36: C. Thi Nguyen - Measurement, Meaning, and Play

22:31And that makes us see the thing that maybe we were typically subject to. We're seeing the water a little bit when we play games.

22:36C. Thi Nguyen:Yeah. Do you mean like we become more aware that – When we're doing that, that whole thing you just laid out, we're not thinking about the ways we're taking on different forms of agency in most of our daily lives. Like we're – I think most people's perception would be like, yeah, of course I'm not going to be like – I'm going to be a little different when I'm at work. But they haven't fully – and I would argue many of the people who are most successful in modern society are the ones who are really good at this. Right. Maybe it's sociopathic. Or, I mean, this is – Sure. This is probably linking to the later part, but there's really good – there's two different things.

23:08C. Thi Nguyen:Really good at role shifting versus being willing to completely transform yourself and get yourself stuck in a role forever. And like one worry might be there's one thing, which is playfully being able to shift into different roles. And there's another thing that this world might reward, which is psychopathically committing yourself to a hyper-simplified role and never being playful. with it we will get to that yeah we will get to we'll get to that later um on this note maybe then of agency and i want to talk about values too because i think it's critical but since you brought it up like the maybe maybe one conception of this would be that games can make it easy to act to my earlier point which is like the the you can just do things for an agency and the other is that they make it easy to explore the possibility space of actions.

24:00C. Thi Nguyen:I think one thing that is important here to keep in mind the kind of two levels of agency involved in games. So there's the kind of, there's one kind of agency in which a game, a specific game provides you with one particular form of agency in the sense that we've been talking about. And it fixes it and you plunge into it during the game. You suddenly become a being of only balance or a being of only like calculation or a being of only like deceit and lying, right? Each of the game focuses you. And then there's another tier of agency. I think of the other sense you're talking about, the freeing sense, the exploring sense, where games as a whole let you move between them, right?

24:44C. Thi Nguyen:They give you the freedom to – I get to mean – I get to have a choice. In a lot of my work life, I don't have this choice. Work life after this interview, I'm going to be grading. Like I don't have any choices about this. Like there is a kind of agency that's going to be pushed into me. But for my break, right, I can choose. Am I going to play with yo-yos? Am I going to run around the block? Am I going to have a quick game of online chess? And each of these is a completely different kind of action and a completely different feel of action. And I get choice of them because of the enclosed nature of games and because the clarity makes that role shifting easier.

25:24C. Thi Nguyen:think that's something really interesting about games the hyper clarity of the rules and the points makes the role shifting easier yes okay this is pointing something i think is actually really important which is what i actually think you just described there is maybe part of the difference between incentives and values um which are two very different kinds of motivators yeah the first one is like i have to grade right and and i want to come back to the agency point because i think that part of what i'm really interested in is that you can just do things form of agency is sort of acting, it's not acting based on incentives and it's kind of acting in the world of value.

26:01Maybe for a second, like you say incentives can provide some motivation, but they don't change your core values. Maybe to start, like why do you think modernity tempts us so much to overweigh towards incentives rather than acting based on values? Well, I mean, I don't,

26:16C. Thi Nguyen:I'm not sure that's the right way to formulate the question for me because my worry is about There are always going to be incentives, and my worry is when incentives become values. So an incentive – okay. So a value roughly is just I think whatever is your core motivator, whatever is the ultimate guider of your action, whatever sets your choices, whatever sets how you're going to change yourself. Your values are where all this springs from, whatever that is. Incentives are things the world gives you where it says if you do this, you'll get those resources. And so I think there's one way that you can keep the world at arm's length where you say like, okay, the world is giving me certain incentives.

26:59C. Thi Nguyen:It's saying I have to do things this way to make money. I have to do things this way for people to listen for me or to get enough people to tune into this show to even hear what I'm saying. So those are the incentives. And then the reason I'm entangling with them, my reason for gathering those resources comes out of my actual values, right? So that's one structure. The thing I'm worried about is when they collapse and we suddenly forget to think about what our values are beyond the incentives. I mean, what I'm talking about is the simplest damn thing, which is the one frame of mind is to make enough money to do what you actually want.

27:36C. Thi Nguyen:And the other frame of mind is just be like, well, here's what I do. Here's the scoring system. I'm just going to max out on making money and not thinking about the thing it's for. I mean, I think that's just – that difference should be familiar to everyone, and that's the difference between like having a firewall between your true values and your incentives and letting them be collapsed. Yes. I think maybe I was making too big of an assumption there and sort of assuming that when I said the difference between incentives and values, I'm thinking of values as sort of the things we do despite incentives, despite clear incentives.

28:12What do you think of willpower?

28:16C. Thi Nguyen:Oh, tell me what you mean by that question. Do you know who like David Goggins is? He's like the ultra marathon. He's the guy who's like, wake up at 4 a.m. and carry the logs. And one of my jokes is I like, I like don't really believe in willpower. I think of willpower as this sort of like grittiness, despite maybe even clear incentives that says like, I'm going to do something hard. Because in the long run, it's going to pay off. Right. And I've always kind of related to willpower as sort of like, the people who require willpower are the ones who haven't found a way to harmonize their real values and what the world wants or something like that yeah i mean that's pretty romantic i get to be a philosopher but let me tell you i have to grade 10 more papers tonight and that's going to need a lot of willpower yeah um i mean i think let me let me try something maybe this is interesting to you so when i was first trying to articulate uh we just introduced the value capture term.

29:16C. Thi Nguyen:So one of the core ideas of my book is value capture. Value capture is what happens when you have values that are rich and subtle and developing. And then you get put in an institution or a social setting that feeds you clear, simplified versions of those values, like a metric. And then there's - It's sort of the incentives and the value that you were just talking about. Yeah, collapsing, exactly, right. So I just, and then they take over. So value capture is what happens when you go to school out of an interest in learning and you get focused on GPA It's what happens when you go on social media to connect to people and you get focused on likes or you start a podcast to get ideas and then you become focused just on subscriber count.

29:54C. Thi Nguyen:Not as a means to communicate what you really want, but changing what you're trying to say to just max out your subscriber count. Okay. So I've been worried about value capture for a while and I've been trying to figure out what's wrong with it. And here's a first pass. one thing you might think is the wrong of value capture is that the world is that you're losing control of your values so the world is forcing your values out of something you freely choose i don't think that's actually the right one and it partially one of the okay if that's true if that were the right account then if someone were forced to and brainwashed into putting on a putting on a watch and just caring about their steps or forced to like pay attention to their BMI instead of their health, that would be a problem.

30:44C. Thi Nguyen:But if someone freely chose and devoted themselves to weight loss over all else, that would be fine because it was a matter of choice. And I think actually one of the most worrisome things is cases where people enthusiastically and freely choose to be value captured, right? They're like, okay, they embrace it. They lose the plot, you could say. And they lose the plot because in some ways it's easier, right? Because the world is giving you a quick, easy tracker and everyone else understands it. Yes. So the thing I'm really interested in is trying to explain – okay, I'm going to do some abstract philosophy.

31:25C. Thi Nguyen:I think you'll like this. I think it will be interesting to you. One conception of what the human well-being is, I mean, this might sound weird, but we've got to talk about well-being and flourishing and what makes a good human life. Because what we're talking about is how oversimplified values screw that up. By the way, that's part of, I think, one of the reasons I wanted to set the table, at least on the more personal side, which is like, we're going to talk more about all the kind of global problems we have. But at root, these things are intuitive. We forget them. The point of living is to live a meaningful, flourishing life.

31:56I think we can all agree.

31:57C. Thi Nguyen:So let me just say, there's so many things I want to say right now, but let me just say one quick way to do it. Like, I'm worried about someone capturing your definition of meaning. I'm worried about someone. And this is why, like, this is why the willpower question is so interesting to me. Because I think, like, if the world can change your sense of meaning, it can reorient your will. It can make you send all your willpower and all your grit towards some simplified, right? Okay. Does that make sense? So let me give you this bit of like technical background that isn't in the book because it was a little bit too technical, but you might find it interesting.

32:40C. Thi Nguyen:So there's a standard view in a lot of economics and rational choice theory. And it's a prevailing view, the guide social policy that says what people's well-being is, is just the satisfaction of their expressed preferences and desires. Whatever they say they desire, whatever they say they want. Give them what they want. Yeah, give them what they want. They'll be good. And the view is something like, well, we can't be intrusive. We have to let people be autonomous. We have to listen to what they want. This is sort of like the neoliberal late-stage capitalism. Right. But this is also like underneath all of economic theory, right?

33:10C. Thi Nguyen:This is like – this is underneath actually a lot of political science. It's like very, very progressive, very positive, very help-the-world-political-science scientists often work with this view that what well-being is is satisfying people's expressed desires. Also not being paternalistic critically. Right, because it's not – that's true. It respects people's autonomy and it is non-paternalistic if you just listen to what people want. One of the most interesting criticisms of this came out of, I think, 80s and 90s feminist theory. And it came because of a worry about what's called adaptive preferences.

33:50C. Thi Nguyen:So it turns out psychologically, a lot of this comes from a sociologist named John Elster. So if I start to limit your opportunities, your preferences will adapt to the opportunities that are available to you. I'll lower my bar. You'll lower your bar, exactly. So one of the things that turns out was that if systemically women can't find work outside the house and they're not permitted to work in the workplace, then people will adapt their desires to domesticity. So here's the worry. Okay. We create a world where half the people are not allowed to work. They adapt their desires to fit the limited situation we have.

34:33C. Thi Nguyen:According to desire, preference, satisfaction theory, we've won. We've succeeded. The world is great. But then you have a falling knife, right? What do you mean? Like you have a fall – like theoretically – like if you wanted to paint a really, really cynical vision of the world, it's just this – that scenario you just described just seeps into more and more of – Yes. Yes, exactly. Let me just finish that. So I just did this for my students. It was like, look, so if your view is that well-being, a good world is one in which people's expressed desires match their situation. Imagine you have – here's a case where most of the world – people in the world get$20 ,000 a year and their desires are to have$60 ,000 a year.

35:16There are two ways to satisfy everyone's preferences. Make the world better or get people to decrease their preferences.

35:25C. Thi Nguyen:Right? Does it make sense why this is in the background? So this is the – part of the worry is that it might look to you like, oh, it's great. If we just get people to collapse their values to incentives, then they will have a ton – we give them everything we want. They want something really simple. They want straightforward things the world can provide for them. And then things are great. And I think part of the deep thing I've been convinced of is that desire, preference, satisfaction, theories of well-being aren't right. And this also means that strict autonomy about values isn't right, that you can have the wrong values, right?

36:05And a lot of what I'm worried about is the systems by which you might be convinced to fully commit yourself to very simplified values that diminish yourself. Yes. And it's reflexive.

36:23C. Thi Nguyen:Did I get – are we in the ballpark of what you want to talk about? You might have the wrong values is something you said. What is this? What is the, this is a thorny question, surely. And it's clear that maybe the wrong values, we don't want flattened values. What is the shape or the texture directionally of good values? Okay. This is the most interesting question. Okay. There's one way I can imagine this conversation going in which you asked this question and someone else seated here would try to give a specification of what the right values are. That is not the way conversation can go. One of the things I think that I've been convinced by is that the right values for a particular person to have are incredibly dependent on a lot of details about the particular person, their particular context, their particular psychological profile, their particular place in the world.

