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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

So Thomas Hobbes, political philosopher, a lot of people know him as the person that said that morality comes down to political power and who has more political power.

And he ended up saying, but he ended up giving us an account of political power that I didn't know about.

He says that the true ultimate political power is not military might or strength or force of arms, but the power over language, the power to define what success and failure mean for people, and the power to define what good and bad mean for people.

And scoring systems are just definitions of success.

And if you accept one from somewhere else, you're letting them rule you and letting them tell you the terms in which you think of your own success and flourishing.

Yeah, it's actually super related.

Yeah.

So clarity, I think, is the feeling of getting things, the feeling that everything makes sense.

The way that some philosophers of science and education put it is that

When you understand something, you have a good model for it.

You see how everything connects together.

And one of the things I think is that you often get these fake models that oversimplify things and make everything easy to connect.

That's what a conspiracy theory is, right?

Suddenly, instead of the complexity of the world, you just have one thing that will explain everything really powerfully.

But I also think metrics do something similar.

Instead of having to justify yourself with a million different values, you suddenly have this one thing that ties – like everything I'm doing is because it makes my –

my salary go up or everything I'm doing is because it makes my sleep score go up.

You have this one all consuming measure that can just reach out into everything and make explanation really simple.

I mean, it's a lot of what's behind a lot of what I've been thinking about is that

The world is unbelievably complicated and human brains are tiny and small.

Showing 961–980 of 3,183 · page 49 of 160