Human Nature Odyssey, Episode 26. Can Games Save The World From Bureaucracy? With C. Thi Nguyen

How many people live within a mile of your home? Every night, when you’re going to sleep, how many other human beings are going to sleep just a stone's throw away? And how many of these people do you know? How many do you talk to? Do you know their names? 

Or when you go down the street to the grocery store, do you know the people who work there? How about the people who grow the food that’s made it to these aisles? Do you know the names of the people who sew the clothes you’re wearing on your body? 

I’ll tell ya my answer: no, I do not. And we don’t have to. 

We live in a large scale society. We don’t have to know each other for this to work. 

We live in a society of strangers. And in the grand scheme of human history, this is very new.

Before the agricultural revolution, we would have lived in a society small enough to intimately know the people around you. Small scale societies are based on actual real life relationships between people.

But large scale societies? What the heck are they based on?

We take it for granted, but isn’t it kind of surprising that large scale societies, full of people who don’t know each other, function at all? 

How’s this thing still chugging along? 

John Locke wrote of a social contract. But it’s more like a social game. 

There are rules, roles, goals. Make money. Don’t break the law. 

Is our large scale society just one big role playing game?

And what if, oh I don’t know, in a totally hypothetical scenario, that large scale society was causing the destruction of the world and we wanted to change it - then we should probably learn more about how games work. 

And if there’s one person out there to understanding the relationship between society and games, it’s philosopher T. Chi Nguyen, professor at the University of Utah, and author of the pretty freakin’ phenomenal new book: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. 

Luckily for us, today C. Thi Nguyen is joining the Odyssey to help us figure out the dynamic between games, bureaucracy, and navigating life in large scale societies. 

Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey. A podcast trying to unbox the most complicated board game of all time: global civilization. I’m Alex Leff. 

Alex Leff (03:13.614)
I wanted to ask you a question about my parents. I was hoping you could help me better understand my parents. I was raised in a strong board game family. We love board games over here. And I always watch this transformation happen to my mom and dad. My my mom, very kind lady. She practices mindfulness and self compassion. She teaches social emotional learning to

elementary school kids and when we're playing settlers of Kitan, even though she claims she doesn't like things that are mean spirited, you know, she's putting the the robber right on my territory. She's gleefully stealing my sheep. She's building the biggest city. She's trying to dominate the board. She's ruthless. And meanwhile my dad, very peace loving guy. He grew up speaking out against the war in Iraq. He's always talking against imperialism.

His favorite board game is Risk. And when he's playing Risk, you know, it's all about amassing the most armies and conquering your neighbors and taking over the world at any means necessary. And I'm no better. I've grown up, loved playing these games. And I wanted to ask you what is going on here? What what exactly is a game and what are they doing to my sweet old parents?


C. Thi Nguyen (04:39.278)
This is such this is such a good qu I mean, okay, I've got a billion let me put on some technical philosophical tools and then and then I will give like maybe my richer wilder answer. Because there's so much I mean, the thing you're talking about is to me the thing that got me so excited to think about games, because I mean, I came from an environment where I was supposed to be a normal philosopher and this is not a topic that people study. But this thing that you're talking about seemed to me so interesting.

And there are two accounts of games that I've been come I mean, there are actually three the account of what a game is that I find really interesting and getting at different parts of this one thing. So Bernard Suit's idea of a game is it's voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them. So that's part of it, right? Like part of what you were doing in these is we're becoming the interesting obstacles for each other. I mean, I think it's really interesting that the way you le if you're playing a game like Risk or Settlers.

The way you let someone down is that you don't try hard because they want a challenge and you are that challenge. And if you don't do it, it's like you're actually kind of letting them down about what what they want, right? I mean, I get this with my kids. Sometimes they want to play Super Smash and sometimes I try hard. Sometimes I'm kind of checked out and they can tell it's boring for them. So that's part of it. There's actually a kind of cooperative social contract where we're becoming the obstacles for the other person.


Alex Leff (06:05.578)
It seems like we're competing. It seems like we're at odds, but actually we're kind of dancing together playfully, even though one of us is trying to beat the other.


C. Thi Nguyen (06:13.838)
Exactly. I think this is like there's an old tradition in a lot of sports, especially martial arts, that you respect an opponent in a match by trying hard against them. That I mean, the way the the the kind of very virtue sports people put it is that you're helping each other achieve their best self. I don't necessarily think it's even that, but you are like a lot of these games are designed, not all, but a lot of them are designed where if you try hard to beat someone, that's what makes it fun, right?

So that that's part of it. You are cooperating. Actually, the first thing I ever wrote in games is an article called Competition is Cooperation. And what I was trying to say was that games are a rule system. They're a technology that turn competition into co cooperation. Right. It's a transformational tool. So that's one thought. Another thought So there's this old tradition in game scholarship about something called the magic circle. So Johann Husinger, early twentieth century anthropologist, one of the first people to really write seriously in this space about

games and play, said that what makes play distinctive is it happens in a magic circle where the meanings change across the transition. And I think again, this is another way to describe something really similar. Like, you know, I love my wife, we support each other. And in the game, suddenly we just try to kill each other. Or I might hate you and spend the rest of my life trying to undercut you. But now we're on the same side in basketball and I just pass you the damn ball. Right.