37:27C. Thi Nguyen:Elijah Milgram, a philosopher who's been really influential to me, has this view that you don't calculate the right values for you from the top down by like thinking about some abstract conception of the good and then like deducing it. You have to try them out and see if they work for you. And one of the things he ends up saying is we get these signals. If you have a value that works for you, you thrive. And if you have a value that doesn't fit you in your situation, you fall apart. And some of it's dependent on your personality, but some of it's dependent on the place you're in. There's this great example.

38:04C. Thi Nguyen:One of my favorite examples of anything comes from Jane Jacobs' The Rise and Fall of Great American Cities. And she has this moment where she talks about how she says a lot of people will come from rural areas to New York. And in rural areas, they'll come in with a value. They highly value friendliness, right? Like making eye contact, chatting with everyone you meet. And then they come to New York and everyone seems like an asshole because no one's making eye contact. And like if you try to talk someone up in the subway who's got their headphones on, they'll like bite your head off. Yeah. And then you spend some time there and you realize the value of friendliness does not work when you're in the subway with people all day long.

38:45C. Thi Nguyen:The big city is so packed that you need to actually deeply value respecting other people's privacy. And it's not that one of these values – It's like an evolutionary fitness for that environment. Yeah, exactly. It's a fitness. So it's not like one of these values is better than the other. It's that some values are suited for some context and some values are suited for others and cross-multiply the context sensitivity of values with the fact that different values will be good for different personality types. And then what you get is the view of something like values should be tailored to you, but this is not the same view as you have the freedom to pick whatever values you want.

39:25C. Thi Nguyen:It's that your values need to be carefully tailored sensitively to your environment and place, often using as a guide the particular signals of your emotions, how you feel. This is kind of what I guess – I'm glad you answered this way. When I guess I'm trying to ask when I say what is the shape of good values, I think is inside of that last statement that you made, which is the point here. Also, I think so much of this is running against like – there's a broad feeling that we have like a meeting crisis, especially for young people. Your central contention is like one of the main reasons is people need to choose their own values.

40:01The history of the world is actually that like values are issued to you top down and not necessarily in this like post-modernity metrics. metrics or excuse me um incentives and values flattening but in like the state tells you what to value or the church tells you what to value or your family tells you what to value and so i guess there's like i i'm feeling some tension which is like i think it's really profound i and i i'm maybe maybe it's because i'm a young person in 2025 i tend to agree that we should choose our own values and yet that doesn't mean you should just choose any values right like there are good

40:33C. Thi Nguyen:values right there's i mean in the background like hopefully it's all right you're you're you're getting a particularly wonky philosophy techie version what i was looking for okay good um there's i just want to go back and say like i think we should be really careful about the difference between you choose your own values and you tailor them to the specific context right it's not just a matter of choice i think this is similar like i was just talking to my spouse about this. A lot of people want to collapse this to this distinction between objective and subjective. Either values are objective or they're fully subjective.

41:07Almost like morals and feelings

41:08C. Thi Nguyen:or something. And if they're objective, they're universal. And if they're subjective, they're just you and your feelings. And I'm saying, no, you can have better and worse values. You can get the wrong values, but whatever the right ones are deeply tailored to what you are. So it's less about choice and more about sensitive detection. It's a mixture of, does it make sense? It's a mixture of both invention and like listening. You can decide. I mean, one of the things that Leish Milgram's, this beautiful, you would love this paper. It's called On Being Bored Out of One's Mind. It says you might have a theory that this is the right value for you.

41:40C. Thi Nguyen:And you go to grad school and you think, I'm going to do this thing. And then you're just miserable. And you're, that misery is a detection signal. And then you start relying on willpower, by the way. Right. Then you start cranking through. And at some point, right? At some point, you have to listen to the signal that this is a terrible value you are not yes flourishing right okay yes yes so oh my god we what was the question i i've gotten i think what i'm trying to square is is oh from outside from outside yeah yeah okay i think this is so one of the reasons i also really like this kind of feminist 90s value literature is that before this there's this kind of like fantasy and i think it some of it we inherit from existential philosophy that like look you your own true values your authentic values come from you and values from the outside are alienating and terrible and that can't be right like we get value like we soak up our values that's sort of the choose your values like sit in a cave and choose your values like pure choice there's this great there's this great uh comment from a philosopher economist named audrey colny but he says that there's some conceptions of value that are just too heavy and thick that don't have any freedom in them all.

42:55C. Thi Nguyen:But then the existential conception of value is too thin. It's too narrow. It's just pure choice. Like just make something up out of what? Ignore the world, just make something up. That can't be it. Yes. So I think we get our values all the time. And even if a lot of our values, I mean, and I think like there's a simple version of this. Like a lot of the way we learn to value things is by learning from other people who guide us through activities. This is a lot of what games do. You show up, you start doing some weird new activity like climbing and you come in and you think to yourself, oh, climbing is for like getting ripped and getting a workout.

43:30C. Thi Nguyen:And then people are, and then, I mean, and then someone tells you like, you're climbing really brutally. Like try a little more sensitivity in your feet and you're like, what? And then you suddenly learn that actually so much of the beauty on offer and so much of the value in this activity is something you never realized before, which is there could be like delicate poetry in your own movement, right? And you learned this, like I learned that from other people, right? Pure existentialism of that kind of like choose your values kind doesn't have room for learning from other people. When it's more top-down too, right?

44:04To go back to your Jane Jacobs or Christopher Alex, any of these ideas are about finding it through emergence and experience.

44:09C. Thi Nguyen:Right. Well, I mean, there's pure top-down is the world tells you your values and you take them off. That can't be right. pure bottom up is like make it up immaculate conception almost yeah yeah and in between is something about learning and negotiation but one of the differences is when they're not fixed from the top down when you receive a lot of value you know candidates and proposals from the world you can balance them and reinterpret them from yourself like the world may tell you you know family like taste like it's a bit like taste like explain what you mean um taste has been a common a big discussion and something i've talked about with people and i think i don't know people in technology figured out taste mattered a few years a year or two ago and i think the conception of taste is often just talked about as this like judgment it's just the judgment it's the judgment isolated he has good taste because he knows what things are good and taste of course intuitively but also uh we forget is eating a lot of food first and foremost it's a lot of inputs yeah which is maybe the connection i'm drawing which is part of what you're maybe illustrating is like perhaps what games can do and we can talk more about that but other things might do too is to allow us to um refine our taste and our values i see what you're going i think taste is great in the following way when you're developing taste in something going it completely by yourself isn't going to get you there and accepting external authorities taste isn't going to get you there.

45:36C. Thi Nguyen:What you need to do when you learn about something like jazz is you listen, you learn, you let people point things, and then you slowly start to also find your own way and refine your own tastes. And you do it through this intense exposure and careful attention to lots and lots of examples. And I mean, I think maybe that's one way to put it. I mean, I do think if the world is like forcing a very specific value conception on you Rigidly, this is not good for human beings. But a thing that often happens, I think, that we're losing in the metrified world is more open. The world might give you a bunch of values, honor, courage, loyalty, family, community, but it doesn't tell you exactly how to apply those concepts.

46:24C. Thi Nguyen:It doesn't give you the precise borders, and it doesn't tell you how they count against each other. So even if the world is generally communicating values to you, you have like a lot of freedom of interpreting particular open-ended terms and finding balances. And that's very different from the world saying – from you saying, I will value a higher subscriber count. That is a non-interpretable, non-plural, unidimensional thing that there's no free play in. And that's really different, I think. Yeah, you have a thing where you say, precise values embody a closed-minded spirit about what's important in the world.

47:01And then conversely, you write about poets using a meaningful inarticulateness and how values can have these imprecise edges. Do you have any, maybe this is a lead into sort of the game role-playing stuff, but how do we move towards these fuzzy values? How do we sit with them?

47:20C. Thi Nguyen:I mean, there's a sense in which they've been there all along. We just have to let them – I mean, what we're talking about is basically the value of art. Like, this is not unfamiliar, right? This is what poetry is. Like, the philosopher Elizabeth Camp, who's this incredible philosopher of language and philosopher of mind, has this beautiful set of essays about what metaphors are. It says what metaphors are is when you know this thing is like that thing, but you don't know exactly how, and you're kind of gesturing roughly being like, I'm not sure, but somehow your soul is like the ocean in some way, but I don't know exactly which way.

48:04C. Thi Nguyen:And it's a way of pointing at something without defining its edges. And I think, I mean, it's so common to think the more precise the language, the better. And there are two cases where this falls apart. both of those I'm fascinated by. One is when the world is actually vague and fuzzy as boundaries. When the real world, when we're talking about something that is, I mean, a lot of the times I think these stupid debates like, is something a sandwich or a taco or a hot dog? The answer is those aren't well-bordered concepts. They are essentially, we have to accept their fuzziness and we not pretend that we know things.

48:43C. Thi Nguyen:The other case where we really get fuzziness is when we're uncertain and we want to express that uncertainty. We want to mark that uncertainty. We remind ourselves we're uncertain and we do that by having the uncertainty almost. What'd you say? We want to sit in the uncertainty. Right. I mean, a paper I'm writing right now is about the term vibe. And I think, I mean, I think it's often 20 events or like good vibes. Really, it's very openly fuzzy. It's like there's some good going on and I can't put my finger on it. We're getting more of these, but auras was the word of last year, right? Yeah, yeah.

49:13It's interesting that society seems to be, or at least young people seem to be trending towards more of these words that are, it's the finger pointing at the moon or something.

49:22C. Thi Nguyen:Yeah, I think we're, I do think new slang, I mean, this is a paper I'm writing right now, actually. I think new slang terms are often people trying to find language to express something that's important. And the rise of vibe, and I think you're right about aura, is people wanting to point to the need to sit in unclarity. Yes, and it's not because it's not real. It's actually very real. It's very real. maybe maybe a lead into one of the earlier conceptions we were talking about of agency like your your sort of like central idea of games is that they allow a gentle fluidity yeah um we humans have an enormous capacity for a gentle fluidity imperial trained me in this mode of getting people to do what you want by giving them a piece of the action and it's not just training some technical skill imperial which is a board game gave me a whole outlook a whole attentional focus yeah i love that like why does this begin with attention yeah i think attention attention and value are so interlinked right what what you value is what you pay attention to i think one of the core things the one of the ways that games work is that the scoring system guides what you're trying to do which deeply guides your attention and so setting the scoring system is a way for a game designer to sculpt your attention.

50:38C. Thi Nguyen:Right? So it's like rock climbing. The goal is to go up. The rules are don't use any rope. And suddenly your attention has to be on tiny details of the rock and the way you balance. Right? Like so. But you've never paid any attention. You never looked at that crevice before. You never looked at it. And suddenly it's also, I think it's really interestingly, it's like an amplifier, like if you're inattentive to your balance of the rock, you'll fall. And so that game is constantly like not only telling you what to pay attention to, but refining your attention by slapping you over and over again. We were talking about this earlier with the yo-yos.

51:11It's like what a great way to just lock in.

51:13C. Thi Nguyen:Right. Yeah. Like it is – some people are – my spouse is very good at attending to herself. I am not. And so I find – I think this got cut out of the book. Godfrey Devereaux, one of my favorite yoga writers, says something like, the reason we do hard yoga poses is because it's a tool for meditation because it amplifies a wandering focus. Because if you're trying to meditate just seated and your focus wanders, you won't notice because your focus has wandered. But if you're in a hard pose and your focus wanders, suddenly you wobble, right? And you feel, it is. So a lot of the times, a lot of games, there are deception games where all the kind of normal like board play is taken away from you and all you have is to stare at someone's in the face and try to read their face.

