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

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

And then they fall apart in a small amount of time.

It's actually super weirdly similar to the thing I was noticing about Twitter, where among other things,

Social media captures likes at the moment of seeing.

No one thinks about a tweet for two months and then comes back to it and hits like, right?

Yeah, the context of capture is...

And so that's another way in which the scoring deviates from what we actually find important.

I mean, I guess the general lesson through a lot of this is that it's not that quantifications are bad, but it is that they will often miss in systematic ways what we actually care about because of the specific constraints on how we capture the information.

And what kinds of information we can aim at capturing at scale.

I think, so this was a huge question for me.

It's just like, look, it's so weird.

It's just this, you put something in a number and suddenly we start caring about it.

One answer is that

So the way that a lot of philosophers of technology put it is that when you have a technology, you should think about what it affords, its affordances.

This means what it makes easy and what it makes difficult, right?

Here's one of the – I don't know if this will be meaningful, but a factory.

What does a factory afford?

Factories afford making lots of things cheaply.

What do they not afford?

Making things that are custom-tailored to a particular interest, right?

Yeah.

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