C. Thi Nguyen

And if I had made a move to a higher ranked institution, I never would have had to explain to anyone my decision.

It would have been obvious to everyone, right?

Because ranking is a very legible, transmittable, status ranking is a very external, comprehensible thing.

But if I don't make that decision, justifying your self-turns seems really hard, right?

One of the things I say in my book, the pleasure of games is that they reduce value complexity.

Like instead of having like a billion values to think about and trying to measure off the value of like health and work and family and all these things and decide, make complex decisions and measure off between these things.

there's just one thing and you know exactly how you did.

And so if you suddenly accept a clear external scoring system for your life, like the ranking of your university or your net worth or, you know, your...

Your military rank, it's wild.

I think there are a lot of different institutions where they'll make fun of other places for being obsessed with net worth and they have their own internal system.

I was on a podcast recently

Right.

And it's another case where like, where the simple, I mean, this is why the portability stuff matters.

The clarity of the score, when you have an external system that everyone can comprehend and they know precisely what it means and explain exactly how it's connected, makes justification to yourself and other people easy.

And it seems to speak really, really loudly.

I mean, this is the same, like opening story, what's going on with like,

Bro who's on the river who's fly fishing away he hates and is miserable and says he has to do it because he catches more fish.

Because the number of fish seems to be speaking louder than the actual point of what you're doing.

I'm feeling very pleased and understood right now because I actually have on the cutting room floor for this book is a chapter about Plato's cave, which has the motto that Plato

metrics are the new shadows on the wall.