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

Suddenly all of this stuff is aimed at a crux.

That everyone can read, right?

Yeah.

And so one of the reasons I think we find sports so attractive is that there are these artificial environments where we can set these binarization devices, right?

And then everyone can look up and suddenly it's clear.

We don't have to dispute anymore about who was the greatest.

We can just look and count.

Yeah.

But in sports, we're not transforming anything real, right?

When on Twitter, we're transforming communication or politics or healthy society into this minorization that doesn't capture everything.

Yeah, so I started writing this book.

So I had a long journey down one of the weirdest paths in philosophy.

I dedicated myself to the philosophy of games for five years, which everyone thinks is weird and dumb because you don't get into highly ranked philosophy journals.

It was the thing I thought was the most interesting, but people didn't think it was real.

Anyway, and then I wrote this book.

about how games and scoring systems are these beautiful devices for crystallizing action.

And then I started worrying about metrics.

I wrote this book about how scoring systems in metrics drain the life out of everything.

And then I realized my two major views completely contradicted each other.

And that if my games view was right, then gamification should be awesome.

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