Chapter 1: What are finite and infinite games according to James Carse?
The religion scholar James Carse once wrote that there are two kinds of games in life, finite and infinite. A finite game is played to win. There are clear victors and losers. An infinite game is played to keep playing. The goal is to maximize winning across all participants. Debate is a finite game. Marriage is an infinite game. Midterm elections are finite games.
American democracy is an infinite game. In the last few decades, I think modern society has become very good at winning finite games, often at the cost of the infinite ones. The analytics revolution, which caught fire in baseball under the nickname Moneyball, led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments that I once called catastrophically successful.
Seeking more strikeouts, managers increased the number of pitchers per game and average velocity and spin rate per pitch. Hitters answered by increasing the launch angles of their swings, raising the odds of both a home run and a strikeout. These decisions, I think, were all correct from a mathematical standpoint, but they made baseball dull.
Singles plunged to record lows, strikeouts soared, hits per game fell to levels not seen since the 1910s. Similar analytics revolutions have come for the NBA with its flurry of three-point shots or 2010's big-budget Hollywood with its devotion to comic book franchise installments. In all cases, the math got smarter and the products got worse.
The finite games were won and the infinite games were lost. Lately, I've been thinking about how this idea applies to our day-to-day lives, to my own life. We are surrounded by metrics, work metrics, fitness metrics, health metrics. Can these numbers make life richer? Sometimes. Can these numbers make us more productive? sometimes.
But very often, I think metrics force us to play by the games we can measure rather than play the games we actually value. A personal example, I care a lot about my Oura Ring HRV, heart rate variability. But I recently discovered that my HRV can be negatively affected if I stay out late with an old friend or have a cocktail with a buddy from work.
A life lived purely by HRV maxing might be healthy, but it wouldn't be very interesting. There is, in fact, no fitness tracker metric for good friendships, and a life lived exclusively to maximize HRV might be one in which I see my friendships wither.
140 years ago, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche criticized Christianity because he said it anchored its worshipers to an external system of values that stood in the place of our own motivation, our own instinct, our own identity. In a similar way, I think for many people, metrics, the quantified life, has become our modern religion.
a system of values that takes us over and can keep us from living the more authentic life we want to live. Today's guest is the philosopher C.T. Nguyen. He's the author of the book, The Score, How to Stop Playing Everybody Else's Game. We talk about metrics, the games of life, a little Nietzsche, not too much, and how to listen to the parts of ourself that cannot be reduced to numbers.
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Chapter 2: How has the analytics revolution affected sports like baseball and basketball?
I mean, part of what happened was I was one of these people, I grew up playing computer games and reading and I was like, Life of the mind, screw the body. And I hated everything about embodiment. And I started to realize it was a problem. I did some yoga. And then at one point, I... Actually, what happened first was I tried to learn to surf.
And I found out that seasick asthmatics should not try to surf. It's very deadly. And then I tried climbing. And I thought climbing was dumb. So, I had this image in my mind where climbing was like... Muscle bros screaming like Arnold Schwarzenegger, just like hauling himself. I thought it was like a pure muscle thing. And I found out it was completely wrong.
That rock climbing is this like delicate balance sport. What I found out was that it was... kind of like solving logic puzzles with your body in yoga, right? Like, you have to find your way through. And I think the really interesting thing to me was how much the scoring system in rock climbing mattered to me. And I kept advancing and kept being good until I hit a wall.
That wall was partly because I'm busy, partly for my own athletic cap, and partly because I became a parent. And I just couldn't advance. And when I kept to the scoring system of climbing, I became miserable, right? I kept trying to advance to the next level, and I just couldn't.
And I ended up having to... I mean, first I got depressed, and the main thing that was keeping me happy was now miserable. And I kept doing it for a while, miserably. And then I finally started...
reformulating it to myself and i was inspired by other people who would say things like oh you know like especially some older climbers are like oh i don't do difficult anymore like i try to be graceful or whatever and i started instead of trying to go harder to go more graceful and that it's super interesting because that gave me the joy back um and it involved i
It involved reprogramming the scoring system to suit my needs. But I also have to admit that I never would have been in the position to reprogram it in that way if I hadn't kind of blindly followed it at first. And I just find that fascinating.
