C. Thi Nguyen

I mean, in some sense, it's like a super simple thing to say, but like, I mean, there are a bunch of things that the world tracks about me as an academic, my publication rate, my citation rate.

And it's a completely different thing to be like, well, I can't keep this job unless I hit this minimum versus my goal is to maximize my publication citation rate any way I can.

I think if you recognize it as a merely external system, then you will...

as we say, like play the game to some extent, but then distance yourself from it and take control where you can.

And I think like, you know, there's some people, I mean, if,

The more, the less power you have, the more you can't exert this kind of reflective control.

But the time, I mean, by the time you get to, I suspect the stage that I'm at and that you're at, I suspect that you two, like crypto experts, are moderately financially independent and you're not about to starve and you can get healthcare if you need it, right?

Like if you're at that stage, right, then you have a real question about whether or not

the scoring system of continuing to max out your financial wealth is the one that's valuable to you, or whether that is a useful resource that can be used as a background for some other pursuit.

Does that track?

Does that make sense?

We're recording this before this book has come out.

And I'm just super happy right now because I feel like... Mostly I've shown this book to other people in philosophy, so I have no idea how it's going to hit elsewhere.

And talking to you two makes me just incredibly happy because I feel like I keep hearing the...

The quiet things I hope would come out, and I think the biggest quiet thing that I hope would come out is this trade-off.

Because I think the thing that – thinking about this stuff has really convinced me is – and I think this is something that is obvious to you because you work in finance, but not to me in philosophy because I work in philosophy, is the importance of scale.

The biggest driving force –

In what I've been thinking about is what scale does to the nature of information collection and what scale does to the nature of judgment, right?

The whole point is the bigger the scale and the more we can coordinate on some clear measure, the more efficient we are at hitting exactly what we've coordinated on.

And also the more likely we are to miss anything that we're not coordinating on, right?