The meaning structures are redesigned. And then the last element here, which comes from the game designer Reiner Knitia, one of my favorite game designers, a genius of board game design. He says that the most important tool in his game design toolbox is the scoring system, because it sets the player's desires during the game. It tells them what to care about. And I think on a on one level, a more superficial level, that's like, in this game I'm collecting sheep. in that game I'm

You know, taking over countries. But on a deeper level, like literally, you open a board game and you find out if you're cooperating, or if you're all in it for yourselves, or if you're on teams. And suddenly a whole apparatus of who you care about, who you're promoting, who you're protecting, who you're trying to kill, just comes into being. And one of the most remarkable things about games is I think they highlight something. Thinking about games in play highlights something that I think is crucial that so many philosophers, psychologists, theorists,


C. Thi Nguyen (08:37.705)
economists don't pay attention to, which is how fluid our desires are. And games are a case where you open the box and it tells you what you want. And you can just want it. Like you can just do that. I was reading this stuff about how, you know, our desires are really hard to change. And that's like it's kind of weird because I know what you mean, but also


Alex Leff (09:00.928)
In the board game Katan, it doesn't tell you you want to collect as much sheep as possible. There's just a a scoring system that in order to achieve that, now all of a sudden I didn't care about these little cards that had a picture of a cute little sheep on it. But now all of a sudden it's I gotta get those sheep. And so in that sense, a scoring system can shape our desires. Is that is that what you're


C. Thi Nguyen (09:23.67)
Exactly. The scoring system tells us what to want and it tells us our relationship to other people. And it can just completely fill our mind. It can be like you can come to care. And I I think it's not just board games, you can come to care so deeply about something. This is an example that's a little so the the classic board game examples for me are really quick. You turn it on, you turn it off. But a lot of the other things we do, a lot of the hobbies we care about, like you know, so I started fly fishing and I'm not a person that used to care about

Catching a large fish. But there's something about being in that structure. It's a very, it turns out to be a much more interesting game if you care about catching a large fish. It's like harder, they're smarter. And so once you enter into this community structure, it can become like this thing that you really like. It matters to you a lot. And then you can just at some point be like, I'm bored. I'm gonna do something else, and it's okay. Like that's not like a bad thing. That doesn't make me an intransigent person. This is like the heart of what games and play are this ability, both in the micro and

And in the macro to shift around just so fluidly what we care about. I mean, we're shifting what we care about in the small scale. And I think often it's to achieve these other things in the larger scale, like peace, happiness, like mental flourishing. One of the core insights who came which came to me from one of my philosophy mentors, Barbara Herman, is that there's this huge difference between a goal and a purpose. So the way she put it is like if you're f you have your friends over for a night of cards or party games.

The goal is to win. The purpose is to have fun. And you have to try to win to have fun. But you can try to win and fail and still have plenty of fun.


Alex Leff (11:03.662)
And so I wanted to ask you, your book is about games and also bureaucracy. Two seemingly different things, but you're talking about one of the ways our desires and what we care about are shaped in games is by the scoring system. And so there are scores and points in our everyday lives. I'm interested in how you became curious in scoring systems and how that impacted you as a philosophy professor.


C. Thi Nguyen (11:35.086)
Yeah. So I thought about games before I thought about bureaucracy. And one of the first thoughts I had was games are actually like architecture or urban planning or government design. They're about setting incentives and constraints to shape our freedom and shape how we move and shape how we interact. And governments do it more to keep us from killing each other, and games do it for fun or beauty. But it's the same kind of like constraint structure. So that's one first thought. Then

I was writing about games and people kept saying, like, you love games. You must love gamification. Let's talk about gamifying the classroom. And I was like, Fuck no. I hate gamification. And so I tried thinking about why. And then so I started writing this stuff.


Alex Leff (12:16.494)
Gamification of the classroom would be like really focusing on how can we bring points and scoring into the classroom.


C. Thi Nguyen (12:23.704)
Gamification is introducing more systems that motivate students towards their grades that are game-like. So sometimes in my classroom, I have the students, my students play a party game to analyze the social structure, but how they do in the game is not attached to how they do in the class. And gamifications are extensions of external motivational reward systems into the granularity of, like, you get points for each of these little actions. You get a point for every time you're.

Participate in class. And that goes towards your age. You get a point for every extra thing you read. That's that's a gamification. I was trying to figure out what was wrong with gamifications, and I came up with a a different theory, but something I ended up calling value capture, which is a case where your values may be like subtle and open-ended and dynamic and rich and complicated. And then you get put in an institution that feeds you a simplified version of your values, typically a metric or measure or ranking, like Fitbit steps, Twitter likes, subscriber counts.

Grant numbers for me, citation counts, right? And those start to displace your core values. So what I'm interested in is not just incentives. It's when the incentives step into your soul. I mean, I think it's one thing to be like, I needed enough subscribers to survive. And another thing to think, what I care about, my reason for being, is to up my subscriber count.


Alex Leff (13:42.114)
Yeah, and with podcasting, you know, when I I first wanted to make human nature odyssey because I wanted to explore big picture questions about civilization and talk to other folks who are interested in that as well. And as you're working on a podcast and, you know, people are asking you, like, how's the podcast going? You know, like how many people listen to it? Yeah. And you're applying for grants and stuff like that. The questions are about like, Well, how many listeners are you growing every month? And it starts to become tempting, this kind of value capture creep of

me wondering like, well, should I be writing episodes based on expanding my listenership? I can feel that in so many aspects of life is this this looming value capture that is twisting what my initial desires and interests were.