52:04C. Thi Nguyen:There are other deception games where you're not even allowed to look or talk to other people. I'm thinking of the mind. Yeah, yeah. You're moving stuff around. Well, the mind's a cooperative game. It's something you're moving stuff around the board and you're trying to signal and deceive people by like showing you. And each of these things like focuses your attention on one particular modality of the world. And I think it like refines it. And I mean, I think hopefully it's clear that like the downside of this is if the world says, like if my university says, what matters is student graduation rates.

52:39C. Thi Nguyen:It's not – that's what we measure. And we don't measure happiness or wisdom or ethical growth. We just measure graduation rate. Then the entire institutional attention becomes hyper-focused only on those features that immediately poop out a measurable outcome. Yeah, lock-in is like – lock-in is such a useful term now. It's like this is scoring systems can be give you the most beautiful part of lock in and the most soul deadening society destroying parts of lock in. What's the difference between recognition and perception? Oh, my God.

53:17C. Thi Nguyen:Thanks for hitting that one. I don't know. This is obviously very related. This is from I think it's from Dewey. My favorite bit, just maybe as a prompt, is you say, we recognize and categorize something, we stop. Perception keeps going. Yeah, yeah. This is from Dewey. So one of the things he says is that – I mean, a lot of what this is really about is how we categorize things. And the clarity of our categorization system. Like the whole point is – the whole point of a fuzzy term like interesting or rich is that you have to ask yourself when you do an activity whether it's interesting, whether it's rich.

54:02C. Thi Nguyen:You have to deliberate and fight and interpret. And the interesting thing about a lot of these other terms that are associated with metrics for reasons I'm sure we'll talk about later is that they're very mechanistic and easy to apply and it's very easy to stop. I mean, the example I've been thinking a lot about is the example of screen time, right? So if I target – I want my child to be involved in creative or interesting apps, I have to make a complex decision. with screen time i don't it's automatic but also screen time is a lousy category because it lumps together like i don't know my kid coding on minecraft with the worst youtube shorts ever so i'm wondering so the difference between recognition and perception is that in recognition you apply a category and then you stop looking at the thing the category is the end of thought and with perception you apply the category and that helps you look at it and you keep looking further and further.

55:01C. Thi Nguyen:And I think of like, I don't know, like a version of this is I know people where if you do something odd, they look for an explanation for it. And when they can put a name to it, they just stop thinking. They're like, oh, check. He's just goofing off or, oh, that's like that's vacation. And then they stop thinking about it. They've categorized it and that's done. Perception is the ability to look at something, have a name for it, put it under a category, and then keep looking at its first peculiarities and differences. I don't really see it. Yeah, one thing you might think about recognition is the problem of recognition is that categories are very abstract.

55:37C. Thi Nguyen:And it just assumes that when you say like, oh, that's a coder. Oh, that's a business person. Oh, that's a Gen Z-er, right? It assumes that that's all the information you need to know. Yes, yes. And it stops. Yes, there's no more information here. Yeah, it stops at a very specific level of abstraction. typically a level of abstraction that's been established socially and it doesn't worry i mean i mean you're you you you pegged this from the very beginning like a lot of this whole book is about the puzzle of why scoring systems are fun in games and so soul deadening in institutions and the answer is often that in games we have a playful exploratory attitude where we keep looking not always yeah but sometimes yes and the the big interesting puzzle is why the nature of metrics as they occur in large-scale institutions tends to promote this closed dismissive vision that categorizes things very quickly and then stops looking at playfulness and perception or maybe on some kind of continuum like or some kind of similarity of vector space this is okay let me just vomit a bunch of associations at you because this is super interesting.

56:48C. Thi Nguyen:And I haven't figured out all of this associational network, but the modernization I really like is Jerome Stolnitz is. What Stolnitz says is in normal life, we have a very practical vision. We have a goal and we go through the world and we classify things according to our goal. And we just stop looking at things and at features of things that aren't immediately related to our goal. It's very filtered vision. Which is almost animalistic, right? It's like evolutionarily i think that's uh gives animals a bad route okay that's very corporate i think that's oh huh i'm thinking of i guess what i'm thinking of is like survivalist right it is very it is very survival but it's not necessarily natural to your point i i suspect that many animals play far more than many uh it's a good check many modern whatever okay then he says stolnett says that, and this is his translation of the Kantian thought, that aesthetic vision is vision that is stepped back from purposes and goals.

57:51C. Thi Nguyen:And so it's a tension that roves freely over all the features of everything, open to whatever there might be there to find. He actually has this great moment where he says like, what aesthetic vision is, is you let the object take the lead and show you what there is to love about it instead of having your own goal. Right? So this This is like – there's this network like where the hyper – the more hyper clear the goal and the focus ahead of time, the more your vision seems to be closed and dismissive and non-exploratory. The more you pre-specified what's important to you. And then there's this other thing.

58:27C. Thi Nguyen:Call it art vision. Call it aesthetic vision. Call it beauty orientation. Call it play. Where we seem to be – one of the characteristics seems to be a kind of openness of vision to new value. Yeah, you'd be surprised. like try to try why the fuck not right fuck around and find out but good yeah what a nice lead into maybe a critical part of what you talk about how games can allow us to explore this fluidity is is the process and outcome stuff yeah a couple of things um from you in games the value of the outcome is inseparable from the value of the process in normal life we struggle in order to attain some goal that we really want in striving play we adopt a goal to get the struggle we really want really nice packaged uh bit there and then finally when i started trying to exercise i had only the barest conception of what it could do for me i didn't realize how much i would find in how much else i would find in it um i think we've talked about this but maybe i'll ask again just in case there's anything else is like what is what about process allows us to maybe just what is the link between process and values what about process allows us to sort of fluidly explore values i mean i think i think it's you This is going to harken back to something we said at the very beginning of the conversation, but I'm worried that that already adopts a modern frame that has crapped on processes too much.

59:55C. Thi Nguyen:So I think, I mean, okay, let's go, let me, I'll take, I'll go, I'll take a running, I'll take a few steps so I can take a running start again. One of the core ideas animating this book is Bernard Toots' definition of a game. For Bernard Toots to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of striving to overcome them. So one way to put it, this is in the quote that you read, is that for suits, the struggle and the constraints are an intrinsic part of the goal. It's not the end themselves. Well, there's a space. There's some very, there's a little wrinkle there.

1:00:34C. Thi Nguyen:So Suits says in practical life, what we care about is the outcome in and of itself. So if I'm trying to get to a particular spot in the city, I just want to get there. Any method will do. If I'm playing a game, if I'm running a marathon, I have to get there by prescribed means. I'm not allowed to take a taxi. I'm not allowed to take a shortcut. It only counts as crossing the finish line if I did a particular way. You have a great line in there, by the way, where you say like cheating in a cosmic sense. Yeah. Which is so good. So what this means is in games, there's some incredibly powerful connection between the struggle and the goal.

1:01:10Now, that's stage one.

1:01:12C. Thi Nguyen:I've added my own little wrinkle to this. I think in games, there's two kinds of play. Achievement play and striving play. Achievement play is playing for the value of winning. Striving play is playing for the value of the process. Yes. Notice, though, that an achievement player in a game still cares about the struggle. They want to have won that struggle. Right. And they wouldn't cheat because it would disqualify the achievement. Yeah, it would mean that they didn't do the – like they want to win, but it doesn't matter. Like someone that just wants to win the marathon is not going to take a taxi because then they wouldn't have won the marathon, but they still want to win.

1:01:46C. Thi Nguyen:The striving player, which is one kind of game player, one motivational state, is the person that wants to win for the sake of the process. Winning is actually just this thing that – it's a constraint that has to exist for the process to be good. Yeah, exactly. So it's like – I mean a lot of the times I think about like – I think about how I play board games with my spouse. So my spouse and I are good at very different things in board games. Once in a while, we'll find a board game where we're matched and then we'll have a delicious struggle. And then I will find a strategy guide afterwards. And I think here's the argument from the book.

1:02:21C. Thi Nguyen:If I'm an achievement player, there's only one logical thing to do. Read the guide. Win. Crusher. Right. Crusher. But I don't because that would make the game boring. Yeah. So what's interesting is galactically, I'm avoiding making moves in life that would make it more likely to win. But during the game, I have to try all out to win to have fun. So I'm like kind of, I don't really care about winning because I'm not like reading the strategy guide. But in order to have the process I want, I have to try really hard. You're taking on a form of agency, of course. Yeah, I am adopting a win-oriented kind of agency to have the pleasure of an interesting struggle.

1:03:00C. Thi Nguyen:Okay, let me go back to your original question. So you said what is it in the process that helps us explore values? I think what I want to say is the process is where all the values were in the first place, right? Like it's only this weird delusion. That there are values without process. Yeah. I mean, this is just from Aristotle. Bernard Suits, by the way, the game scholar I love, was an Aristotle scholar. And he attributes his notion of games very openly to Aristotle. What Aristotle says is that the value in human life comes from the rich exercise of our capacities, our intellect and our body and everything and our social capacities.

1:03:39And that outcomes, tools, resources that we make, they're useful insofar as they allow the exercise of the capacities.

1:03:47C. Thi Nguyen:But in many cases, what we're trying to do, we're aiming at an outcome. But the thing that is valuable is the activity, the process, right? And then – and I have some theories about why. We have somehow been persuaded that processes are unimportant and all that's important is countable outcomes. The products you make, the money you make, the increased measurements that are applied to your skill and not the actual – I mean if I actually wanted to rack up the numbers of success in games, I would play intellectual games because I am physically mediocre. I'm a terrible climber for how long I've been trying to climb.

1:04:29C. Thi Nguyen:Yeah. Right? I cannot justify it in any outcomes-oriented way. The only way to justify it is to think, no, this is valuable because I get to be moving, because I get to be – because the process of skill refinement, even if I never end up at most mediocre, the process of refining the skill is valuable in and of itself. I think my response to the question of what is it about processes? Why is it that that's a place to explore value? My response is something like that's where the value is in the first place. How did we get to think that you had to look in stuff and piles of things that you made for the value?

1:05:08One of my favorite examples you use that links to this is the difference between a recipe and a dish. Do you want to talk – I think this comes from John Thorne. Yeah. Do you want to talk about that just briefly for the listener?

1:05:18C. Thi Nguyen:Yeah. Yeah. So John Thorne, who's one of my favorite food writers, who it turns out was a philosophy major as an undergrad. Some kind of link. Some kind of connection there. Has this marvelous distinction between a recipe and a dish. He says a recipe is a dead thing, a writing down of how something was made by someone once. And a dish is a live thing, an idea of balance in a creative cook's head that gets remade anew each time. And one of the things, I mean, A, creative cooks who are making dishes are typically actually better cooks. This is a lot of people, I think, my generation, your generation mostly cook from recipes.

1:05:56C. Thi Nguyen:And we wonder why our parents' generation was better. And it's because they don't have a fixed recipe. They're like adapting to – You have a great line in the book where you say, you were mad that your mom wasn't giving you a quote-unquote real recipe. Yeah, she was giving me this thing where she was like, you got to taste this and you have to adjust. You have to taste the pineapple and like see if it's sweet or sour today and adjust your vinegar and sugar. And I was like, this isn't real cooking. You need the answer, mom. Yeah, give me the recipe that I can follow. And, you know, of course, now that I cook, I'm like, no, that's the real thing.