So with rock climbing, you fall in love with an activity. you find a metric that at first seems to push you toward becoming a more advanced rock climber, but ultimately that metric becomes the single thing that you focus on. It takes over your life. It plunges you into a depression over the activity that you initially fell in love with. And then ultimately you find some kind of synthesis.
You say, I'm going to find a way to adhere to my own values, but also live with this metric that exists. Tell me, how is your professional life, being a philosopher, like rock climbing?
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Chapter 3: Can metrics enhance our daily lives or do they limit our values?
in graduate school. It's really common. And you start getting focused. And what you get focused on is going up the rankings. And that's a very specific methodology. So high-end philosophy journals typically feature a kind of very technical, very careful, very slow work on a set of fairly prescribed questions. And I do want to say that a lot of this work is extremely important.
And it's very valuable. But it wasn't my jam. And, but I found myself working on it, which is kind of weird because it's not like anyone goes into philosophy for worldly success. Like you basically burned your like life and career opportunities by throwing yourself into stupid discipline. The only reason to do it is for love.
And then suddenly I found myself working on things that I was bored by for like five years. I also got super depressed. And I also like basically lost my love of philosophy and I was going to quit. And in this case, the thing that I did was I basically ended up
having to ignore the ranking system altogether it was too pervasive it was too powerful i had to get rid of it completely i had to like forswear and alienate it from myself and basically go back to working on things i loved and that involved basically giving up on any kind of status in the profession because what i did was i started working on the philosophy of games and uh that's not really a legitimate topic in philosophy like you're not supposed to work on that that's not real
These two stories are the two stories that begin your book, The Score. And the reason why I find the story of your relationship with rock climbing and your career and philosophy so interesting is that I think when most people think about metrics ruling our lives, maybe we think about sports and Moneyball. Maybe we think, in my profession of media, about clicks or unique viewers.
Maybe people who are accountants or in data analytics are thinking about their own KPIs that rule their life. I think not so many people, certainly outside of rock climbing and philosophy, would think that the cult of metrics has grown so much that it has even metastasized into those domains.
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Chapter 4: What personal experiences highlight the downsides of metric obsession?
But this shows just how pervasive this culture of measuring things has become. It has crept into every nook and cranny, it seems, of modern life. So I want to get into the history of how everything in our life became metricified. Right. or measured, I suppose, is the actual English word. But first, why don't we use this opportunity for you to simply tell people two things.
First, the explicit thesis of your book, the score. What are you trying to tell people most explicitly? But then maybe, and this is perhaps a dangerous exercise, but as someone who's written books, as someone who knows people who write books,
you're a thoughtful person, a literal philosopher, sometimes the message that we want people to take away from our books is not a message that we make explicit. It's something that we hope to leave with people even if we don't make it like the very end of the very first section of the book. So I would love for you to tell people, What is the explicit message of this product?
And then what is the kind of underground river secret message that you're trying to leave people with to tell us what metrics are doing to us and to our world?
Oh my God, this is the most beautiful question. Okay, I gotta think about this. So, okay, the explicit message So the explicit message is built around the idea of value capture. So one of the core ideas of the book is to characterize this thing that I'm feeling and seeing around me that I think a lot of people see and feel.
So value capture is what happens when your values are rich and subtle or developing, and then you get put in an institution or a society or next to a technology that gives you a simplified view. measure, typically quantified, and then that version takes over. Like, you know, me going to philosophy for the love of philosophy and then aiming at the rankings.
Or starting to exercise for health and fitness and becoming obsessed with BMI or VO2 max or some other simple measure. HRV. HRV. I didn't even know what this was until pretty recently. Or... In education, one of the things that I've become really obsessed with is this gap between wanting to educate students for wisdom, curiosity, reflectiveness, all this other stuff, and then coming...