C. Thi Nguyen (14:27.224)
Yeah. Part of reason I got into this is because I am very susceptible to value capture. I've been value captured by status systems in my profession. I was value captured by Twitter. And I think that is a very distinctive experience. Cause when I got on Twitter, I got on it to have interesting conversations with individuals. Like it started as like, here is like a scientist, a cognitive scientist I never would have met before. And we had this long conversation and no one else cared. No one else hit like on it. But we met each other and had a fascinating conversation.

But fascinatingness is not measured by the user interface of Twitter. What Twitter measures is one thing, which is scale of popularity. And so once that starts creeping in and captures you, it really orients, it can completely change your reason for communicating. It completely changes. I used to care when I started Twitter much more about deep single contacts. And when Twitter started getting in inside my head, I started thinking about.

You know, what will be popular, what will be liked by a large number of people. And that's a very specific kind of communication. So basically, the long-winded answer to your question is I was both deeply vulnerable to external scoring systems and also trying to figure out why. I mean, I think the most interesting way to put the question is both games and institutions work on the same apparent mechanism, which is one that

A scoring system is something that specifies clearly how you'll be evaluated, right? It puts everyone on the same evaluation procedure. Why they're so delightful in games and so awful in institutions. And I think that became to me this weirdly compelling question.


Alex Leff (16:11.342)
About


C. Thi Nguyen (16:12.994)
I mean, in some sense, it's a question about how our social structures change us. Because here's this case study in two kinds of social structures, games and bureaucracies, that actually seem really similar and yet they impact us so differently. So I wanted to understand what the difference maker was given their apparent similarity.


Alex Leff (16:34.22)
What I'm interested in with human nature odyssey is exploring our relationship as individuals to our larger culture. One of the things I hear you exploring in your book is about large-scale societies. Societies that become so large they are filled with people who will never get to meet each other. People are gonna have to cooperate even though they don't have a personal relationship. In place of those.

Personal relationships, large scale societies create institutions and bureaucracies to run those institutions. And as a shorthand for those kinds of centralized large scale societies that require institutions, I would think of that as, you know, quote unquote civilization. Just we can are we cool with playfully using that term to refer to that kind of society.


C. Thi Nguyen (17:28.49)
Since I am open to the idea of a civilization that isn't rule bound in a bureaucratic way, I borrow from James Scott's seeing like a state, the term state, which refers to any large scale institutional bureaucracy that includes corporations and governments, that processes information by centralizing it according to rules.


Alex Leff (17:49.538)
And I see your book is navigating the trade offs that come with living in that kind of society. Right. Right. And of course it's one thing, it's tempting to be like, I don't want to live in that kind of society. I want to go hang out with my friends with a bunch of people who I have an intimate relationship with too. But of course, we're captives somewhat. We're beneficiaries and captives of this large scale society that we don't really have the choice to just abandon and walk away from. Yeah.

And you seem to argue that games can show us a way out of not rejecting large scale society, but better ways to navigate it. Yeah.


C. Thi Nguyen (18:34.338)
Difference in thinking about games versus bureaucracies really helps isolate for me what the working difference is. So I used to think the working difference was just the clarity and explicitness of the rules. But I think games show you why that isn't true, because games have explicit rules and explicit scoring systems and highly mechanical systems, but they encourage us to play with those systems.

And modify those systems. So I think what what games actually expose to me is that a huge working difference is not the existence of the rules, but their fixity and pliability at scale. The thing about games that makes them so interesting is that we both have clear rules that anyone can use, but they're also radically different game systems that we can move between. And games permit us to modify the I mean, this is the dumbest way to put the thought.

But in the end, after like thinking about that for like four years, the fast version of the answer is you can house rule Dungeons and Dragons, but you can't house rule GPA, right? Like what games are is a r scoring system and a rule set that's essentially isolated and detached from other ones that gives you the freedom to modify and move between them and modify them to small scale. So you can create an indie tabletop role playing game that just suits like five hundred people and

No one else cares about it. That's okay. And my plague group can be like, this doesn't quite work for us. We're gonna modify these rule. We can try it out. But they also point us to the upside of it. And I think this is a big difference between me and a lot of the people I've learned from, like James Scott and people like that, which is that a lot of them are entirely resistant to rules and resistant to scoring systems. And I think there's an enormous upside to them. Stable, explicit rule systems are really good at communicating different ways of approaching the world.

They're little packages of value and activity that make them transmissible. The clarity, right? The simplicity, the mechanicity. The downside is that it leaves out a bunch of stuff. The upside is that they are highly accessible. Like I think one of the big experiences I had was having the rule system and the the scoring system of rock climbing completely changed my relationship to my body, right? Like I used to hate my body. I used to think movement was dumb. I used to think that was just for like.


C. Thi Nguyen (20:58.486)
Whatever, dumb people. Like this is just I I read science fiction and philosophy. Like screw all and what's interesting is without a rule system, when I would go into nature and I would play around on rocks, I would just kind of move at random without much attention. And it was rock climbing saying, here's what you do. You go up hard things, you use your hands and feet, and your goal is to keep moving up harder things. And there's a scoring system of difficulties in climbs, and then you try to move up.