1:06:28C. Thi Nguyen:It's not a recipe. The recipe is not the real thing. But I think the reason this is related to processes is I think a lot of – I've been really interested in this thing that people have that's like – the perfect cookbook with the perfect recipe for the perfect dish. And what that often has you do is following something precisely and measuring things precisely. But it's been engineered so you don't have to make decisions. And you do often get a good outcome, but it's a very fixed outcome. I think there's something profound in that sentence you just said that applies to much of what we've been talking about today.

1:07:07Yes.

1:07:08C. Thi Nguyen:Yes, exactly. Which is the challenge. That's the trade-off is, man, it would be nice to have somebody make the decisions for me to simplify things, to reduce the complexity and be able to get a pretty good outcome. So let's think about what you get and what you don't get. Because I do think, for me, cooking is the perfect metaphor. Here's what you get for a clear mechanical recipe. It's easy. You don't have to make decisions. You don't need any experience. If you follow it correctly, you will get a pretty good result and a semi-reliable result. And here's an important part. The more the ingredients are fixed, the more it'll be reliable.

1:07:47C. Thi Nguyen:The more you're using the same canned tomatoes and the same flour that's been standardized and is stable, the more you'll get a reliable outcome. But it'll be kind of the same one. When you cook from a dish, here's what you get. A, it'll take a while to learn. One, B, you will slowly over time develop the capacity to see the decision space and move around it, to see when you can make it crispier or saltier or softer. C, you'll be able to adapt to changing ingredients and roll with the fact that the tomatoes today are really sour and not sweet. You can have a compensator for that. And four, instead of being in the mode of rigidly following someone else's roles, you'll be constantly engaged in your senses and making decisions out of your senses of tasting being something like, mm, that's good, but it could use a little bit.

1:08:37C. Thi Nguyen:You'll be engaged in that process. You might enjoy the cooking. You might enjoy the cooking. The funny thing about all this too is, I was hearing you list the pros and cons of the first one, is the most valuable, one of the most valuable parts of the recipe is that you're way less likely to waste the food and your time. Right. Goes back to what we talked about earlier. Yeah. Yeah. We're so afraid to waste. I love that. It is, there's a perspective from which, oh, you'll get it right each time you won't waste something. Here's another perspective from which you could have had a lovely hour being engaged and making decisions and being free with your senses and tailoring something to yourself.

1:09:14C. Thi Nguyen:But instead, you spend an hour following someone else's – Being a robot. Yeah, you don't get to cook. You don't have to cook. You get to cook. Yeah, I mean, John Thorne says this. he says something like, we have persuaded ourselves into the restaurant mindset where we've turned ourselves into our own menial laborers and we go into the kitchen, close the doors and follow the restaurant precisely in order to have a guaranteed good outcome where instead we could invite our friend into the kitchen, cook together, get a little drunk together, make decisions together, taste together and the outcome might not have been perfect.

1:09:48C. Thi Nguyen:But we lived. But you did the thing with the person and the thing... We were there. And we have somehow been persuaded that the value isn't there. We've covered this a bit, but I wanted to hit it briefly. You talk about object beauty and process beauty. You say in games, the beauty shows up not in the game, but in the player. Game designers work a step back. They shape the general contours of our action, not the precise details. I know you've also done a lot of work on aesthetics broadly. And aesthetics come up in bits and pieces. You talked about a little bit with the rock climbing or maybe the beautiful experience of cooking.

1:10:23why how do how do we underrate the virtues of aesthetics right i mean i think this is this is

1:10:29C. Thi Nguyen:a with games it's a double underrated right a we're underrating aesthetics and b we're underrating the aesthetics of doing instead of of objects but i mean i don't know like we are in the world where people that are really good at optimizing industrial processes make a ton of money and that people have soaked their soul into making completely beautiful, moving, emotional, personal indie comics can barely survive. I mean, as a world, we underrate it. And I think my suspicion is it's because the aesthetic value is one of the harder things to count in an objective way. There's not a good metric for aesthetic value.

1:11:14C. Thi Nguyen:And I don't think that's an accident. It's because whatever aesthetic value is, it is by its nature, subtle and variable. It's also not recognition. It's perception. I mean, yes, it is. Aesthetic value is about the value of perception. And here's the thing about perception in that sense. It is slow as fuck. If you want to be really efficient at hitting some simple target, you should be a recognizer and not a perceiver. Because you will move quickly. you will ignore everything that's irrelevant and then you'll be able to optimize for your target and that is great as long as there's nothing of value in what you threw away and decided to ignore you mentioned earlier autotelic which is a wonderful word um kind of one of the more compelling philosophies for like how to live finding love for its own sake finding your passion you you actually earlier reacted to my willpower comment about maybe it being a little unrealistic or naive or idealistic.

1:12:14Like we aren't, Suits writes about a theoretical future utopia where we live in a world of abundance. We live in a pretty abundant world, but not a profoundly abundant one. Great things are clearly not always playful. You do all kinds of things that suck and are hard to get to either, whether it be the aesthetic process you want or outcomes that are important. And yet I think like aspirationally, we all hope to get a little closer to, me doing this now is a little closer to things, to the autotelic than things I've done in the past. I'm curious, like, how you've, what your relationship and your career has been to this sort of, like, finding the love and the joy and the internal motivation with also managing the real messy external things.

1:12:57Like, is this just a thing we strive to until we die? Is it, like, I think people out there want to believe it's incrementally more possible. Perhaps the answer is not to naively think you can just purely be autotelic, but. Right. I think you're kind of asking me about whether technological progress is good.

1:13:16C. Thi Nguyen:Is that what you're asking? Or are you asking? It certainly leads into what we'll talk about next. I don't know if I, I suppose I'm maybe more asking just for a personal reflection on a friend of mine who I interviewed. He has this frame that's inspired by Christopher Alexander, this idea of unfolding into a life that fits you. Kevin Kelly talks about don't be the best, be the only, the goal of life is to become yourself by the time you're on your deathbed yeah um a playful orientation to life a way of finding all this stuff we just spent the last hour talking about certainly feels kind of the way to directionally how to get there and i'm curious as someone who is spewing these ideas in in a profound way and also has to live in the messiness of being a professor and all these like is it just is that just the struggle like how do you relate to this i mean I mean, every profession has its grind and you got to do the grind.

1:14:09C. Thi Nguyen:And the question is whether you devote yourself entirely to the grind or whether you make space for – I mean, my career through philosophy was really – it's like this value capture stuff is in part just coming out of me pulling myself out of a bad trap in my own career. Like I went to philosophy because I loved it. And then the same thing happened as everywhere else. I went to grad school and I got the metrics in philosophy. There's like, you know, status rankings for universities and status rankings for journals. And you're aiming at getting a lot of journal articles published in highly ranked journals.

1:14:46C. Thi Nguyen:It becomes really clear how you would game that out, which is to hyper-specialize in a small domain, write very technical, small-move articles, and get published by being a super-specialist. And I should also say that a lot of really good work happens that way. But that path made me almost die of boredom. But I was doing it. I was walking that path. I went in the course of my professionalization from someone who was like deeply excited about philosophy to somebody who by the time I left high school, I mean, by the time I left grad school, I was like grimly doing philosophy and I hated doing, I like didn't look forward to it.

1:15:31C. Thi Nguyen:I had to work on things I wasn't interested in. I was writing things I wasn't interested in. And like, like I had to have a dark moment of the soul. And I think I was actually saved, I don't know, by my impatience and my intolerance of boredom where it's just like, I can't do this anymore. I have to do something else. And now, I mean, still like, I mean, it's really fun here to talk here. And there's this fantasy that you might imagine where I spent all my life talking about, I mean, I get maybe, you know, at best a quarter of my life to think about this stuff. for the rest of the time. It's administration.

1:16:09C. Thi Nguyen:It's teaching. It's grading. It's like going through policy changes in the university to figure out if there's like some horrible trap that's been laid for us by some funder. Like it's, there's a lot of grind and I think you always have to do the grind. But a previous version of myself, instead of like carving out this little spot where I could do what I wanted, like threw the rest of me into the grossest part of the grind too. I mean, does that answer the question? Yes. But what a privilege to have the 25 % maybe. I mean, I will say getting 25 % of my life to think about this junk is like pure – I recognize that I'm one of the luckiest people in the world that I get to just play and roam weird-ass ideas for some small part of my life.

1:16:59We've talked around it a bunch, and we already talked about the value capture stuff. I think the best place to start is metrics. and the reason maybe it's particularly relevant for me, I think the world I've spent a lot of time in, meaning the tech and business worlds particularly, they have a classic kind of guiding principle, measure what matters. Of course, the implication of doing so is that we tend to only value the things we can measure. A few excerpts, choice excerpts from you in the book on metrics. Metrics are a technology that standardize attention. Data is engineered information and metrics are engineered values.

1:17:38Public metrics get rid of intuition. They force us to justify ourselves in the cold light of general comprehensibility. They kill opacity. And finally, scoring systems don't just discover a convergence that was already there. They produce convergence. There have been many benefits to living in a quantified world. I think our speed of progress, our collective understanding, collaboration, all these things. And yet you basically spent a third of this book just ripping into the ways that metrics are ruining us for lack of, maybe that's too strong a language.

1:18:16Why can't we tolerate, why can't we just tolerate, maybe to go back to the first part of the question or the conversation, why can't we just tolerate a quantified, metricified world at a global level and leave the subjective value, qualitative stuff for our personal lives?

1:18:30C. Thi Nguyen:I mean, that would be great if we could do it. And I think the worry is that there's this constant intense suction. We're constantly being – I'm not saying get rid of metrics. I'm not saying metrics are bad. I mean, metrics are clear, comprehensible, accessible, and portable. And we can unpack all of what that means in a bit. But that's good for a lot of things. And if we just treated them as these simple, low-quality, but useful proxies that were usable in limited ways, as limited heuristics, as like guidance mechanisms for large-scale activity. Great. Cool. But instead, what we get, what we find over and over again, there's lots of empirical evidence about this, is that when you put a metric into space, everyone starts to care about it and hyper-oriented to it.

1:19:26C. Thi Nguyen:I mean, here's a really interesting example. We all know that BMI, body mass index, is a terrible health measure that varies from person to person. It was originally not – I mean, it's been horribly abused. It was originally proposed as a useful proxy at the population level. So BMI, I mean, we all know that people, some people are perfectly healthy at high BMI. Some people are perfectly healthy at very low BMI. It's a huge personal variant. BMI was originally introduced as an epidemiological measure to see like, oh, if you have a whole population, a whole country, and suddenly there's a huge BMI shift, that's probably a sign that something's going on.

1:20:05C. Thi Nguyen:And it works great as a rough first proxy at the population scale looking at national populations and shifts in nutrition for national populations. It's a way to identify among – or like food – large-scale food deserts. You can use it for that. But of course, what we find is people, once you get that number out there, tend to hyper-orient towards it. It's like a personal scoreboard for health. It becomes a personal scoreboard. And its proxiness is lost. it's people forget about the fact that it's this just really rough population level measure and i think that's that is the worrisome thing i mean the thing you said uh that i really want to talk about is this measure what matters i think i mean i'm gonna vomit forth a lot of sure uh bad examples of metrics and i think the standard response is oh those are just bad metrics Let's fix them and get better metrics.

