are going to stop watching your stream, right? And so actually, you've really shifted the nature of the activity in the process of doing it. And certainly when I think about some of the things that I most enjoy doing, it's things which may have a professional character, but where it doesn't feel like that kind of shift in metrics has happened. I mean, I need to finance running the podcast, but it's not my source of income. And so to me, this is like, you know, like, yeah, I want people to listen to this conversation, and I'm really proud that we've built up a good audience, but ultimately, I don't care. What I care about is that, like, I get to have an excuse to ring you up and say, come have an interesting conversation with me for an hour and a half.
- [52:34]
Thi Nguyen
You know, I mean, this is. I think the thing you're pointing to is deeply true. I love the example of doing it for a living. I had been thinking of a different example, but I think that's a perfect example. And there are two ways that hits. One is, in a given game, I think we don't just completely give ourselves the local goal, we often modulate it. And I think, I mean, when you're playing with your friends, you can find this, like, if you're too little competitive, the game isn't fun. If you're too hyper competitive, it isn't fun. And so when you know what the purpose is, you can kind of regulate your exact relationship to the goal and you don't follow it all out. Right? There are some gaming contexts in some games where to have the most fun out of it. I have to be a brutal. Like, that's what it's Designed for. And that's what it wants from me. And there are other games where if, if you go all out, it's just a middle level party game, you'll wreck the experience. And so you can modulate your experience with different games. So that's the first thing, I think. The second thing, and I think this is the really interesting thing with the job stuff, is that we're often modulating the goal when we're playing games. Since we're not locked to a particular game, we can often modulate the goal as we're going. So this happens a lot in fishing, right? So sometimes you can. Sometimes I can fish for easy fish. Sometimes I can fish just to catch a lot of fish. Sometimes I can go fishing and just spend, like try to get one big fish that's right there. And I can modulate that goal depending on my mood, depending what I feel like, depending on the environment, depending on what feels fun that day. But that's because the goal isn't link to something downstream. Once you are. Once you are, once you turn into
- [54:16]
Jasia Monk
a job, if you're a commercial fisherman, you know, you go to sell those damn fish and that's poundage, right?
- [54:25]
Thi Nguyen
You're now locked in. You cannot modify the goal and you can't tailor yourself. I think there's this deep sense in which what makes games distinctive is actually something subtler in the background ecosystem, which is in their ecosystem of play. Like this is. This is. I mean, this is the 19th century insight about aesthetics. This is Kant on beauty. Like aesthetics is the realm where we're free to think about things in different ways because we're not locked into a practical purpose. We can reconceptualize how we're thinking about things. Play is the space where you can reconceive of what we're doing. There's this lovely. So Collingwood, an old philosopher of art who's kind of out of fashion now, who I love, has this distinction in art and craft where he says that craft is when we know exactly what we're trying to do and we have the specifications of what we're trying to do ahead of time and we know exactly the ingredients, so we're locked into that procedure. And art is when you figure out what you're trying to do as you're doing it and figure out what you're thinking as you're doing it. And I think that is exactly the thing that you're capturing. Like now I cannot play with the goal, so I cannot reconfigure the activity. And a Lot of I think what's happening with people when you watch them manage to survive doing a thing for a long time is they're subtly changing how they're doing it over time to track their changing selves and their changing sense of what matters. Introducing Home Care Plus, a new subscription service from Lowe's that helps make life easier by giving members a hand with home maintenance. Let Lowe's tackle the tasks you keep meaning to do, like electric dryer, vent cleaning, replacing hard to reach light bulbs and more. Subscribe to Home Care plus for just 99 a year and consider your to do list.
- [56:12]
Jasia Monk
Done.
- [56:13]
Thi Nguyen
Members get more at Lowe's. Available in select zip codes only. Cancel anytime. Non refundable fee. Product purchase required terms and service restrictions apply.
- [56:19]
Jasia Monk
Details@lowe's.com Terms subject to change One of the things that really struck me is a student who I think watched one of your videos, I don't think it was a student of yours and who realized again, a very typical story. A high achieving student who works really hard, is successful at gaming all of the metrics that life throws at her and who realizes that she's unhappy because in fact that's not what she wants to do. And I think that she wrote on the background of her phone something like is this the game you want to be playing? I mean, it's a self admonition for us to always ask. It's not to say, I think there's a simplistic version of this which is very popular, which is like stop playing the game, reject all the metrics, stop playing the game, just go hang out with your friends on a beach. That's not the question she's asking. It's very interesting. She's saying no, no life is going to consist of playing games. And not just fun games on a game night with friends, but games of I want to achieve it with endeavor. I want to become a professional philosopher. And that will involve publishing a certain number of places and jumping through a certain number of hoops. But even as you recognize that it's inevitable to play certain kinds of games in life, you need to make sure that you don't get so caught up in a particular game and the particular rules of it that you actually are doing an activity that you don't want. And so the right question is not the right admonition is not stop playing the games. It's to keep reflecting on am I still playing the game that I actually want to be playing?
