C. Thi Nguyen

speaker

3,183 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 7 Jul

C. Thi Nguyen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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Two Percent with Michael Easter · #25: Why Numbers, Scores, and Metrics Make Life Worse | Thi Nguyen · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

tasks, and the problem is compulsively reaching for one tool even when it's inappropriate.

So he says that qualitative information, justifying things in terms of words,

is good at being sensitive, subtle, open-ended, dynamic, at responding to all kinds of new information, but even multidimensional.

But it travels badly between contexts because it requires a lot of shared background knowledge to understand.

It takes more time and thought, and it takes, a lot of times, expertise.

I think this is the crucial thing.

So when I write to my students about...

what's going on in their essays.

I write paragraphs about their rigor, their originality.

I use a lot of philosophical terminology.

I talk about their ability to do various kinds of critical reasoning.

That stuff won't be comprehensible to, say, a dean of the business school.

And it won't aggregate.

And it won't aggregate precisely because...

In some sense, the important thing is that when I'm writing to my students and when each different professor is writing to their students, they can respond differently to students' different abilities and interests.

I might write if one of my students really cares about writing quality and wants to be a writer.

I can focus on that a lot, but I won't do that for other students.

So it doesn't travel well.

That's the way he puts it.

It requires a lot of shared background knowledge.

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