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.

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Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee · How To Live An Intentional Life with Professor C Thi Nguyen #670 · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

And I thought in that moment, there isn't one, and it's not an accident.

I mean, I think a lot of the times when you point out a bad metric, you're like, this metric sucks, which we do all the time.

People's response is, sure, okay, that's all right, but we'll just find a better metric.

And I was interested in whether

There is a part of life that systematically defied metrics, that systematically defied datification, that systematically defied measurement.

And I think I found the answer.

And the answer comes from a bunch of places.

It comes to me mostly from a field called science and technology studies, which is a field that starts in philosophy of science and then explodes.

It's an interdisciplinary field full of historians and anthropologists and sociologists.

And the answer comes in a few places, but I think the first thing to put on the table right where our conversation is, is an idea from Theodore Porter.

So Theodore Porter is a historian of quantification culture.

He has this book, Trust in Numbers, which is one of the, you know, like matrix type veil rips from my eyes moments.

So he's trying to understand why bureaucrats and politicians compulsively reach for quantified justification, even when

We know that the metrics are bad, that they're not capturing what's really important.

His answer is that there's two kinds of ways of knowing about the world, qualitative and quantitative.

And they're good at different things.

And the problem is when we compulsively reach for the quantitative even when it's not the appropriate vehicle for knowing or thinking about the world.

So he says, OK, qualitative –

Justification, qualitative communication using words, is open-ended and dynamic and rich and subtle and context-sensitive.

But it travels badly between people with different contexts because it requires a lot of shared background information.

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