The institution community focused on a few easy measurables, like speed of graduation and starting salary, which is often opposed to the measures of reflectiveness and ethics. And so I think the best way to describe the problem of value capture is that when you're value captured... You're outsourcing your values. Instead of developing your values on your own, you are taking them off the rack.
You're taking them in a particular formulation that comes from somewhere else, that has other people's interests embedded in it. There's something I think I'm sure we'll talk about. 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.
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Chapter 5: How does Nietzsche's philosophy relate to our modern relationship with metrics?
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.
I'm hearing you say two things. The first is that metrics are useful precisely because they compress complicated information, right? The concept of heart rate variability, or my resting heart rate the moment before I fall asleep, these are useful because they can help me live a healthier life. Metrics compress information. That's the first thing I'm hearing.
The second thing I'm hearing, though, is that metrics aren't just useful, sometimes they're catastrophically useful. They're so useful that they pull our attention away from the that was our value before the metric existed, and they pull us toward this new value that is created by the convenience of the metric. So one thing that I want to do here, I'm sorry, maybe you want to jump in right there.
You should finish, but I'm excited. What I want to do here is force you to make the case against metrics by my defense of metrics. So I got into journalism by initially being an economics reporter. And there are a lot of economic statistics that I would argue have extraordinary value. Poverty is a rate. It is a statistic. And I think it is a moral good to push the poverty rate down.
Real income, that is wages that are adjusted for inflation, is, I think, something that we should want to rise, and therefore it's important to look at that number and watch it rise, hopefully quarter after quarter, year after year. So clearly,
Metrics, numbers can be incredibly useful, not only to make legible that which was previously illegible, but also to coordinate actors, to get many different people in many different places say, let's focus on pushing the poverty rate down, let's focus on raising average incomes.
How can metrics go awry if indeed they compress information usefully, coordinate action between actors that aren't initially coordinated, and even encourage action for providing some kind of agency? Why do you see, despite metrics clearly doing some things that are useful, potentially them being dangerous in many circumstances?
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Chapter 6: What insights does C. Thi Nguyen provide about metrics in professional life?
So I'm not, I mean, I think it's, okay, I think the thing you said is the, maybe I'm just being like a fussy economic philosopher here.
No, I love your edit. No, please keep going. Don't apologize for a half second. I love the way that you're pushing this.
Yeah, I mean, let me go back and first, like, push up what you said. So I think one of the most important things I learned from a lot of the historians I'm reading here in this field called science and technology studies is this idea that a lot of the times there are things that people make, that are decisions that people make, right? that go into information infrastructure.
And when they enter information infrastructure, we forget they're there and we forget that there were decisions people made. And then we just think that's the way the world is, right? So one of my favorite examples, this is new, it's not in the book because I just ended up talking about it in class because of a reading. A philosopher named Felipe was in a discussion of like,
Values and Measurement, about how measurements themselves can be value-laden and political, talks about the idea that intelligence is a measurable quality. And I think when people talk about IQ tests, they already know something like, oh, IQ tests are biased, they're biased on racial grounds, they're biased on gender grounds.
But there's another even deeper underlying thought that he's pushing, which is the very idea that there's one thing, one quality that's intelligence, that's measurable, and that we can point to and say that's the general quality that cross-cuts everything and lasts over your life, that's a very specific way of thinking about the world. There's very different ways of thinking about the world.
You could think about the world as one in which there's hundreds of different capacities, which are important in different contexts, and which were measurable independently, right? But instead, we've done this thing where we've squashed them into one thing, and we've made decisions about how they're ranked. So I think...
It took me a while to realize this, but our intelligence testing and measurement system tends to highly weight logic and mathematical ability and tends to weight barely, if at all, emotional sensitivity, right? That's built into the scheme. But if that enters your background infrastructure, you just might walk around and think like, oh, that's just what intelligence is.
There weren't any decisions that were made in that. That's just how nature is. That's what intelligence is. And I should just accept that. Yeah. And so I think a lot of the stuff you're talking about is completely right. That in many cases, in many cases, what's going on is that the world has given us a scoring system and it's programmed it in a particular way.
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