C. Thi Nguyen

And that is really inflexible.

It's been formatted.

Metrics are...

are ways of valuing that have been formatted to work in large-scale bureaucracies, and that has a very particular constraint.

And so when you become value-captured, you ingest that into your soul.

And I think if there's a message to the book, it's not...

Ignore rankings, ignore metrics.

Because the weird heart of the book for me is about the weirdness of the fact that scoring systems can be so valuable.

They can inspire play.

They can teach me how to love my body.

It's that scoring systems are very specific tools that capture narrow slices of valuation, and you can use them under control incredibly effectively.

But if you get swamped by them, if you let them dominate your vision...

then you are no longer contouring, deciding, choosing between modifying scoring systems for your purposes.

You're letting them set your purposes.

And I think the explicit message of the book is be incredibly careful about

what you hook into your mind and soul, be incredibly careful about what kind of external systems you let in unthinkingly to rule yourselves, and think about what's missing from those measures, and so what's missing from your valuational system when you ingest them.

Okay.

I think there's so many ways to answer this.

But the fastest answer, the fastest preface is, they are useful because they compress information.

They are dangerous because they compress information.