1:21:03C. Thi Nguyen:And the thing that I'm worried about, the thing that I spent a lot of this book arguing, is that metrics are by their nature unable to measure certain things. That metrics, not that metrics are bad, but they're very good at measuring very particular kinds of things. Really roughly, there's going to be a lot more to say about this, but they're good at measuring are things that it's easy to count together. The things where everyone can recognize the borders, everyone can pick out the same things and count them in the same way. That is very, so lifespan measured in years, easy to measure. Whether or not some intervention leads to death or not, or saved lives, easy to measure, right?

1:21:47C. Thi Nguyen:Changes in graduation rate, that's just counting how many semesters a student gets through and whether they, easy to measure. So another, I mean, I think another example, one of the things that's really interesting in the history of attempts to diversify various institutions is early people in these efforts were always like, we need to diversify among all these dimensions. What this should not become, please God, don't let it become a quota where you need a certain number of women or a certain number of minorities. Yes. And then you're down the line because diversity along lines of intellectual style, creative style, background, cultural background, that's very hard to measure.

1:22:28C. Thi Nguyen:Number of women hired, very easy for everyone to measure together, right? So the worry is that the basic intrinsic nature of metrics is very conducive to targeting some things and does it really well. Like, it is no accident that large-scale data collection systems have given us miracles like antibiotics. Because antibiotics lead to a highly measurable result. Bacteria goes away. You stop being sick. But there are whole other swaths of human life. And here I want to put art, beauty, wisdom, happiness, richness, connection, friendship. All these things are very hard. But also critically, I would add, like, as you talk about in the book, health.

1:23:10Yeah. Like, I just, I think it's important to acknowledge, like, art, people might be like, but there are a lot of things that are really important, even if you view them as not that subjective, that apply. Yeah. No, I think this is, we should navigate to help last.

1:23:25C. Thi Nguyen:I think it's one of the trickiest examples. But I think one of the things I'm really concerned with is when you have something really rich, like flourishing and well-being or even physical health, and then you have near it a simplified proxy, like how long your life was or how low the heart attack rates were. And that proxy begins to capture our sense of health and then minimize – and then we start forgetting about the other stuff. And like, I mean, again, it's not that lives lived isn't important and it's not that we can't target it. It's like in the war of trade-offs, what the metrified world seems to do is get us to hyper-focus on what's easy to count at together and kind of like drown or shout out the subtler, quieter, more variable things.

1:24:13Yes.

1:24:13C. Thi Nguyen:Okay. Now, let me give you – I think you're teeing me up for the vomit. So let me give you the vomit. So basically, when I was trying to figure this out, I was basically – I spent a lot of years trying to figure out the question of whether there's something intrinsic about metrics that made – institutional metrics that made them hard to – made it really hard for them to capture a lot of what was really valuable for human life. And I found a bunch of scholarship that really helped me. Two key figures here are Theodore Porter and Lorraine Daston. So Theodore Porter is a historian of quantification culture.

1:24:45C. Thi Nguyen:For the geeks among you in philosophy, he was deeply influenced by a philosopher of science named Ian Hacking. And what Porter ends up trying to figure out is why politicians and bureaucrats become so motivated to justify things quantitatively, even when the quantitative measures are obviously bad. And his answer is to think about the two different kinds of knowing. He thinks there's qualitative knowing and quantitative knowing. And he says that qualitative ways of knowing are rich, open-ended, context-sensitive, dynamic, but they travel really badly between contexts because you need a lot of shared background to understand them.

1:25:27C. Thi Nguyen:And then he says quantitative ways of knowing. And here, big asterisk, we're not talking about quantification in principle. We're talking about institutional quantification. We're talking about how bureaucracies and large-scale organizations count. He says the way that institutional quantification works is we identify a context invariant kernel, a little nugget that everyone understands the same. And we create this by removing high context detail and so create something that's portable that everyone can understand. And now we can all understand what each other means by this single thing and we can all collect into it and it can aggregate.

1:26:04C. Thi Nguyen:So my standard example for my life is qualitative assessments are the long paragraphs I write in response to student essays that can talk about their relative originality or clarity. It can assess what they're doing in particular. It can pivot based on what they want. It can – on the person that's more creative, I can focus on their creativity and also – it can do all kinds of things. Really meaningful to that student. Very meaningful to that student. Very meaningful maybe to other philosophers. Very hard to interpret for someone in the business department, the school department. Law school, whatever.

1:26:36C. Thi Nguyen:Incomprehensible to someone hiring in Silicon Valley. And also, crucially, it doesn't aggregate. And I think this is really important. And it's by nature, right? If a lot of different people are being open and responsive and context sensitive and issue thousands of different qualitative responses, right? because of the fact, the very fact that these responses are dynamic and tracking different qualities, it means that they don't aggregate, right? The variability and the open-endedness is what makes them not able to aggregate. The fact that we fix the meaning of A, B, C, D in letter grade, and we hold it the same is what makes that information travel well and what permits automatic aggregation.

1:27:18C. Thi Nguyen:So here's Porter's insight that I find so compelling and terrifying. Just institutional quantification is socially powerful by design. And the way it's been designed to do so is that nuance, context, and sensitivity have been stripped out of it. It is an artificially created, easy communication mechanism. And what it's missing is the source of its power. That's the feature. It's not a bug. It is the feature and the bug. This is the trade-off view, right? It is like this is – I mean this is literally the thought that keeps me up at night. This is the thing that gives it social power is its very insensitivity.

1:28:05C. Thi Nguyen:So that's stage one. So that's something that – so what is blotted out? Any kind of value that requires a lot of context to understand or a lot of experience. It's systematically removed. is systematically removed, right? Okay. That's one. That's one. The other main lesson is from Lorraine Daston. Lorraine Daston is this incredible intellectual historian, one of the most important intellectual figures in the last like 100 years. She has this incredible early work about the nature of objectivity and how it changes. And you would be so interested in this. And this book that really basically broke open the secret heart of things for me, on rules.

1:28:49C. Thi Nguyen:And she says that and what we're talking about when we're talking about scoring systems and metrics is rules for evaluation. They're rules for counting. They're rules for saying here's what we pay attention to and here's what makes the number go up. It's rules for what counts. So she says there are different conceptions of rules and older conceptions of rules are she says the dominant older conception of rule was what she calls a printable. And a printable is an abstract generalization that admits of exceptions and requires discernment and judgment to apply because you need to know when you might be in an exception case.

1:29:30Mm, mm.

1:29:32C. Thi Nguyen:So the exception proves the rule kind of structurally. I, maybe, I have never understood the phrase the exception proves the rule. I think the essence of the point of it is that when you find an exception, it helps you model that the rule is almost always typically taken. Right, right. I get that. I mean, one way to put it is, so one of my favorite examples of a principle is in creative writing, I learned show, don't tell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people break that. But also if you understand why they break it and when, you'll understand why the rule generally holds. Yes. And also I need to break it.

1:30:07And the point isn't to throw out the rule. The point is that the rule should hold until it doesn't.

1:30:11C. Thi Nguyen:Right. And there's no mechanical way to say that. You have to get the spirit behind the rules. The vibes thing. Exactly. Wisdom. In some sense, wisdom is vibes. Okay, that's the next paper I'm writing. Wisdom is vibes. I mean, exactly. That's exactly the point, right? That's a principle. That's a principle. Second kind, she says, is a model where like, basically a role model. So she says the rule of St. Benedict was just the person St. Benedict. To rule yourself that way was to think about what they would do in that situation. Okay. So both these rules require judgment, expertise. Every single time.

1:30:46Every single time. There's no automatic way to apply that.

1:30:48C. Thi Nguyen:Yeah, there's no automatic way to apply, like, you know, what would Jesus do? Exactly.

1:30:57C. Thi Nguyen:Because the roles are often complicated and subtle. And as a result, those two have some travel and some scale. There are principles, but, like, they are harder to repeatedly scale. Right. You need to teach. For someone to really learn show, don't tell, they have to learn it in a context. I learned to apply it in a context over several semesters in a creative workshop. Apprenticeship, whatever. Yeah. It's the kind of thing that travels exactly in an apprenticeship culture. Yes, yes. Then the third kind of rule, she says, is an algorithmic rule or a mechanical rule. And she says this is something that's meant to be applied unthinkingly, automatically, with no exceptions, exactly as written.

1:31:42C. Thi Nguyen:And then she says the thing that I found to be utterly mind-blowing, which is she says people thought that mechanical rules and algorithmic rules arose with computing machines, but they didn't. They arose about 150 years earlier in an attempt to cheapen labor. So you didn't have to hire experts who had judgment. You just hire equivalent, basically. Making labor fungible. They make labor fungible. They make it so you can hire anybody and fire anybody because the rule has been made explicit. So, I mean, again, think about like recipes. McDonald's has mechanical rules, which means they can hire anybody and slot them in and fire anybody.

1:32:20In Korea, in Mexico City, in LA. Right.

1:32:23C. Thi Nguyen:It doesn't matter where you are. And note also, it works particularly well when you standardize the inputs, when you standardize the bread and the flour. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So in that case, what it is to be a mechanical rule is to be a rule that's applicable consistently by anybody. And when you say mechanical rule, you mean algorithmic? Same thing. She shifts back and forth between them. In my book, I use the term mechanical just because I think the term algorithmic has already shifted in its use a little bit. I think it also harkens back to the incentive stuff we were talking about a little bit earlier, which is when values and incentives combine, you get mechanical value sets.

1:33:01C. Thi Nguyen:You get something mechanical. So here's the next way to put it. I should say one more thing. I think you'll find this interesting. When you're talking about this, and a lot of her examples are mathematical, people freak out because they're like, wait, mathematics is by its nature mechanical. And I think you have to understand how much of mathematics is not mechanical. So a lot of the times – so in many cases, what you get is a complex choice of which procedure or formula you're going to apply. You have to decide, am I going to do statistics? Am I going to do Newtonian mechanics? Am I going to do modeling?

1:33:42C. Thi Nguyen:They might be mechanical within those. Right. It might be mechanical within those. So here's my – maybe here's the easiest example. I've been trying to find an example here for a while. So let's say that you want to split a pie in half. What methodology do you use? You could split it by weight. You could split it by angle. You could split it with the eye cut you choose. Which is so wonderful. Right. And each of them is a different – so by weight is good for nutrition, like if you're counting calories. By angle is good for visual appearance. I split you choose is good for a sense of equity and fairness between two kids.

1:34:20C. Thi Nguyen:Each of these is a different procedure. And the point is, there's actually, there's not, here's another way to put it. Half is kind of already itself a subtly complicated thing. And half by angle is different from half by weight, is different from half by deliciousness or appealingness, right? And so there's a complex choice of procedure. But if you mechanize it, then - By the way, if we lived in a nuanced-less world, a detail-less or a world of perfect detail, you could do – you could mathematically figure out half of a circle. But no pie is perfect. Like introducing all of – it's such a good example.

1:34:56C. Thi Nguyen:I mean, it is – if things – the more – I mean, this is going to point to the stuff we're going to say later, I think. But the fewer complex overlapping details there are, the more everything is evened out in the same. If all pies were completely identical and there was no variation in texture in them, there wouldn't be a problem there. Yes. But they're lumpy and delicious. Almost like people. Yeah. Pies. People are like pies. So. Lumpy and delicious. Yeah. So here's the second stage. What metrics typically, not always, but typically prefer mechanical rules for counting, which means that they tend to recognize differences between things that are easy for anyone to recognize and highly accessible.