And that goal, which I'd never had before, right? I had never gone into nature and been like, I'm gonna go up harder things. I was just like, I'm gonna wander around and have fun and it's pretty. That clear, simple, restrictive goal forced me to pay more attention to my movement, because to climb well, you have to be very precise. And it attuned me to little qualities in my body that I'd never noticed before. And that was like the gateway to finding like ecstasy in motion, to being like, my God, there's like this huge

fascinating world of subtle, dance-like, complexed, attuned motion. And I wouldn't have gotten there if it weren't for this clear, explicit rule system that could transmit and shove me into a system that I hadn't had. And yet, the important thing about games is they're restrictive on the smaller scale, and that helps us find new ways of being, but they're open on the large scale. After a few years, I started going off the scoring system and like inventing my own.

Like I now climb for like maximum elegance. But I couldn't have done that without having first hewed to the traditional external scoring system and learning from it and the kind of community that established these climbs.


Alex Leff (22:41.846)
It's amazing the freedom and the creativity that comes with limitations. Yeah. So you talk about personal value capture, how each of us can experience value capture in our lives. You also talk about societal value capture. When I think about with how societies experience value capture, you talked about it on an educational level with GPA. I certainly, as a kid in school, started to feel like

Okay, I think that the goal here is for us to get the best standardized state test scores more than individuals learning. And then of course GDP is another example of that too.


C. Thi Nguyen (23:21.838)
What we tend to socially target is things that we have clear measures for. And I think it's easy to just think about like creepy Machiavellian supervillain type manipulations. But I think for me, some of the most damning and compelling cases are very good hearted cases where people are trying to do something good in the world and then they glom onto a measure. So a lot of public health focuses on extending lifespan.

And decreasing easy measurables like heart attack rates. They don't focus particularly much on mental health, community flourishing, a sense of freedom. And I mean, the dumb case for this is just like, you know, what is the recommendation going to be about the consumption of rich fatty like cheeses? And even suppose the science says, and this is debatable, suppose the science says it creates more heart attack rates, it lowers your lifespan. The worry is that this becomes the dominant goal.

Because it's measurable, and something like happiness and tradition and joy and like, my God, this is so delicious. This just drops out of consideration because it's harder to measure.


Alex Leff (24:29.422)
Mm-hmm.

Right. It's not because there's some sort of conspiracy against the good things in life. It's that institutions, which large scale r societies require to have people who don't know each other cooperate, institutions are blind to something like the joy of cheese. Yeah. Institutions can only see the world through what's measurable. Yeah. And I find that a really interesting insight that you explore.


C. Thi Nguyen (25:00.514)
Yeah. I mean this is this is this is Scott's thought. So the key of Scott's seeing like a state is this idea that large-scale states only find the easable, easily countable parts of the world legible. That's what they can see. So they want to remake the world to make it more legible. Scott focused on, I think, kind of externalities. He was interested in city structures, property taxes, forests, about simplifying biodiversity to make forests easier to manage, like simplifying agriculture, shifting to monocropping and

highly controlled, highly fertilized environments with single crops because that was easier for states to control. And I think what I'm doing is saying that Scott's story extends to values. And when our values are more legible to the state, we are more manageable and controllable. And to do that, we are much more manageable if our desires are legible. And so if our desires track simple, easy to count things like lifespan. And again, this doesn't have to be a

evil state. We are much more manageable if we care more about having more money and having longer lives. And we're much less manageable and easy to optimize for if we care about weird art shit or our bizarre ass communities or like peculiar kinds of hard to count freedom.


Alex Leff (26:13.612)
Mm. Ultimately you talk about system wide value collapse. Could you define that for us and then I have a question for you about it?


C. Thi Nguyen (26:23.64)
So value capture is what happens when you internalize as your core values external simplifications like metrics. I think one key about value capture before we get to value collapse is that a big difference with value capture is that you kind of lose your reflective standpoint from which to reflect on the simplifications. So if you are not captured, if you're just like, I'm gonna try running for a while, or

I'm gonna pay attention to my citation rates for a while, you still have a standpoint from which you can say, this is not working out for me. I'm unhappy, or this is screwing up my research. As long as you have a grip on some larger sense of value, you can navigate those metrics and pay attention to them and be like, well, I have to pay attention to this for my job, but otherwise I'm gonna try not to pay attention to it. But when you're value captured, if you redefine success as

For me, like citation rates, right? If that becomes my definition of success, I lose the ability to say, this is what's wrong with this definition of success, right? I lose my reflective stance on these definitions. So value collapse is it's a feedback loop. It's my name for a potential feedback loop where systems reward people who are willing to narrow their values and be value captured. And then if those people, when promoted,

when they gain more power, reinforce that effect, then we get this effect. Let me start with a simple example. So this I got from a paper by Paul Smaldino and Mizard McAlreth called The Cultural Evolution of Bad Science. And it's a modeling paper. And they run this model where they say, like, okay, just a s have a few simple assumptions. Imagine that there's some gap between good science and getting a lot of scientific publications. And they think what basically what happens is

If you're maximally rigorous, you're gonna be a little slow. And so given the current incentive structure in science, what the incentives actually say is do experiment at the minimal publishable level of rigor, and then you'll publish more quickly. So basically, people that game the incentive systems will game it by doing minimally rigorous experiments. And then the worry is, but if our systems reward scientists by number of publications, right, if they give them


C. Thi Nguyen (28:52.482)
The best jobs and the biggest status by publishing a ton instead of publishing a few very rigorous things, then they will rise in power. And if you get rising in power in the sciences, the people who are most willing to ignore true science and game the system, and then you get them training graduate students, right? Then you get this feedback loop where the science will just come to care more and more about gaming the system of incentives and less about doing real science.