- [58:05]
Thi Nguyen
Yeah. And I think one of the reasons the game's framing has turned out to be powerful for a lot of people is that in our hearts we know that games are voluntary and you have some degree of choice. And the framing activities we're involved in as a game highlights that feature. But I think, like, I mean, there's a way in which one response to a lot of this material is like, look, I just can't. They're metrics, they're connected to money, right? Like, I. I can't help it. Like, I've got to do the thing. And I think sometimes, yeah, there's some incentive systems are unavoidable, at least for practical reasons. But I think a lot of the times we have more degrees of freedom than we think, and then we can forget it. And I think this is the reminder that you can exert even if you now have total freedom in the practical world, you have some, hopefully some of us have some, and don't give that up accidentally, right? And those degrees of freedom, look in various ways. So it's not. Sometimes that degree of freedom is like changing the way you do your work. Sometimes it's making a decision about which work you want to be involved in. Sometimes it's as something as like changing the degree to which you hold some goal in your heart. And I think that's like, look, I'm an academic. I always will have to be report my citation rates and like my publication rankings to some upper administrators. Those numbers have to pass through me, but I at least have the decision about whether or not I want to treat them as kind of mere informational incentives or something that I hold in my soul, or maybe even something I want to ironize and laugh at and try to occasionally tank once in a while just to see there are degrees of freedom we can exert.
- [59:53]
Jasia Monk
I've been trying to think through what some of my economist friends might say in response to this conversation. And this perhaps applies more at the kind of institutional level than at the individual level. But when I go back to something like the simple example of a bakery, they would say we actually have a great system for that. And it's the price system, it's supply and demand, right? You can specialize in. If you think that your purpose is to make sure that people are well fed, then as a bakery, you can say, you know, we offer really cheap products and we're not amazing, but we're fine and healthy and you can turn a profit that way, right? You set your price low. A lot of people buy it. If you want to create the best croissant on sale in the Ile De France, you're going to price that croissant a lot more highly, right? Fewer people are going to buy it and you're going to produce fewer obese croissants. But you can do that because you put a higher price on it and you still are able to gain a profit. And so actually, economists would claim that the most rich form of incentives we have and the best way of balancing in certain ways between different competing objectives is the very straightforward one that we use every day in our social life without thinking that much about it. You can get the dollar cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts or you can go to a third wave coffee shop or boutique. Have we arrived to a fourth wave yet? Coffee shop. And pay $8.50 for your coffee. And those are two very different kinds of coffee that allow the people who are producing them to engage in different kinds of forms of agency, in different forms of how they want to intersect in the world. And in process, we make an income and so on. So how do you think about the kind of price system and the system of supply and demand in this?
- [61:59]
Thi Nguyen
I have an answer to this that I really want to try out in you because I am not an economist. You know so much more about economics than me. So let me see what you think about this. I think that it is actually, let me back up a little bit and take a running start because I just made a connection I've never made before because of the way you answered this. Let me, let me, let me try this. So one of the first places I started thinking about this stuff was with transparency metrics. And I was really struggling to understand them. And the philosopher Onara o', Neill, I was reading her lectures on trust and she has this great line where she says, people think transparency increases trust, but it decreases trust because transparency asks experts to explain themselves to non experts and they can't, so they have to make things up. And that's deceptive. And I think even worse than that, public transparency, which binds public transparency, works by setting targets that are comprehensible to everybody, which is great because you can't hide bias and corruption. But it's also terrible if insofar as the actually important things in some space require a lot of expertise to see. Right. So transparency metrics often look like judging arts funding by box office sales or judging philosophy education by how quickly someone gets a job, because those are very publicly accessible metrics. And I think the thing that I ended up thinking was that with transparency, the problem with transparency was another one of these trade Offs where transparency eliminated bias and corruption, but it also eliminated sensitivity and expertise in the name of accessibility. So I've just now I realized there's a really. Maybe the response to the economics and price stuff is something really similar that what prices emphasize is the kinds of values that are very accessible and cross cutting. I, I was thinking about this. I have a stab at this in the book where I have this story about my fully true story about my wife's grandparents house, which is this weird magical house in San Diego. Her grandparent was a naval engineer, her grandfather had been a naval engineer. And then he just built hidden staircases and weird bookshelves that fold into the wall. There were secret rooms and then they had this enormous food garden. They built this food forest that just like where all these interlinked like carefully designed ecosystem of interlinked plants that yielded incredibly good rich vegetables. And when they died, we went down, we removed some stuff from the house and then no one was in, the family was living in San Diego. So they sold it and they sold it to house flippers. And house flippers like removed all the weird bookcases, they removed the secret alleyways, they bulldozed the food forest and replaced it with concrete and grass. And the reason is because all that weirdness wouldn't sell well on the market. Right? Because the appeal is peculiar. So that's, I mean that's a simplistic story. But the worry is that what price it, what prices emphasize is the value. Value that's highly accessible and highly legible to a very large number of people that's shared and they tend to miss very local, specific and subtle value. So the values in particular art and small scale communities that have a very developed aesthetic sensibility that's very rich but it's very hard to access outside of that community. Those are typically radically, in my mind their price doesn't reflect the value. And that's because I think is it sense. I think there's, I don't have quite a clear way to put it, but there seems to be something really deeply similar about this worry about transparency and this worry about prices which is both of them depend on aggregating something that's quickly available. And so they'll tend to emphasize once again, I mean it's not quite the same as having the mechanical standard that everyone can apply in exactly the same way, but it is emphasizing those things whose values are readily legible at scale and underrepresenting highly subtle values.
