Authors in August: Thi Nguyen’s “The Score”

27:17And mechanical rule is one that's written so that anyone can follow it unthinkingly and get the same result. And I know this is rooted in double entry bookkeeping because I've read your book and she talks about this. And for understandable reasons, for the first time, we needed sort of separate from human, inhuman facts. That's a relatively modern conception. And it started with the accountant's tea. Yeah. You're talking about Mary Poovey, another scholar in this space. And one of the things she says is, we used to think something was a fact because it came from a good person who had good judgment.

27:51And now what we think a fact is, is something that comes from a mechanical process that anyone can inspect, something that emerges from no person at all. And I think in a sense, what's happened is that we as a modern society have been captured by the standard of mechanical repeatability, right? We think that what's real is what anyone can track and that everyone tracks the same way. And what's not real is anything that defies that. that's not true that's not the real heart of things because there are a lot of things are important in the world that require intense expertise to notice or see jennifer lena the sociologist i love has this great example about how arts funders often try to give grants for artists based on expert judgment about what looks like good art but oversight especially congressional oversight, often thinks that, you know, these arts grantors are just nepotistically funding their friends because they can't see what's valuable.

28:55And so when they look for a standard that anyone can follow, they often reach for things like ticket sales, box office sales, popularity. That's mechanically inspectable, but it doesn't actually track what's valuable. Lorraine Dastin thinks that mechanical rules are designed to that anyone can follow them. They're designed to be accessible, right? They're designed to be accessible without particular expertise or education. But there's a cost to that. When you write rules that are designed to be accessible, what you're excluding is any kind of judgment that requires sensitivity or expertise or long familiarity.

29:32She gives this incredible example of the difference between principles and mechanical rules, and it's recipes. So she says like, okay, if you look at recipes, old school recipe books, old school cookbooks look very different from modern cookbooks. So a recipe in an older cookbook will often look like this. Take three handfuls of flour and mix in enough water to make it moderately pliable and gooey and knead it until it stiffens and then thwack it until it is resilient. Stretch it, roll it. Then my favorite one was bake it at good heat until it gives a nice resounding knock sound when hit. Then a new school recipe often looks like mix three cups of flour and two cups of water, You know, mix for at speed eight on a KitchenAid for three minutes and then form into a loaf and bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

30:23The latter looks legitimate to us. And I think for a lot of people, the first one looks weird, old, goofy, unreal. Actually, if you bake a lot, what you'll understand is the first one is actually really good. Old school recipes actually work really well if you know what you're doing. if you have the expertise they're actually cuing you to adapt to listen to sense things and to sense what's really important so the thing about this knocking cue is it doesn't actually work great the first time but once you practice a few times with the bread you'll learn exactly how bread sounds when it when it hits the right level of loft and it's actually cuing you in a way that requires some testing experience and skill to look for what's really important this other thing, the modern recipe style, it looks really official to us, but it's been written so that anyone can follow it without background skill or practice.

31:15And it doesn't actually work perfectly over time. It works pretty good. But if you're a good baker, one of the things you know is that humidity changes, temperature changes, different flours are different. And on different days, the same bread will take more time, will want a little higher heat, will want a little bit more needing, what you need to do is adapt. And the interesting thing about the modern style recipe is it writes itself in a very accessible way that anyone can follow and get to the same procedure. But what you lose is any cues that tell you to adapt, to be sensitive, to look for odd little details, to like sniff and smell when things smell right.

31:59So what's interesting here is, is that The way that Lorraine Daston puts it is that the modern recipe is written as a set of mechanical rules to follow, that anyone can follow in the same way. And its virtue is consistency. What it loses is adaptability to changing circumstances, right? It loses the cues tell you to look and listen and be careful. I think what this is, I don't know if it's a metaphor, but it is a version of what's going on with metrics. When I tell you to fund original art, when I tell you to fund creative art, when I tell you to try to teach the students to encourage critical thinking, these are things that require a fair amount of sensitivity and judgment to apply.