So value collapse is my name for generalizing that. I just think that applies to everything, right? If there's a gap between what's really important and what's easy to measure, and Porter just tells us what that gap is, right? The gap is the gap between what's rich and subtle and nuanced and what's highly accessible at scale. So imagine you have two populations. Imagine you have one population that actually cares about what's valuable and then

Pays attention to the incentives and systems, but kind of trades off against them. And what sometimes they're like, you I know the systems are like this, but I still want to do great science. So I'll compromise. Right. And another population that's like, no, I'm just going to game the system. I I'm I'm just willing or able to burn out my sense of what's really valuable and just aim at the s incentives. The second population is going to do better because they are not trading off, right? So

The worry is that you get this feedback loop where we'll just get a feedback loop that gives more power to people that are willing to ignore what's actually valuable and just pay attention to the metrics.


Alex Leff (30:28.414)
Is system wide value collapse inevitable in large scale societies? Yeah. Because as I'm as I'm reading your book, that's what I'm wondering. Because if large scale societies require institutions, which require bureaucracies, right, which lead to systems-wide value collapse, even though it could be individually resisted, it seems like it's

structurally inevitable, almost like it's part of the same process, like the head and the tail of a snake. What do you what do you think of that conundrum?


C. Thi Nguyen (31:07.854)
So this is the root. I think this is the thing you're picking up on. This is the story. I'm not sure about the story, but this is the story that leads you one to think that institutional value collapse is kind of inev inevitable. We need to organize at scale. Communication at scale happens through these thin portable measures. As long as the systems are set up to reward people that hyperfixate on the thin measures, then we'll get a system that more and more pays only attention to.

the thin, low context, highly accessible measures and loses any sense of anything else. And what's in the other bucket is subtle values, variable values, values that are highly local, highly contextually specific, highly specific to a domain. All that stuff kind of gonna get washed out of the system. So that's the worry.


Alex Leff (32:00.214)
And the danger is as well that can large scale societies solve the problems that it creates? And I look at something like climate change, for example, the way institutions approach climate change as if it's a metrics problem. There's too many emissions, there's too much CO two, so we're gonna have to lower the amount of carbon that's being put into the environment.

And so we set these emission targets. And now climate action becomes this game of scorekeeping. And there's this focus on optimizing that score. And so, you know, we might create cars that are electric vehicles and they lower the emissions, but we're focused on lowering the emissions, even if that means we have to mine critical, you know, rare minerals around the world or that our overall consumption of

resources is actually going up as long as that scorekeeping of the emissions is going down, we'll feel like we're doing something about climate change. And I feel like climate change as a phenomenon is a great example of not a metrics issue, but actually like a a relational issue that cultures and human beings can only actually address based on local context and the subtlety and nuances of

what each individual ecology and ecosystem requires. My worry is that it's actually impossible for large scale society to address something like climate change, which of course is a consequence of large scale institutional society.


C. Thi Nguyen (33:44.334)
I mean, I tend to think maybe I often use climate change as an example on the flip side, but I might just not know about it as much as you. But I tend to think that what metrics are very powerful as a tool for large-scale, very tightly coordinated action. And so there are some things that are good that admit of easy measurement. And I think like I mean, look at the kinds of things that we have been very good at over the last two hundred years, right? We've been good at extending lifespan. We've been good at

Increasing vaccination, reducing death by various illnesses. We've been good at decreasing general poverty level. Like that that stuff has genuinely happened. It's happened in many cases by coordination over metrics. And what metrics make available is that kind of quick coordination. So the worry is what is left out of that. So in a particular region of concern like health, there are going to be some things that admit to easy measurement, like life expectancy, and other things like mental health and

Flourishing and well being or other things, like just the beauty of complex athletic skill. These don't admit as easy of measurement. And so the worry is that they'll tend to get beaten out in public argument, and we won't pay attention to them. There's an ultra cynical view of this, which is something like metrics will always miss everything. I don't

I think that's just so cynical that it's not believable. There's been so much that it's done. It's the story is more like metrics are really good at helping us target the kinds of things they can measure. And that is one chunk of the world, and some of that's important. But they also kind of fixate our attention on it, and we lose this other stuff. So the question I guess one way to put the question for me is how do we get the goods while mitigating the evils? Again, there's a clear trade off here.


Alex Leff (35:21.091)
Right.


C. Thi Nguyen (35:31.308)
I mean, I think one can imagine a world that is structured to use metrics to target these larger things and yet create space, structural space for us. Let us actually use metrics to control emissions insofar as that matters at all, right? Let us use metrics to increase lifespan and decrease poverty. And also

Let us also make space for people to be into the weird shit they're into and to pursue well-being and education and flourishing in their own weird ways. So the counterpressure to that really is value collapse. That's the worry I have, right? Like the worry is that we have a world in which people systematically gain power and influence insofar as they're willing to ignore all the subtle important stuff.

So I think that's the really important thing to fight.