1:35:45C. Thi Nguyen:And they tend not to pick out distinctions between things that require high discernment. So one example is – this is a very complicated example. And it also – this is an example I find interesting because it tells us that mechanical procedures are sometimes great. So you might think that the right to vote is tracking something really complicated like intellectual and emotional maturity. But that's something that requires a lot of discernment. So we offer a mechanical rule. Here's your age. 18. And 18 does not track intellectual maturity. We have chosen inside of choosing a team, we have made a set of compromises around it.

1:36:25Like, this is the best we can do.

1:36:26C. Thi Nguyen:Right. And in this case, I think it's totally great that we make that compromise, right? We make, there's a case where the cost of not getting it exactly right to intellectual maturity is lower and the cost of bias is so high. It's not always like that. Right, right, right. Here's something else. I just, I think I'm getting more of a vibe of the things you're into. Michael Endicott, who's a philosopher of law, has this great moment where he says, when you're switching between discerning judgment and mechanical judgment, you're actually trading off between two kinds of arbitrariness. Yes, I remember this.

1:37:01C. Thi Nguyen:So good. With discerning judgment, you let in the bias of individual bias. Yes. With mechanical lines, you shut that out, but you introduce instead the bias of arbitrarily sharp lines where things are fuzzy and complicated and gray. What a profound example. That example travels so wide. We are diluting ourselves into thinking that one example, one choice is arbitrary and the other is objective. I mean, this is over and over again where I've ended up thinking about metrics is not metrics are bad, but there's this complex set of tradeoffs and costs. And we forget – we have a fantasy that there's not a tradeoff.

1:37:42C. Thi Nguyen:And in this case, what we're actually talking about is the tradeoff of accessibility. And you can see it back in – it's like the recipes tradeoff again, right? If you make a procedure more accessible and you make everyone follow that procedure, you also cut off expertise and sensitivity. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And sometimes you want to do it. Sometimes it's worth it. I want to talk a little bit about eligibility and legibility and trust on that note maybe. And you talk about this as kind of one of the core dilemmas we have in this world where we have a huge world. Science is really complicated. You have amazing work on conspiracy theories, which we'll have to say for another time about how what's so appealing about them is that they make the world like fit into your head.

1:38:22But in the real world, there's so much complexity. We have to specialize. You say a few bits I love. First off, from the outside, posers and visionaries can be awfully hard to distinguish, which maybe perfectly illustrates almost the problem. And then you say you have this great section on transparency is surveillance. You say, we limit the harm that bad and incompetent people can do, but we also limit what good and competent people can do. Transparency leashes both kinds of people, forcing them all to operate within the public's comprehension, back to accessibility. And then finally, we often assume that expertise is just technical.

1:38:56Experts are there just to run the machinery, like the McDonald's people, the fungibility. But the goals and values guiding it all are always obvious and accessible to everybody. But this is a mistake. Like, expertise involves seeing more deeply into what our true goals should be, grasping the subtle values of the terrain. The whole reason you go to a doctor is that they understand things you don't. Like, this is a profound problem that, like, I don't think has obvious answers. But I do think, like, at Root, it's about the success. It's almost about, we were talking earlier, like, how much we can compress and how much we can make accessible.

1:39:33Like we are at an all time low in institutional trust. And so like the, I guess the challenge is like to go back to all the metrics of like there, there are all of these benefits we get from the, from living in metrics world. And yet metrics world kind of, I think makes us want to trust philosophers and academics and doctors less. Like what is maybe, I know this is like a very long window question. What does trust need to scale? Maybe is my question. Oh my God. That feels like the antidote to the metrics.

1:40:11C. Thi Nguyen:The whole reason we were talking about Dastin and Porter is to understand what metrics miss about values. So what Porter teaches us is that large scale institutional metrics typically remove high context. And what Dastin teaches us is that large scale metrics typically remove expertise. And they both in some way are about different kinds of sensitivity and specificity. They tend to emphasize the things that everyone can see consistently and recognize consistently. So metrics – There's no room for context. Yeah. There's no room for context. What metrics world – I mean, here's the simplest, dumbest version of this.

1:40:51C. Thi Nguyen:Our department was just cut again. Like the philosophy department is being defunded in favor of AI programs and the business school. And part of it is because we've been labeled an unproductive department. Even though lots of people – like highly ranked department, lots of important publications. Lots of waste. Dare I say it. Well, actually, here's the interesting thing. The reason is that the measure of productivity in my university has become grants, research expenditures. Right. Right? Right, right. Philosophers don't need grants. There's a sense in which actually we're very efficient. You just need a book budget and a little – Just thinking.

1:41:29C. Thi Nguyen:You don't need a lab, but because the metric has become research expenditures and that metric can't make the contextual shift of being like this little group over here – Shouldn't be measured by grants. Yeah, yeah. Should not be measured by research expenditures because you don't need grants, right? That's an oversimplified example. Sure. I think maybe a more interesting example. The reason I'm worried about this is because this is the answer for why metrics can't capture values. Because values are context sensitive, highly expert. Right. And metrics, by their nature, target what is portable, consistent, and accessible.

1:42:13Yes.

1:42:14C. Thi Nguyen:What is legible. Yeah. And another example that I found really fascinating here is the example of Charity Navigator. So Charity Navigator is a nonprofit watchdog that was designed to tell us which charities were good and which charities were bad, which were good and which were wasteful. And it's – By the way, to go back to the posers and visionaries. Right. The root of this, by the way, is that there's a whole bunch of people, if you don't quantify the world, will abuse systems. Right. So the whole reason we want transparency is there are fakers out there, right? And then we impose a method of transparency that makes them – that tries to root out the fakers by seeing who can succeed on some publicly legible target.

1:43:02C. Thi Nguyen:But that will take out two groups of people. It'll take out fakers and then it'll take out people who are trying to target something important that isn't quantifiable, but not legible or not easily quantifiable. In fact, another word you might see is then the fakers will simply adapt and game the very now clear. You have this great concept in the book of the gap, which is almost like the gap between what we can measure and what actually matters. The gap is the gap between what is easy to measure and what actually matters. And I think the Charity Navigator case is so interesting to me because for a long time what Charity Navigator used, and I was convinced by, and I let it guide my charitable giving, was a throughput rating.

1:43:42C. Thi Nguyen:So the throughput rating is – Efficiency? Yeah. The ratio of how much money is given to the nonprofit versus how much it expends out on the other end. Right? Seems good. As it turns out, it means that – Don't hire anyone really talented. Exactly. So it assumes that a nonprofit is just there to like redistribute resources and not to do internal resources, not to hire experts, not to make decisions, right? Yeah. So – but here's the interesting – here's how I think it matters. I didn't emphasize as much as I should have in the book because I think – but I think this is super interesting. In order to actually judge nonprofits' actual efficacy, you would have to understand the specific domain of each nonprofit.

1:44:29C. Thi Nguyen:If you wanted to compare nonprofits that worked on housing versus nonprofits that worked on food, you would have to actually understand the complexity of how you improve an ecosystem, how you improve like nutritional delivery services. But throughput rating is a matter of accounting, and that's the same between each nonprofit. And so there is a single way to judge them all in an apparently objective mechanical accounting system. And do it efficiently and fast. And do it efficiently and fast. And so it highlights what is mechanical and similar, which is accounting. And it ignores what's actually important but highly variable.

1:45:17So how do we scale trust?

1:45:19C. Thi Nguyen:I think this is super interesting. The charity navigator example is super interesting to me because it's an attempt to scale trust or it's an attempt to get around the problem of trust by finding some – okay, here's the problem. It was an attempt to eliminate trust. That's what I'm saying. Right, right, right, which is very different. By the way, trustless systems – I have a question later I wanted to ask you about markets. Like trustless systems are interesting and can be really valuable for the world. Yeah. But they can't replace trust. Right. Right. This is – here's one way – one way to put it – well, I was thinking about transparency metrics.

1:45:50C. Thi Nguyen:A transparency metric, which is made to make institutions accountable to the rest of the world to see if they're biased or not, they're trust eliminators, right? They try to – instead of trusting an expert about their specific domain of what's important, they look for some public way of counting the goods. But what that means is that they're now forcing institutions not to use their expertise about what's important, but to only focus and target. Only be automatic. Yeah, the simple, easily accountable values, the simple, easily accountable targets. And my favorite examples of this was like when Congress put the National Endowment of the Arts under oversight because they were afraid of bias.

1:46:36C. Thi Nguyen:They started measuring artistic success by box office receipts. Yes, engagement. What a way to measure things, Netflix. Exactly. Measure art. Box office sales, ticket sales, page views, engagement hours, all of those are mechanically accountable. So the problem is, here's one way to put it. The problem of the world is that there are different domains where people understand the special value of different things. And to actually access that, we need to trust people. Yes. But we need to trust people beyond where we can go. Because that's the whole point of trust, right? That people are. And the point of specialization.

1:47:13C. Thi Nguyen:Right. And the point of specialization. I mean, the whole paradox of transparency and accountability is the whole reason we want experts and specialists is because we don't understand them. And then we're like, then you can only attempt to do the things that we can understand, right? That's not possible. Like there is a tension between transparency, accountability, accessibility, and trust and expertise and sensitivity. It's another trade-offs for you. So your question is how trust scales? I don't know. The problem is that I understand how trust works on small scale intimate life. I understand why it's hard to get trust in people at large scale and why we substitute things like metrics.

1:47:56C. Thi Nguyen:And I understand why that creates an enormous degree of loss. And I don't have an answer. I don't have an answer, but let me tell you two things I find fascinating. There are two moments from my favorite texts that I've been obsessed with, and I think if I can understand them, then we will understand the heart of the modern world. One is from Theodore Porter, this quantification guy. He says, because what data is, what information is, is understanding that's been a special – is a special mode of understanding and knowledge that's been pre-prepared to travel and be understood by distant strangers.

1:48:35C. Thi Nguyen:Yes. You even used the word engineered to do that. Right. Yeah. Right. And then over, there's this other text I love. One of my favorite pieces of philosophy is Annette Buyer's Trust and Antitrust, where she starts by complaining. This is a feminist philosopher from in the 80s. She starts by complaining against social contract theory. And she says, there's this mistake people make where they think that morality can be bounded on contracts, where contracts are envisioned as like voluntary agreements between free people. And she says, that's something only rich dudes in a gentleman's club could have imagined would be the root of morality.

1:49:11C. Thi Nguyen:Morality depends, begins in dependence and vulnerability and relations between parents and children and dependent. And she ends up saying that the heart of trust is vulnerability and that part of the mistake is trying to secure that vulnerability perfectly. Because what it is to trust someone is to be vulnerable. Yeah, I need a contract to trust you. You see? Exactly. Right. Okay. This is where she's going. Okay. What she ends up saying towards the end of this beautiful article is, she says, the real reason social contracts are a weird place to build your morality is because it's a very specific metaphor because contracts are a specific social technology to make fines and expectations explicit to ease and secure one-off transactions between distant strangers.

1:49:58Yes. Yes. Which, by the way, is beautiful. It's a lot of men's scale. but the whole premise is actually not about trust.

1:50:04C. Thi Nguyen:Yes. So, I mean, I kind of think if you can find, I think that buyer's comment about social contracts, eliminating trust, and easing one-off transaction in strangers, and Porter's comment about how data information has been prepared and engineered to travel to distant strangers, those are like two pointers to the heart of the modern world. well maybe it's just the last thought i guess my like my reaction to the scaling trust thing would just be and and i'm sure you even talk about some of the challenges here from the velocity standpoint would be like we trust the other experts yeah like what maybe just quickly like what what are the things that go wrong when we defer theoretically the doctors should all regulate the doctors right um but that we run into the same problems you're describing even in those cases i The problem is that we have to trust experts from distant expertises.