32:47Sure. When I tell you to educate for fastest graduation rate or highest salary, right, or highest scores on student evaluations. These are things that do not require expertise to apply. These are standards that have been mechanized, right? And I think what Destin is really showing us is kind of the heart of the trade-off at the center of modern metrics. What it is is a trade-off between sensitive rules that are hard to follow versus clear mechanical rules that are formulated so anyone can follow them. But in order to be so formulated, they have to cut off directions and criteria that have high sensitivity and high experience.

33:35We can't have context. We can't have nuance. In some senses, they're dumbing not just the system down, but obviously a concern of yours and something that I enjoyed when you went there in the score is they're dumbing us down too if all of a sudden we're no longer paying attention to nuance or we weren't aware that things could be more complicated or more interesting. Yeah, I mean, but I should pause and be clear that I am not anti-metrics. I think in many cases, metrics are put in place precisely because they're accessible, precisely because without them, you have bias and you have corruption.

34:10And by forcing people to hit a clear target that anyone can check, you do remove a certain window for corruption and bias. at the same time, you remove a window for sensitivity and expertise. I mean, I think it's really worth here talking about Theodore Porter. So this is the other major player that really helped me understand what was going on. He's the one that talks more explicitly about context. So Porter in this amazing book, Trust in Numbers, Porter is a historian who's studying the rise of quantification culture. And the thing he's really interested in is explaining why so many bureaucrats, politicians, and administrators reach for quantified justifications, even when the quantifications are obviously irrelevant or obviously tracking the wrong thing.

34:58My new favorite terrible metric, a friend of mine is a student advisor at the university, and he and his student advisors are now being judged on advising quality, where advising quality is measured in number of keystrokes per minute into the student advising system. And you know, this seems like obviously bankrupt. And I guess the question here is, it's so obviously terrible. Why would anyone use this? But this is a question that Porter's trying to answer. Like, why are numbers so seductive? And his answer is that there are two different systems of reasoning and justification we have, qualitative and quantitative.

35:33And he thinks they're good at different things. So the claim isn't that quantification is bad. The claim is that these are different tools that have different purposes, different strengths and different weaknesses, and we should use them together carefully and intentionally. So what he says is that qualitative reasoning is reasoning in words, justifying things in paragraphs. Qualitative reasoning is sensitive and open-ended and dynamic, but it travels badly between contexts because it requires a high amount of shared background knowledge to understand. So he says in institutions, we get around this, we try to solve this with a technology, with a device, quantification, metrics.

36:12So what we do to create quantifications in institutions is we identify a context invariant kernel. We identify something that everyone understands and counts in the same way. And once we've identified that kernel, that information can pass easily between people with different contexts and people in different contexts can all count and collect data into the same bucket and that can all aggregate instantly. I mean, I think my favorite example of this is GPA, right? Like when I evaluate my students' papers, I write long multi-paragraph commentary about their originality and sensitivity and about their scholarship and rigor and the quality of their argument.

36:51And I can move along 10 or 15 dimensions and I can use all the rich language that we've developed in philosophy. But those qualitative assessments won't travel. They won't be understood easily by people in different departments and they won't aggregate, right? Because each of them is tracking different dimensions. When we create a stable bucket that everyone agrees on, GPA, then we've created something that does travel. We all know approximately what an A, B, and C means. And we all mean approximately the same thing when we enter A, B, and C as someone's grade. And so everyone can interpret those numbers easily, and we can all kind of collect them into the same buckets, and they can all aggregate instantly.

37:31And so what we get, says Porter, when we create this kind of invariant, this contextually invariant bucket, when we create this kernel that everyone understands, is a highly portable information system. We create something that everyone can understand and share instantly. But we create it by stripping out context and nuance from that bucket. We have to be all counting something that we can all track together. And so we can't be triggering it off of high context expert particulars that only a few of us can track. So I mean, I think the huge insight here is that the power of data is inextricably connected to its price.