Alex Leff (36:29.804)
Right. So for climate change, the corporations and the governments and the NGOs that are able to point to lower emissions are going to be held up as societies. We're doing something to address climate change. But of course that's gonna maybe ignore are they taking a forest and just clear cutting it and building an array of solar panels? Yes. So while we can individually resist value capture, it just seems like

If it's structurally baked into o to be cynical about it, I'd desperately love to be knocked out of that.


C. Thi Nguyen (37:01.23)
Yeah.


C. Thi Nguyen (37:06.83)
I remember writing down the value collapse argument in the simplest form. I really depressed myself. And then I sent it to a bunch of my friends and I was like, I wrote this argument. It really depresses me. Can you find the flaw in it? And they wrote back, they're like, fuck you, I'm depressed now too. but it also the argument also identifies what the weak points are. And I don't know if we actually have power over them, but the weak point is really the feedback loop whereby we systematically grant power in terms of the metric. And what this looks like is

If you only promote and reward and make your CEOs and university presidents the people that max out in the metrics, that will lead to the system. If you hang on to other forms of value in your power conferring system, if you do not demand maximally legible, accessible justifications for all your power conferring decisions, then maybe we have some degree of hope. One of the first places I started thinking about this was thinking about transparency metrics.

Anar O'Neill, one of my favorite philosophers, has this beautiful line where she says, People think that trust and transparency go together, but they're actually intention because transparency requires experts to explain themselves to non-experts. But expert reasons are not all transmissible to non-experts by definition. That's what expertise is. And so transparency will encourage experts to lie. And I was like, actually, it's even worse. Transparency will often ask force experts to act.

not on their expertise and de-expert the whole system. And I think part of the the reason is it's not that transparency systems are bad. It's that they're the opposite of gut intuitive judgment, right? Like transparency systems asks people to justify their actions with reasons that ground out in kinds of evidence and kinds of reasoning that everyone can see and audit and check. And without that, we have room for massive corruption and bias. But also if we only have transparent reasoning,

then we don't have room for subtlety, delicacy, and domain-specific expertise. And sometimes I worry that part of the system we're in, the good hearted part, not the evil, whatever part. The good hearted part, some of it arises from overattaching to transparency, from being like, well, we have to get rid of bias. So you have to be transparent about everything. And I think again, the answer is a trade-off answer. Trust and transparency are in basic tension. If you trust too much, you allow unlimited rooms for corruption and bias.


C. Thi Nguyen (39:32.098)
And if you demand too much transparency, you eliminate all the space for subtly trained intuition and complex, informed, deep judgment about what's important in an area. And like the answer is something in the middle, which means that in the practical case here, what we're looking at is like urging that decision making about policies and about leaders not be entirely transparent, not be untransparent.

But that we admit room for reasoning not just in terms of public data and public metrics, but also a sense, right? I mean, I think one place I see this is I mean, the history of philosophy is a dumb example, it's just the one I know best. For a long time, people could just use their gut to hire people. And what you got was rich old white men hiring more rich old white men. And then when we introduced more objective measures, no, you gotta look at their citation rates.

And their publication rates. You did get at first a clear like it opened up the space because articles are blind peer-reviewed, and because publication status is something that you get from blind review, right? Like it doesn't matter if you're Asian or a woman, you can submit an article to a top journal and it gets blind reviewed. And if the status of publications is what people are forced to pay attention to, then suddenly you get this huge debiasing effect. It's great. And then twenty years later,

You get systems gaming, right? Where everyone is like, okay, what is the thing I can do to most surely be published and get a ton of citations in these journals? And that turns out not to be good philosophy either. You need some balance between transparent metrics-based reasoning and room for more gut judgments, like here's a hiring decision that I cannot justify in metrics. This person publishes a lot, but it's all kind of

Boring stuff designed to game the publication system. And this person publishes less, but it's really interesting original work. And if that's allowed into the decision stream, then we have a guard against value collapse. But it's really hard to permit that into the decision stream. It's really easy. One way that I like that Theodore Porter puts it is that metrics permit people to defer responsibility. So if you


C. Thi Nguyen (41:54.922)
Make a decision based on the metric. You can be like, it wasn't me. The numbers just said so. Even though underneath you made a lot of decisions about what metrics to use and how to count them. But if I make a decision using my gut, if I depart from the metric and I'm like, no, here is my decision. I think this is a better decision based on my own reading of the situation, suddenly I'm in the stream of responsibility and I can be fired. I think that's there's something about the way in which metrics create this face of objectivity.


Alex Leff (42:23.598)
Objectivity laundering as you call it.


C. Thi Nguyen (42:25.6)
Yeah, yeah. That they can create even though they're many of the decisions about what to count, how to count it, and what not to count are deeply, deeply value laden. Metrics present a face of, no, we just did a bunch of number crunching. This is another thing important to think to talk about, the degree to which so this is an insight I get from a lot of my colleagues in philosophy, in philosophy of science, particularly this kind of modern feminist wing of philos philosophy of science.


Alex Leff (42:42.2)
Mm-hmm.


C. Thi Nguyen (42:53.878)
It's really interesting in the degree to which a lot of objective seeming measures involve hidden value decisions at the bottom. One of my new favorite examples is intelligence testing. You can say something like, we just hired the highest IQ candidates. That's right. Like that decision was out of my hands. I was just


Alex Leff (43:03.478)
Yeah.