1:50:58C. Thi Nguyen:And then we have – I mean, this is – I was working – when I was a graduate student, the problem I was obsessed with, which I think is still a version of the problem I'm obsessed with. It's a problem that's actually as old as Socrates. The problem is how does a non-expert recognize an expert? And the dumb way to think about the problem is to think, oh, there's some class of special experts. But really, most of us are non-experts in 99 % of the world and experts in at most 0.01 % of the world. So we're constantly having to recognize non-experts and figure out who to trust. But we're constantly having to overextend ourselves and become vulnerable.

1:51:40And then we try to secure it with hyper-accessible metrics, which imagine away the complexity.

1:51:47C. Thi Nguyen:they suppose that there's some easily accessible moment, some test for real expertise. But I think the worry is if there's not a mechanical easy test for expertise, then we're plunged in the, I think, the true awful existential dilemma of the modern world, which is we're surrounded by people that are true experts and sensitives about forms of value and forms of life that we know nothing about. And we're surrounded by posers and fakers and exploiters. and the difference requires expertise as we don't have.

1:52:22The challenge of so much of this that I think maybe leads into what we'll talk about next is we want security. We want objectivity. We want answers. We don't want to have to consider the possibility we might get scammed. Right.

1:52:39C. Thi Nguyen:I mean, this is, I had this moment where I was talking about this stuff, about trust and vulnerability. And I had a student from the back of my class, like big guy, tanked up. He's like, this is why I never trust anybody. You can't trust anybody. Like they might screw you over. You can never trust anybody. You always have to take care of yourself. And I was like, how'd you get to class today? He was like, I drove. I said, did you go on the highway? He said, yeah. I said, how many other drivers and car mechanics have you trusted with your life today? And he actually had a meltdown. One of the things Annette Beyer says is that trust is so intense and deep.

1:53:13C. Thi Nguyen:that we forget how much we're trusting because trust to us is like water to a fish. We just swim in it all the time so it becomes invisible to us. Are you an optimist in the cosmic sense? I don't know. You tell me. But does that make sense? But I think, so sometimes I walk my students through this exercise of trying to figure out how many people they're trusting with their lives in this moment, sitting in this building. And like what it introduces is vertigo. because you suddenly realize how big your trust is. Yeah. And you realize, and I think there's this fantasy that we can secure it and know for certain.

1:53:54C. Thi Nguyen:I mean, in philosophy, I think this is Descartes' fantasy. Descartes' fantasy is you could start over from the beginning and only believe in things you're sure by trusting only yourself. And that is - Yeah, if we just rebuilt the whole world, by the way. Without science. it's funny again this mentor Elijah Milgram in his book The Great Endarkenment his joke is that he thinks the great enlightenment undid itself because it started with the idea of intellectual autonomy and rethinking things and that created so much science that intellectual autonomy became impossible right and that the idea that we can think for ourselves is an old out of date illusion the best count this is a whole separate you ever come across david deutch though uh it's like science his his articulation of good explanations it maybe rhymes a little bit with your articulation of good science where you're talking let me see if i can find it you i think you talk about it as being like um having a good error metabolism yeah it's like something that's a sort of somewhat atomically verifiable by an intellect like an intellectually reasonable person maybe that's our best hope and then otherwise we mix up i mean i maybe what part of what i'm left feeling here is like on one hand holding a loose grip which is just like actually objectivity is not something we're ever going to have we are going to have trust we are going to have failures and also trying to make more of the world have good error metabolism right okay okay a lot there too i think i have found the best tool to fuck with your mind okay Lorraine Dastin's first book is about what objectivity means.

1:55:37C. Thi Nguyen:And she ends up saying they're very different senses of objectivity, and they mean very different things. And the notion of objectivity she thinks that we have settled on in the current era, modern era, is what she calls aperspectival objectivity. Where what it is to be objective is to be a kind of fact that would be recognized no matter what person is looking and what kind of person they are. So in this case, objectivity and truth come completely apart. Objectivity is the land of highly accessible, consistent judgments, but that isn't necessarily. And there are some things that where it's easy for us to get objective about, again, the world of the easily countable.

1:56:19C. Thi Nguyen:And there's some things in which a perspectival consistency is incredibly hard, but they might still be important things. They might still be true. They might still be true, right? Right. So part of the – I mean this is the whole – I mean the reason we're talking about all this stuff is because the dream of metrics is that by narrowing things down to entirely objective mechanical rules, we can secure our intellectual behavior and we can secure our judgments. So we will always know for certain we're right. Theodore Porter actually says the reason that bureaucrats and politicians reach for numbers is to avoid responsibility.

1:57:04Right.

1:57:05C. Thi Nguyen:Oh, it's so good. By not having to make a judgment or exercise your discretion, they take themselves out of the apparent stream of judgment and say like, it's not me, it's just the numbers. I don't have to trust you. We have a contract. Right. Same thing. Right. It's a dream of – if all that was important was easy to count together instantly and we could recognize it, then we could be secure in making decisions together. There would be a mechanical method. But it's not. And if you have subtle values that require context and sensitivity to detect, but you are so obsessed with the dream of security and so obsessed with the hope of objectivity that you will only reason using easily accountable metrics, then you achieve security at the price of any sensitivity.

1:58:06C. Thi Nguyen:Yeah.

1:58:11we have a little time left and i want to hit i think this ties well into this last kind of section about the way that value judgments are hidden everywhere yep um which maybe is just an it's another thing adding to the point you were just making which is um the real live objectivity yeah yeah well i think first off it's worth noting you have a great line you say standardization may crush souls but it also saves lives um you are you are decidedly not anti-progress, not anti-science, et cetera. And yet, you say, when we start using any technology, we're always outsourcing some of our values. Why are technologies not value neutral?

1:58:50C. Thi Nguyen:This is because part of, this is the second attack on this dream of objectivity, which is that many of the metrics we think of, they look objective, but there's also a value choice hidden at their core. So this is this massive – this is, I think, a basic insight from the philosophy of technology and from a field called science and technology studies. So there's a presumptive view that seems really strong in our culture that tools, technologies are value neutral. Yes. That people just make – scientists and engineers just make tools and just empower people and then the people make the choices. And this seems, once you look at the actual details, obviously wrong.

1:59:30C. Thi Nguyen:So there's some classic examples. I mean, some of the easier examples are straightforward bias, like technologies can be biased in all kinds of ways. One of my favorite classic examples is Robert Moses and the New York bridges. Do you know this example? I know a bit about Moses, but I'm not sure I know this.

1:59:52C. Thi Nguyen:He managed to keep out what he perceives to be the rubbish from the good parts of New York by carefully setting the standard height for bridges and overpasses. as slightly lower than the average bus. So buses, right. So there's an easy, that's an easy, that's like case one to commit like, so you can encode a bias. But maybe that's just a mistake. Let's back up for a second, because just to say it, like the counter argument would be like, that's not a technology. Exactly. Maybe buses are, but that's a decision. That's an easy first example, but that's not the real thing. So Langdon Winner, who's one of my favorite philosophers in this space, he has this beautiful article called, Do Artifacts Have Politics?

2:00:31C. Thi Nguyen:And he says, But he says one of the interesting things is that technologies actually shape and push society into certain directions, often irrespective of what their designers and users hope for. So his example, one of his first examples is the printing press. So one of the things that he thinks is really interesting is that oral communication is deeply decentralized. Like, you know, if I say something to you and you say something to them. There's no centralizing power. Right? Right. Like each of us can change the news. Yes. The printing press, no matter the democratic and anti-elite hopes of its inventors, the printing press concentrates communicative power and communicative authority.

2:01:11C. Thi Nguyen:It requires capital. Yeah. And whoever has enough capital to have a printing press. Yes, yes. And then it's instantly demic - that's the official news. So he thinks that - Well, this is the challenge of technology too, though, is like so many technologies, they actually start this way and then they democratize. And so we can convince ourselves of these ideals of all the ways that we'll democratize access to power. And yet, you could jump way ahead to 2025. The slope of how artificial intelligence is adopted matters a lot, not just its ideas. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so in a very abstract sense, like many technologies have world-shaping powers.

2:01:51C. Thi Nguyen:In the specific case of metrics, one of the things I find really interesting is...

2:01:59C. Thi Nguyen:People think that metrics are neutral and objective, but metrics capture what – so to have a metric to count something, we need a categorization system to count it together. Right. Yeah, counting can't be value-laden, can it? Right. Counting can't be value-laden, can it? So Jeffrey Barker and Susan Leestar have this great book called Sorting Things Out, where they look at classification systems. And what they're really interested in is the interestedness of the classification systems that are the foundations of data and metrics. So here's a simple example. What they say is every category – so we can't keep track of everything in the world.

2:02:39C. Thi Nguyen:We need to reduce the granularity in order to store it and aggregate it. But there are decisions about where to reduce that granularity. So a simple example. U.S. Census has categories for black, Caucasian, Asian, Latino. That is very interested in the difference between Asian and Latino and uninterested in the difference between South Asian and East Asian. It forgets the granularity there. And by the way, that has seeped into how people believe about – like we just say Asians. Right. We just say Asians. Similarly, they're really interested in medical record keeping. So there's this astonishing moment in their book where they look at the ICD-10, which is the classification manual that's the basis for mortality and accident statistics that are used for martial epidemiological and medical research.

2:03:29C. Thi Nguyen:And they point out, for example, that in the falls category, there are separate codes for the following urban falls. There are different codes for fall from a balcony, fall from a stair, fall from an escalator, fall from a bed, fall from a commode, fall from playground equipment, fall from hospital equipment, fall from – right, there's about 10. And then for rural falls, there's fall from a cliff and fall other, right? So you can read the interestedness. So metrics seem objective. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they track – We have forgotten the value judgment that was made way back when. Right. We've forgotten.

2:04:10C. Thi Nguyen:There's so many of these cases where we forget the value judgment that's made way back when. One of my favorite examples, this is a geeky example, but I suspect you'll be interested in it. A lot of Theodore Porter's book is about the history of the cost-benefit analysis. And he notes that cost-benefit analyses look really objective, but at the starting point, there are all kinds of weird-ass interested decisions. So here's two examples. So one of his examples is if you're trying to do a cost-benefit analysis of, say, how much you spend on a national park, you have to insert into your analysis the value to a visitor of a recreation day.

2:04:47C. Thi Nguyen:You have to attach a number of dollars. A dollar, yeah. And then you set one. So in 1914, they said it was like 14 cents per visitor day. That's the value of their study experience. 14 cents is the value of one person visiting a park. Yeah, right. And then you run that and then it looks objective at the other end. But one of the inputs is – We just made it up. We just made it up. It expresses our sense of valuation. My other favorite one, and I think – this is one of my favorites. So one of the most important numbers in any cost-benefit analysis is the discount rate. Okay. Do you know this? Basically.

2:05:24C. Thi Nguyen:Yeah. So the discount rate is the relative amount you discount the future compared to the present. It's essentially how we keep the present – or excuse me, the future from being wildly overvalued. Right. So by the way, P.S., if you set the discount rate to zero, what you get is long-termism, right? Right. Right. Of course. Yeah, you would all – yeah. 17th century economists and like Adam Smith who works this out is like, well, if we set the discount rate to zero, You get all these absurd effects for any minor change in the future through compound interest. Sorry. Any minor change in the present will be justified because of swamping effects in the future.