38:10The power of data is that we can all understand it, all access it, and they can travel instantly. And the price is that it focuses us on low context qualities that are stable across different expertises and contexts. Yeah. So this is like, for me, like this is now like, this gives me nightmares now. Because what it says is that the very reason that metrics are powerful is precisely that they have been intentionally denuanced, right? That is the method by which we've created the power of portable data. You know, as I think about this, T, one of the things that I've certainly learned is that scientific evolution, people who are much better studied on that than I, some of whom I've read, point out that what makes humans unique, what makes us quite amazing, really, what caused us to far exceed the apes and the chimpanzees is our ability to coordinate at scale.

39:10to organize and to cooperate. You know, if you get more than like 60 apes together, they can't work together. They just start fighting. So things that we humans take for granted today, I'll give a few quick examples. Clothing, iPhones, stadiums, medicine, airplanes are all largely explained by our ability to cooperate at scale. And so one of your four horsemen, we don't have time this week to talk through all four of your horsemen of bureaucracy that you highlight in the book, a fun feature throughout the score. But one of them is scale. And obviously, you and I, on the one hand, are inveighing against it and just pointing out the dangers of falling in love with scale and missing all of the nuance and what makes life special and memorable and what makes every person unique.

40:03And yet, out the other side of our mouths, we have to acknowledge that scale explains why we have clothes on right now and medicine and iPhones. Yeah. My claim is never that metrics and data are bad. I mean, let us be clear. I'm an asthmatic without modern science and data-based medicine. I would be dead at age like 10. I think I can probably off the top of my head think about 15 times where I would be dead without medical interventions require large-scale data. In no way am I saying the data and scale-based methods are bad. What I'm saying is that they're a tool that's very good at certain things and not good at other things.

40:45So they're very good at targeting the kinds of things that everyone can detect or count together. If you want me to overgeneralize, this is one of the reasons why modern medicine is really good at extending lifespan and really bad at supporting mental health and psychological well-being. Because lifespan is the kind of thing that everyone can count together easily. And psychological well-being is the kind of thing that's highly variable and highly contextually dependent and very hard to count together at scale. I mean, I guess another way to put it is I'm not saying that metrics and data, that what they measure is a lie, right?

41:23If your metric measures the number of keystrokes in the student accounting system, that's a real number, right? When your metric measures how quickly students are graduating, what their salaries are, those are real numbers. When your data is measuring how an intervention increases average lifespan, those are real numbers. The thing that I'm worried about is that they're another sector of humanity, a huge part of our lives that are hard to count together precisely because they require high sensitivity or high contextual nuance. And because they're hard to count together, They won't show up easily in our data systems.

41:57And so when there are fights between the easy to publicly count and the subtle hard to publicly count stuff, in our world, the easy to count stuff kind of wins automatically. I mean, OK, I have two examples. One's less controversial. One might get me canceled, whatever. OK, the less controversial one is when you're thinking about saturated fats, it's really easy to track their impact. if saturated fats increase heart attack rates and decrease average lifespan, that's easy to count at scale. If saturated fats also give some of us profound joy, if the taste of brie is like one of the deepest treasures of my life, that's pretty hard to count at scale.

42:41And so my worry is that I'm not saying this is where I start sounding like a Thanos type supervillain or something. I'm not saying that lifespan is bad and decreasing heart attack rates is bad. What I'm saying is like it's worrying that the easy to count stuff, which is important, auto wins fights and that the other stuff drops out of you completely. Another version of this for me is, I mean, okay, this is the more controversial one, but I have been worried that during COVID, during public health discussions, counting lives saved and lives lost is an easy thing to count because death is very visible.

43:18psychological health child development community well-being tradition i think these are also important but they're very hard to count and again i'm not saying that saving lives is not good i'm saying that there's a complex calculus but the way modern justification systems work the stuff that's not easily countable suddenly count to zero and that seems weird when i mean I mean, I guess one way to put it is a lot of people want to say things like, oh, there's objective stuff and there's subjective stuff. There's the real stuff and the not real fake stuff. And what I want to say is that's not actually the line that explains data versus non-data.

