C. Thi Nguyen

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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 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

Yeah.

So the thing that makes something countable is it's kind of invariant across contexts and easy noticeability across contexts, which tells us exactly what metrics are bad at picking up.

which is anything that is highly variable, highly context-dependent, including, for example, your particular personality.

I think your example is exactly right about picking which kid to go to which school because when we use a metric like a college ranking, we're applying measures that have been put there because they're approximations of what everybody thinks.

They've been departicularized.

Hayek famously said, central policy can never target any particular person.

It can only target the average person.

I think that's very close to what you're saying.

So that's one big thing I was thinking from what you're saying.

The other big thing is, I think,

The idea that every metric is interested.

And I think this is... What do you mean interested?

So this is an enormous thing I learned from a bunch of these scholars I'm talking about in science and technology studies.

And that one of the big views from that world is that people think that technologies and systems, like systems of representation, like metrics, they think they're neutral.

They think they're objective.

They think people tend to think that...

Metrics are objective.

And what the people from science and technology studies have taught me is that different technologies and different ways of representing the world are deeply value-laden and deeply represent a specific perspective and a specific value system on the world.

So the—

the easiest example for me is to back away from data for a moment and think about maps, right?

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