- [66:25]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, I'm trying to puzzle through this. So a few points. The first is that the price mechanism and supply and demand is a form of metric, right? And so I think everything that we've said about metrics so far is going to apply, right? They're going to be useful and important in a whole number of ways. We can't do without them. And also they're going to oversimplify things in important respects. Certainly. I don't think that, you know, measuring what is the best movie by its overall box office revenue or even by the amount of profit that it made, you know, the investors, you know, should determine who gets the Oscar or something like that, right? There'll be a misunderstanding of what the aesthetic judgment of what, you know, a particularly meaningful piece of art is. Not that I think that the average Oscar winner is in the recent past, either systematically that different from the movie that won the highest box office or necessarily better. But that's a. That's a different thing. You know, communities of expert can go badly wrong. The second thing I'd say, though, is that there are features of a price mechanism which are probably superior to a lot of the other metrics that we might care about. That would have to do with this example of a croissant, right? Because actually, since anybody can offer a product to anyone at any price and it only takes a relatively small subsection of a general public to purchase that good for that to be a viable enterprise, you're allowing, through one mechanism for people to express different forms of value, right? So when I'm going to Lidl and buying the cheap croissant, you know, I'm expressing that what I'm in the market for is like something that tastes fine that, you know, that gives me a little bit of pleasure, you know, on a constrained budget, right? When I'm going to the boutique bakery in Brooklyn that, you know, sells a croissant for 10 times the price, I'm expressing that this is a luxury indulgence of mine because I am a foodie. And, you know, the slight difference in quality is something that to me is much more important than the monetary cost of it, that I'm willing to invest in this because I'm really motivated by the fine distinctions of taste. And so you can have through the same metric, which is the price system, these two radically different things in a way that other kinds of metrics, including the ones that academics have created in part because they're mistrust market mechanisms, they end up with weird quasi markets fail to do. In philosophy and empirical theory, which is my field and so on, you end up with a certain kind of work being valued because there's a very monolithic scheme of what has become fashionable or what has become ossified as a thing that's valued in a certain number of journals that actually end up being much more flattening than this. Let's put it another way. I think that you, who I think is one of the most creative, interesting philosophers writing today, are more valued in the commercial marketplace. This book is published by Penguin Press, which is also my publisher. It's a big mainstream publisher. Then you are in certain respects. I know you also have a lot of respect for you with an academic philosophy circles. I don't want to misstate the situation, but in some ways you were the best publisher in the United States. The work you're doing at the moment would probably struggle to get published in the best philosophy journals in the United States. And perhaps that is in part because actually the ultimate market mechanism allows. You don't have to sell this book to everybody. If 0.1% of the US population bought your book, it would be a huge commercial success. And that actually allows for a better mechanism than some of the alternative metrics.