Alex Leff (43:15.618)
That ignores all of the different values that went into the IQ test in the first place. Right.


C. Thi Nguyen (43:21.452)
I think IQ testing makes it really apparent because I mean and a lot of people know that there's certain biases towards gender and race and culture, but even beyond that, there's something baked into the heart. I mean, here's one way to think about it. There are all kinds of mental capacities we have that we might weight and value differently. There's abstract reasoning, there's mathematical reasoning, there's emotional sensitivity, there's creativity, there's narrative creativity, there's visual intelligence. There like there's a billion things. There's the ability to smoothly navigate a social situation. And our IQ testing right now.

Highly weights mathematical and abstract reasoning and reading skills, and it does not weight or barely weights emotional sensitivity, empathy, narrative creativity. And so basically that's a value decision. Do you call it a subjective one that gets baked in at the bottom of the measurement system? But it's hidden so that by the time you get to the to the decision process, someone can claim, there were no value decisions made. We just

Pick the candidates that had the highest IQ or had the highest citation rate or had the highest grant numbers, right? And it does not look like you've made a value decision, but you have. One value decision you made is which metric to use, right? There's a billion. And another is underneath the formation of each metric are a set of value decisions about what to count and what not to count, and how to weight them and how to compare them and how to aggregate them.


Alex Leff (44:46.732)
I think your book, The Score, does a beautiful job of reminding us why appreciating our individual values is such a beautiful thing. What does it look like to be free of value capture? Remind us, those of us, myself included, who struggle in a world that, you know, tells you, well, the point of life is you wanna make as much money as possible. You wanna get

as big of a social media following as possible. You wanna have the fanciest clothes as possible. You want all these external measures of good life. What is the point of ignoring all that and getting in touch with your own values? Why is that important? How do we get in touch with our own values? Right. Remind me.


C. Thi Nguyen (45:38.85)
This is a lovely question. And this also gives me another way to think about your question of is value collapse inevitable? One way to put it is I think we have counter bureaucratic practices, traditions. And they're around and we know what they are. I think the names we have for them are art and play and games and all of these things. Art is, I think, a preserve where we've truly tried to encourage people

To make things and value things from their own quiet sense of value, although it's their incursions. But I think what this often looks like is what we expect people to do in the arts is to be like, I love this, and I can't tell you why, but it's so delicious, and that's okay in that space. Games, I think, are a really interesting case because games, I mean, this is maybe my most optimistic romantic take, but games are practice in

irony towards bureaucracies. Like what games are is a the practice of playing games, especially aesthetically, is that you try on a system, a clear system, and you learn from it. And then you step back and you say, Do I want this in my life? Do I want more of this? And the basis that you decide from is outside of scoring systems usually. You ask, is the game fun? Is it interesting? Was it rich? Was it beautiful? Was it fulfilling? Was it difficult in a cool way? Was it dense, right? And that's practice in

Stepping back. It it's that I think is this ideal state where you both get to use the power of explicitness to learn from systems and then also try to manage, modulate, and reflect on them from a standpoint outside those clear systems. I mean, I think there's a dumb version of this is just be more playful with your work life. And that's not going to fucking work like that. Because the external large-scale systems are tied to massive incentives. And

They have that huge power of clear communication. I think the real seductive power of metrics is that you make yourself instantly comprehensible. And anytime you have some weird hobby and have to explain it to a room full of adults and have them look at you is that's the experience of what it's like to communicate about something that is not preformatted into a highly accessible justificational system. The hope we have is to learn to be okay with sometimes being incomprehensible.


C. Thi Nguyen (48:04.334)
Not always, but sometimes be like, yeah, I'm sorry. I love doing philosophy and I love helping people, but I also love yo-yo and I'm just gonna have to be okay with the fact that everyone's gonna look at me like I'm a weird, stupid asshole and accept that. And the price of not accepting that is the loss of freedom to find out what matters to you.


Alex Leff (48:32.046)
Mm-hmm. I think that's beautiful. And I almost want like I want like a guidebook on how we can all, you know, explore our own values and be bold enough to to embrace them, even with all the external pressures to be legible to other people. I'm also curious, too, that it seems like our society right now is focused on what you call as achievement play.

I love the dichotomy you give between achievement play and striving play. And I suspect that we could all use a little bit more striving play. And so how would we as a society move towards striving play? What would a society that encourages striving play look like?


C. Thi Nguyen (49:17.654)
Yeah. I mean, my idea of striving play came from reading Bernard Suits, the philosopher of games, who defines games as taking on voluntary obstacles. And Suits is an Aristotelian. He's an he was an Aristotle scholar. And I think he was really expressing this Aristotelian idea that the meaning in human life comes from activity, not from outcomes. It comes from doing things, exercising your capacities, being engaged in interesting thinking, interesting motion, interesting decisions, interesting conversations.

