C. Thi Nguyen

It's this really great discussion of why I think like health, you'll never get a metric on health.

And the reason is because health is not a context invariant concept.

So she points out that what health is, is highly variable depending on your interests.

She's a great example.

She's like, okay, you go to a doctor, you're like, is my knee healthy?

And she says, look,

What a healthy knee means for a 20-year-old Olympian who has four years to train for the Olympics is very different from what a healthy knee means for me, right?

For an Olympian, knee health, what really matters is maximum performance over the next eight years.

Long-term pain might be worth it, right?

For me, I'm a climber.

Like what knee health means for me is I want to climb as long as possible so I

Long-term, this matters more.

But, you know, I'll take some pain.

It's okay.

I wake up, my knees hurt every morning.

That's okay as long as I can keep climbing.

For other people, what health might mean is to walk pain-free as long as they can, right?

So, because the concept of health is interest-dependent, it's going to vary between people.

And so no metric will capture it precisely.

Does that make sense?