43:57What data tracks is the stuff that's easy to count in unison. And what's on the other side is stuff that requires sensitivity and expertise to track. And that's what's dropping out in a data-centric world. Did you know three out of four U.S. homes have toxic chemicals in their tap water? Even though contaminated water looks clear, it could put you at risk for devastating health concerns including fatigue, hormone disruption, cognitive decline, even cancer. Surprisingly, standard fridge and pitcher filters do little to remove most contaminants, and bottled water contains microplastics. So, what's the solution?

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45:27AquaTrue even comes with a 30-day Best Tasting Water Guarantee. T. That's aquatrue.com. Aquatrue spelled without the E on the end. So that's A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com. And remember to use the promo code RBI. Aquatrue.com. You know, as I listen to you, T, I'm just reminded that I wish this conversation, this podcast could go three hours sometimes because part of me wonders, you know, what if we had a standard list of, let's say, 20 goals that undergraduate students identify at the start of their education. And maybe it's a standard list of 20 things. And one of them is simply intellectual exploration. And you know that for that student, it matters.

46:12But for this other one, he just wants to graduate as fast as possible. It's all about the money. Like if people could express ahead of time in some standardized way that might become a metric, I feel like we could nuance the system and make it smarter and not make you as an academic have to perform to certain rates that aren't that your own students may not even care about. But I need to push all that aside because when I think about something like that, that's more of a beautiful question. It reminds me of one of my favorite books, A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger, which is so much about in some ways what we're asking.

46:44Couldn't this be done better? How do you balance these things? Those kinds of questions. But I think just bringing this through and concluding on the book for now, I'm thinking about my listener right now. And this person, I hope, has been highly engaged. They're a little mystified because they agree with you that a lot is missed when we pay too much attention to metrics. And yet, and you yourself would acknowledge this as I would as well, metrics still matter. So I'm wondering for the rest of us, T Nguyen, what is a score that you think we should be trying to keep that maybe not enough of us are scoring ourselves on?

47:20And then what's a metric that you think most of us may not even be aware of, let's say, and we should be shedding? I refuse to answer this question, but I have principled reasons for doing that. I think the, and this is related to a part of my book that I don't want to spoil for people, but I think you'll know what I'm talking about. I think the entire message of this book is that the scoring systems that matter for you are the ones that align with your values. And so the most important thing is to have intentional reflective choice about which scores do align with their values and which ones don't.

47:56In that case, the most hypocritical thing that I could do is to tell you which scores to listen to. So I refuse to answer that question. I love it. I love it. And, you know, again, since we're running out of time, I can't ask my follow up, but we're going to have more fun still ahead. I have one final question. Then you've consented to play buy, sell or hold with me, which we will close with. My one final question is, I sort of adumbrated this earlier, but T, have you had any new thoughts since writing and publishing the score earlier this year? What are you thinking about now that we haven't been able to read about?

48:28I have been thinking a lot about how many of our basic ideas have already been transformed by this demand for mechanical clarity and decontextualization. And I've been working on this stuff about how many of our basic ideas, like self and art and moral responsibility, have been artificially clarified. And that what the actual reality is, is much fuzzier. Like what you are responsible for, the idea that you are responsible for specific things might be this illusion that we built of the legal system because the legal system has to punish particular people. But the answer is always, who's responsible for that?

49:06Like a million things throughout history. So I have been interested in, I don't know, how much we've imported bureaucratic thinking even to our basic moral concepts. I love that. You know, so much of philosophy, and I only took one course in my undergraduate studies that was philosophy, but so much of what I've learned from you. And what I love in the world is, is paying attention to the words that we use. And one thing that, before we move on to buy, sell, or hold, one thing I'd just like to reflect on is you use this phrase, and it's going to sound very complex to most of us. You use the phrase, hermeneutical injustice.