2:06:00C. Thi Nguyen:So you've got to have some discount rate. The present has basically no value. Right. Yeah. So you have to set some discount rate. What have you said it at? There's no correctness. We made it up. Right? It is. The discount rate represents a value choice about the relative value of the future versus the present. And then someone sets it at the bottom of your calculation and then it gets hidden. And then things look objective. By the way, you could, I mean, you could so easily imagine how arbitrary discount rates might affect our broad sensitivities for how much the future matters. How much, because it goes back to the adoption of technology thing.

2:06:37Like, is it okay if we build this technology because in 20 years everything will be great or we'll have amazing abundance? And so much of our thinking is we – it's almost like we're avoiding the messiness of these ethical questions.

2:06:51C. Thi Nguyen:This is exact – I mean that is exactly the goddamn point. So the phrase I have in my book for this effect, I'm currently calling it objectivity laundering. Yeah, yeah. Like money laundering is you take dirty money, you pile on calculations here. You take a subjective choice and then you pile on calculations. I mean, the whole thought in the background, the opening thought for this book was something like games are beautiful because they simplify things. For once in your life, you don't have to worry about conflicting values. There's a victory point scale. You know exactly how much things are worth.

2:07:20C. Thi Nguyen:You know exactly who won. And it's so tempting to export that. Oversimplify the rest of the world. Simplicity contained is great. Yeah. Simplicity contained is great. And if you manage to convince yourself that your metrics measure all that matters, then you won't experience the tension of what you're missing. You'll think, oh, it's easy. And then actually it'll be much more efficient in achieving and optimizing for your metric because you don't get any drag from worrying about all the other stuff. All you had to do was delete from your vision everything else that was important. Maybe that ties in one of the last things I want to talk about, which is many people in my audience are technologists.

2:08:00I joked with you when we first met, you are a philosopher and think a lot about games, both of which are kind of like wildly low status, or especially games, but maybe philosophy too. In an area of technology that should almost certainly be learning a lot from those two domains. Why can't we do ethics from first principles? Maybe it's just a super simple starting point. You joked to me about that and I think it's profound. That's a really intense question. Maybe a better question would just be like, what is your caution there to people who think ethics can be simple?

2:08:32C. Thi Nguyen:Okay. If ethics is about treating people well and fairly and doing it well, then doing it well will involve deep attention to the particularities of people and their context and sensitivity to the emerging complexity of what matters. This is, I mean, this is again from Aristotle. I learned this stuff from Martha Nussbaum's version of Aristotle, which is like what practical wisdom is, is being soaked in the moral and value complexity of particular situations and being able to see all. It's perception, not recognition. Yeah, it is. Exactly. It is. I mean, there are some abstract things I could say that like morality, treat people well.

2:09:20C. Thi Nguyen:Right. But as an actual thing that guides action, if what actually matters to people, what actually hurts them, if what actually helps them is highly dependent on interaction with particular context, particular personalities, and particular values, then it's going to require enormous sensitivity and context. And if you expect not just to have a general vague principle of morality, act well and be sensitive, sure. Right. If you actually expect a decision procedure that will resolve ethical debates and you expect it to be mechanistic, then you will start to concentrate on those moral features that are easily countable.

2:09:58C. Thi Nguyen:Yes. Yes. And you will ignore the others. And you will ignore the others. what do you say to we we actually didn't talk about it you you give an example in the book that i love which is you talk about how maps are value laden as a technology as well and how super simply maps have elevation because somebody made a decision 100 years ago for battles and they don't have sound quality yeah and critically the answer here is not to not use maps the answer is to not participate in not not to not participate in the world and so like we've benefited so much from compounding and a ladder of abstraction, particularly in technology, benefiting from the work that others have done in the past, even if they were value laden.

2:10:40Technology, I think, to a fault, loves to solve for hero metrics and simplicity and solve for X. But even for technologists who are mindful of the ethical thing, who want to build quickly and with impact and with global coordination, what do you say to those people? Part of this is maybe listen to conversation read the book but like if you if you were to maybe a different way to ask this question that's like a little silly is if like i could give you 30 minutes in a room with sam altman mark zuckerberg and uh elon oh no like what you would try to persuade them of which i realize is different question than like thoughtful person who's listening don't give me that question okay but what would you try to have them you even you have another bit where you talk about reflexive control and part of so much of what i think this is is like remembering remembering to put on a mindset that gives way to these things while still operating in the real world and benefiting from all of these.

2:11:34C. Thi Nguyen:So it's interesting. A lot of the times I've been asked this question about how we're supposed to survive as individuals, not as your technologist. So what I say about the individual question is often something like, it's very much like the maps thing. We have to use maps, but what we should hope to do is choose, be aware that different maps reflect different values and choose our maps with care and sometimes make our own. And maybe an echo of this is at the structural level, if you have controls over the structure, then one thing to do is to try to make a map for everyone and force it out. And another thing to do is, and I mean, this will sound super simple, but like help create a variety of maps.

2:12:22Yes.

2:12:23C. Thi Nguyen:And help people figure out. There are choices. Or there could be choices. Make tools that let people build the maps they need and want. And to be careful. I mean, okay. Let's focus on this. I'm going to focus on a simple case. I've been thinking a lot. I've been running into people from the technology space who are concerned about the world. and they have a particular way of what's wrong with the world, a view of what's wrong with the world, which is that polarization has screwed up a lot of politics in the world. And so they're trying to solve for it by optimizing. And the way a lot of people are trying to solve by optimizing for it is to reduce polarization by algorithmically boosting content that's equally agreed upon by both sides.

2:13:11C. Thi Nguyen:I think they think this is a value neutral way of proceeding. I think it's a way that clearly emphasizes politically centrist and in particular – I mean, here's the uncomfortable version of it. Imagine you went back to 1830 America where half the population still believes in slavery. And then you had your bridging content moderation algorithm that boosted the things that everyone, both sides agreed with, right? That is a very value laden, very choicy. I mean, I think there's this fantasy. I'll speak directly. I've been thinking about this. And I think there's this weird fantasy in the technology world that you're going to be able to make – not have to make moral decisions, not have to make political decisions, but somehow improve the world and change it for the better and never have to think any complicated thoughts about what better is.

2:14:13C. Thi Nguyen:Does it make sense? Like there's this – It's a little bit – I think it's a little bit oversimplified, but directionally I think you're right. Yeah. I mean maybe – we might be thinking about different people, but I have – big ala i like anthropic and ai labs they talk about ethics it's not that it's not part of the discussion at all so i think we've moved but but i think that the push that i hope a conversation like this helps people is is like you need to perceive this way more you need to be well way more thoughtful about all of the places that values are are laid out right yeah i mean i if you think that there's some values that are easy and you can optimize for them yeah Right.

2:14:53Cool.

2:14:54C. Thi Nguyen:But if you think values are tangled and complicated and you might be missing a lot of it and anything that you do is going to vastly change the value landscape in a substantive way and there's no easy, neutral way to make the world better without making value in political choices, you might have to be a lot more careful. man i have so many other things i want to ask you i i think we have time for just two more um maybe three very quickly you mentioned to me you have another idea that you think you'll probably spend the next five to eight years working on could you give us just a tease

2:15:30C. Thi Nguyen:um we've already done it i mean the the the big the biggest most interesting question for me is that it's like the question about data spun up. Whenever we coordinate and we have to communicate, this will require making decisions together about what to ignore together and what to track together. And how do we think about the essential pluses and minuses of coordinated communication? Like not just data, but for everything, for our concepts. Cool. You said we give things power by believing in them. What do we need more belief in? We've answered this already. Play. Like, I mean, in particular, maybe, I was going to say play or humility, but I kind of think they're the same thing.

2:16:19C. Thi Nguyen:I mean, I guess one worry, one way to put my worry about metrics is that the metrics, the attitude of optimizing for a metric encodes behind it the attitude that we know it's important. And we just need to max out for it. That there's no process by which we might wander the world figuring out what we've missed. And I think the spirit of play is like encodes in it a spirit of humility because you're trying out shit. Even if it looks weird and silly. You need to be surprised. And you're open to being surprised. I have just one last question, which obviously relates. Near the beginning of the grasshopper, there's a line from the grasshopper.

2:17:11And he says to two of his disciples, I have the oddest notion that you are grasshoppers in disguise, that everyone is really a grasshopper. How do you remind yourself that you're a grasshopper?

2:17:25C. Thi Nguyen:i have sometimes i've had some professional success lately and i used to be the person that walked into the room and like no one wanted to pay attention because i was the one working on the dumb stuff like games and now i'm getting to the thing where i can see the path of becoming like a senior person where everyone like wants to listen to you and i like i can start to trust myself too much i can start to become overconfident and uh the way i resign in my context the way i remind myself of the fact that we are all just clumsy playful idiotic mud things these days i bring really weird toys i bring some yo-yos i have a new one i've got these like really silly spinning tops and I play them with people and fail.

2:18:20C. Thi Nguyen:And there's something really weird about doing something dumb and hard that you're bad at with other human beings. Being a beginner. Yeah, being a beginner, being soaked in the oddity of it, not being particularly good at something, being soaked in an activity where you don't know exactly what it's for and exploring it with people that, I don't know, reminds me that I don't know much about anything. What a great way to end it. T, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening. I hope you were inspired by my conversation with T. And before I leave you, I'd just like to thank Notion one more time for being the presenting partner of Dialectic.

2:19:02If you missed my announcement of the partnership late last year, I wrote up just some thoughts on both what patterns had emerged as I had 35 conversations last year, as well as the things that stand out to me about the show, what I feel when I'm doing it, the audience, and more. Those three themes were ideas turning into action, craft, and soul. And I wrote about those, and I also wrote about why I think the overlap in those values with Notion made them such an amazing partner for me. I think they're a company and brand and product that embodies that as a tool that you can use to turn your ideas into something real, whether it be solo or with a wide range of collaborators.

2:19:46It is a tool that is filled with craft at every level of detail. And I think I really admire the way that the Notion team has been able to scale craft. It's not something that's easy to do. And all of these years later, it's something that still goes into so much of what they do. And then finally, Sol, again, probably a thing that's hard to pin down,

2:20:07C. Thi Nguyen:but something that you can feel and something that is kind of enriched in humanity and aspiring to do your life's work, to do something great. I'll link to that in the description if you'd like to read it. And once again, thanks to Notion. I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. I hope you were inspired by my conversation with T. And before I leave you, I'd just like to thank Notion one more time for being the presenting partner of Dialectic. If you missed my announcement of the partnership late last year, I wrote up just some thoughts on both what patterns had emerged as I had 35 conversations last year, as well as the things that stand out to me about the show, what I feel when I'm doing it, the audience and more.

2:20:49Those three themes were ideas turning into action, craft and soul. And I wrote about those. And I also wrote about why I think the overlap in those values with Notion made them such an amazing partner for me. I think they're a company and brand and product that embodies that as a tool that you can use to turn your ideas into something real, whether it be solo or with a wide range of collaborators. It is a tool that is filled with craft at every level of detail. And I think I really admire the way that the Notion team has been able to scale craft. It's not something that's easy to do. And all of these years later, It's something that still goes into so much of what they do.

2:21:32And then finally, soul. Again, probably a thing that's hard to pin down, but something that you can feel and something that is kind of enriched in humanity and aspiring to do your life's work, to do something great. I'll link to that in the description if you'd like to read it. And once again, thanks to Notion. I'll see you next time.