I mean, we have a version of this still around. Like every poster that says the journey is the destination is like a version of this thought, but mostly we've lost it. Right. I think part of the reason we've lost it is that outcomes and products are easy to count, but like the joy of the process is one of the most ineffable, hard to express, hard to capture things possible. I'm guilty of this all the time. I mean when I was learning yo yo and people were like, What are you doing? I would

immediately be you know, yo-yo is a great stress reliever. It helps me reset and write more. And I was like trying to justify joy in terms of productivity and output that was easily countable. Cause like you can't show joy to other people, but you can be like, I wrote twenty pages today. Yeah. Right. I think it's actually most likely that the most beautiful things will be labeled stupid. Many of

The systems where everyone gets to be creative and everyone gets to make art that satisfies themselves or a small community of people, that people get to be expressive and personally tailored. These are considered the dumbest parts of the world. Think about most of the world's attitude towards fanfic. Look at this world where you get the little micro communities fashioning their own taste.

Where everyone gets to be an artist and evaluate every other art and develop their own sensibility in small groups and everyone gets to make shit. How is that the dumb part of the world? Like that is the most beautiful part of the world. How is it that people sitting Dungeons Dragons, people sitting around and telling stories that suit them out of their own creativity? How did that get to be the worst, geekyest, most embarrassing activity when I was growing up, right?


C. Thi Nguyen (51:38.518)
I think part of the reason is because Dungeons and Dragons and Fanfic are not optimized for art product. They're optimized for the joy of the creative process itself.


Alex Leff (51:49.622)
If you get your friends together for a role-playing game, the story that is produced from that might not be on the same caliber as Lord of the Rings. You know, if you wrote a transcript of your Dungeons and Dragons game, you might not be able to sell it to a lot of people. And so our culture tells us like, well then why would you do that? You might as well just watch Lord of the Rings, which I'm I'm not anti-Lord of the Rings. But the point of playing that game with your friends is not to produce the most widely

accessible story, but to have a connection with your friends and get to experience it yourself. And I thought that was such a beautiful thing you explore of how can we in our own lives and then culturally really value that experiential joy rather than the outcome joy.


C. Thi Nguyen (52:41.826)
Yeah, I mean, fanfic world, Dungeons and Dragons World, gardening world, knitting world, like these are all worlds in which communities sustain each other in being engaged in beautiful processes. If bureaucracy world is a world that forces us all to conform to a particular conception of value and then asks us to excrete objects as efficiently as possible by some external conception of value, what's the opposite of that?

Sitting around with your friends making up a story for no reason that'll evanes at the end of the day just because the joy of creating a story together is amazing. I mean, I just think I don't know, the opposite of bureaucracy is tabletop role playing. That's that's my take.


Alex Leff (53:25.784)
Yeah, just taking that step towards appreciating that kind of thing with your friends and if we were all doing that more and avoiding the value collapse, it'd be interesting to see what ripple effects that that would have.


C. Thi Nguyen (53:38.924)
Yeah, I mean Bernard Seud put it this way, he said, like, imagine utopia where we've solved all our practical problems. What would we do with our time? We would play games or be bored out of our minds. So games must be the meaning of life. Which is an argument that some people find idiotic, but it's i it's just the Aristotelian thought again. What he's really saying is what makes human life meaningful is the doing itself and some of the most important doing.

will not be tuned to producing outcomes or effects or good consequences. It'll be tuned towards just whatever makes doing meaningful.


Alex Leff (54:20.366)
Thank you so much for creating this book and reshaping, you know, these old conversations we have in such interesting new ways and letting us I think it provides us with lots of different tools for thinking about these questions.


C. Thi Nguyen (54:34.914)
This has been amazing. We've travelled everywhere and I said a bunch of new things I haven't said before, which is fun.


Alex Leff (54:48.558)
Thanks for listening. This is the kind of episode that for me raises more questions than it answers. Here's a little of what I've been thinking about since talking with T.

If large-scale societies and their institutions and bureaucracies can only see the world through metrics, then I'm worried they're blind to local context and nuance. But we can't just snap our fingers and make large-scale society go away. Is it possible to structure highly local, autonomous small-scale societies within large-scale societies? Where communities play a more active role in governing themselves so they can

respond to all the subtle nuances of what's needed locally while still coordinating in a large-scale way? Can we build systems where, like games, our roles are temporary or seasonal or dependent on context? Like a structure where we take on specific roles, gain specific status, and then let them go, reshuffling our sense of ourselves and our role in a community throughout the year.

And throughout our lives. Until next time, I hope you'll consider what you enjoy doing for the sake of doing it, and what you most value that can't be quantified and turned into a metric to gain.


Alex Leff (56:17.59)
In the meantime, if you'd like to dive deeper into these ideas, you can find a whole lot more on the Human Nature Odyssey Substack. There's a two hour bonus episode where friends of the show, Jake and Marin, join me for a wide ranging discussion inspired by the ideas in this book. Wynn offers all sorts of interesting and creative frameworks for thinking through this conundrum. The Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy. The difference between

Old school context-based recipes and new school algorithmic step-by-step recipes, and much more. Thank you so much to everyone supporting the show on Substack and for those who've long supported it on Patreon. This summer we've been transitioning the community side of HO fully to Substack. If you've been supporting the project on Patreon, I'd love for you to come join us over at Substack. If you enjoy Human Nature Odyssey, please share it with a friend.

And leave a friendly review. Thank you to Nick for your feedback on this episode. And thanks so much to C. Thi Nguyen for joining us today. I highly recommend reading the score yourself. You can also find more of his thoughts at his awesome blog Objectionable. I'll link to it in the description. This series was made in association with the Post Carbon Institute. You can learn more at resilience.org. And as always, our theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch. You can find a link in our show notes. Talk with you soon.