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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
see the parts of the world that are easily countable in a bureaucratic way, everything we've been talking about.
And so everything else is invisible to them.
What's seeable is what's legible to the state.
And then he thinks that states have a motive to remake the world to make it more legible to them.
And he has all these stories about... So he opens with this story of...
the German managed agriculture industry starting to manage the German forests to optimize for plant yield.
And it turns out that it's much easier to track what's going on and to measure your interventions if you reduce biodiversity.
So they took the German, they replanted the forest from like about a hundred different trees to two different trees.
And they also started planting them in even rows instead of letting them grow with a tangle of underbrush.
And what happened was
They successfully optimized for plank yield for about 60 or 70 years, and then the ecosystem collapsed.
Because so many important long-term things weren't being tracked.
And when you optimize for one thing that you can clearly see, you kind of decimate everything else because there's always trade-offs behind everything.
Everything.
And I think the thing you're talking about, it's funny, it sounds exactly like the German forestry story, right?
You had a small thing.
Once you have a small thing that you track, it's really easy to optimize for it.
And if you're optimizing just for that thing and cutting out all the kind of longer term, more sustainable, but more subtle qualities, then you're going to have a crash.
And I'm worried that this is the world.
Exactly the same thing.
Showing 821–840 of 3,183 · page 42 of 160
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