- [70:48]
Thi Nguyen
I'm no economist, but I think I agree with two parts of what you said. One is that as an aggregator it is open to different expressions of value and that it also suffers from the problems of the same information compression problem of metrics because it's one method of aggregating values that is lossy in all kinds of ways. I mean, we just, we could just. I think it's easy to come up with a list of things that seem extremely overvalued on the market and incredibly important things that seem undervalued. And, you know, and I, I think I need to think a lot more about exactly the form of lossiness. I've been thinking more about metrics established inside institutions and the way prices work. And there seem, there seem to be. I mean, on the ground when you work with metrics, you can see just lots of examples where the metric seems to miss. Seems to miss what's important. And then I think Porter and people like that have given an explanation of how that kind of rigid metric misses. And then over in the marketplace it looks like I can see plenty of examples of especially, especially the same kinds of things. High variance, subtle things. I think the thing about a croissant is there's an example of something that. I think it's a super interesting claim because I think a croissant in Brooklyn may be appropriately valued. And then I look at other weird aesthetic terrains like so indie tabletop role playing and the people that pour their life into it and create completely lovely things that are astonishing, innovative, creative can sell like a handful of $5 PDFs to a very small market of people. And I'm not enough of an economist to explain what the difference is, except there's a similar pattern. It's the high, subtly high variant stuff that requires a lot of background knowledge that's often concentrated in one in a small community where the prices seems to miss. And the more something is croissant in Brooklyn is a thing in which a lot of the market understands the value of the croissant in Brooklyn. And then when I point to this other weird the things that miss, it's all about these weird little sub communities that care about their odd thing and the value is not particularly public and accessible. And I wonder if what's going on in the croissant case is precisely that you're pointing to a community experience where for happenstances of culture, that value is broadly appreciated and so it's priced appropriately. And then other things it's not.
- [73:53]
Jasia Monk
That's a great point. And that stands to reason, right, that if something is a highly sophisticated, aesthetically appealing thing, but it is sufficiently niche that it struggles to find a market that's not something that the price system is going to encourage. And then there's questions about whether that appropriately is going to be the realm of hobbyists or whether you should have state subventions for certain kinds of forms of activity like that. I have in the background the sort of difference between the artsy in the United States and the art scene in Germany. And I think Germans are horrified that in America everything's down to the market. Some Americans may be horrified, but in Europe, taxpayers pay all this money to subsidize somebody going to the opera with €300 a pop or something like that. I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. And the more multiplicity of metrics you can have, the better. I think that there's some things about various forms of the arts, green performing arts in the United States, that the. The market incentives misshape. I also think that there's something really strange and artificial and stagnant about the arts in Europe, including theater, which I used to do in Germany, because it is just selected by some mix of experts and political interests because
- [75:17]
Thi Nguyen
we're back at the same point again about. I think it's super interesting that I'm finding the same point about transparency metrics. I mean, maybe in the background this Is I think one of the things I found really striking about James Scott's book Seeing Like a State, which is one of the. I think a very popular book that laid a lot of threads in my mind about information compression at institutions at scale is that it tried to alternate examples between large scale global capital markets and centralized organized communist governments and tried to find the same kind of problem. And I think it's really interesting that. It's really interesting that. The upside of transparency is that it breaks through kind of stuck dogmatic systems. Like, I think the. And the downside is it misses. Right, it misses sensitive weirdness. And those go together. And I think we see the exact same thing. Like a lot of transparency metrics, they're at their best when, I mean, I think even the biggest critic of quantification culture will say something like, and yeah, when you have a horribly sexist culture and no one believes how sex it is, you need a simple metric that's like, look here, you're only employing 5% of women, but the women are doing just as well on standardized. That's the kind of brute measure that can cut through corruption and bias and break us out of some lock. And I think the same thing you're pointing like, look, here are some cases where if you have no market at all, then you can get really trapped in certain feedback loops of one particular way of thinking, and the market comes and breaks in. And then on the other side, both the transparency metric and the market miss weird, subtle stuff. And I think it is one of those cases where I think what I've been thinking just carries over my worry about transparency is that it's actually very hard from the outside to tell the difference between bias and subtle expertise. It's super. I mean, one of the ways I started thinking about this way back when was about both quantified scoring in wine culture and just in aesthetic areas, how hard it was to tell the difference between a bunch of posers and a bunch of people who are onto something that you didn't quite see. I remember for a long time thinking that bop jazz was like random fast noise, like hard bop, like, you know, Coltrane, and that all the people who are into it were just like hipster posers until I got it. And then I realized I had been wrong the whole time. And so I think, like, that. That's. That's the thing. Sorry, my mind's falling apart a little bit. But does that make sense? I think there's this really fascinating structural similarity between what they can do to break into a space and how that kind of large scale bluntness misses so much subtlety at the same in the same F.
- [78:39]
Jasia Monk
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a good fight in the rest of this really interesting conversation, as I'm sure you've come to agree, as I hope you've come to agree. T and I talk about how to act on his insights. We talk about the way in which we might have metrics in life, but multiply them create space for agency even as we retain some way to measure performance and progress. He is inspired in this endeavor by a really interesting cookbook co authored by Julia Child and Chuck Pepin. I also asked Thi for recommendations for games. I learned a lot about the nature of games reading his work, but I also got inspired to try this game and to order that game. If you want to know how to have fun in a more interesting, sophisticated way, please become a paying subscriber. Please listen to the rest of this conversation. Set up the premium feed of this podcast that spares you those in all ads and gives you access to the whole conversation by going to writing.yashamunk.com listen writing.yashamunk.Com listen sa.