49:44And while that's a complex jargon-ridden phrase, perhaps, the underlying concept is really worth briefly thinking about. At one point, you talk about the phrase sexual harassment. And that was not a phrase that people used 75 years ago. And therefore, because they didn't have the words for it, they didn't, especially women, since usually it's been visited upon women, they didn't actually have a legitimate gripe or a way to express what they were seeing or feeling. And it was even at scale. And so it wasn't in some senses until we awakened, we had consciousness around this thing and put words to it, reified it, one of my favorite complex words, reification, that it made it possible for us to tackle it.

50:30And so, you know, before we go to buy, sell, or hold, I'm thinking again just about the importance of the language that we use in inventing new terms and reframing concepts. And I know you're alive on fire with this one. Throw me something before we start buy, sell, hold. Yeah. So that idea comes from Miranda Fricker. And the history of it is that before the term sexual harassment, the term that was in general use was office play. And this says a completely different moral valence from sexual harassment. And in Fricker's accounting, many women who experienced such a thing felt, she says, crazy and alone until they came up with a language that made it possible to think those experiences to themselves.

51:09I think this is deeply related to the Hobbesian idea that who sets the language, whether the most popular term is office play or sexual harassment, deeply changes our reactions to things and our evaluations of things. And that's kind of the worry I have about metrics. It's totally fine to have neutral data in the background, as long as you know that that is only one way of conceiving of things. It's when that stuff gets projected and forced on us, or we unthinkingly uptake it as the automatic definition of what's good. When you just start thinking, yeah, what's good in social media is a lot of likes, or you start thinking, yeah, what's good in my life is having the most money at the end of the day.

51:45That's when you have lost control of your values and let some distant institution reach into you and tweak the settings on what you care about. The key phrase here, fellow fools, is value capture. And I do appreciate that the good doctor here himself is not putting forward his own values. He's encouraging you to think about what your values are and awakening you to the possibility that you might be compromising your values or have thrown some away because of metrics that you are being forced, maybe not even in a way you were previously aware of that you were being forced to kowtow to. The book is The Score, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game.

52:22Our author and my guest this week is C.T. Nguyen. C.T., let's go on to close it out with buy, sell, or hold. I'll be asking you about things happening in our society or culture. And you already know this. You've played before. These are not actually stocks. But if they were, would you be buying, selling, or holding in a sentence or two as to why? and since i have a lot of fun with you i think i have eight so we should go through this rapid fire you ready yeah all right buy sell or hold chat gpt oh my god no uh i've such complicated feelings uh i'm gonna hold uh my my feelings are too complicated except to say that uh we're at a moment of a radical transformation of what is automated and not and uh what is outsourced or not.

53:13And the thing I think to think the most about ChatGPT is simultaneously what it can do for you and then what skills you have that will rot when you no longer exercise them. Very well said. Number two, chess, go, poker, diplomacy. Increasingly, whenever humans invent a game, AI eventually masters it. So maybe the question isn't who wins anymore. It's whether that changes what games are actually for. So see, T Nguyen, buy, sell, or hold playing games against AI. Oh, against AI. I'll sell. The answer to this is really clear. For me, no marathon runner is threatened by the fact that cars go faster.

54:00And I think chess and go players should not be threatened by the fact that AI can do it better. Like that's not what games are about exercises of specific capacities by excluding tools, right? Very well said. And I will note for gamers, and they're out there, certainly. Our conversation this go-round around the score is really about scores and metrics, obviously tied to games. But if you want to hear T and me geek out on games, including our Mount Rushmore favorite games, just go back, Google CT Nguyen Rule Breaker Investing, and you'll hear a lot more game talk if you feel like you're missing that this time around.

54:38Next one. I think I already know the answer to this because we discussed it earlier, but I'm still going to ask it anyway. By seller hold, Thomas Hobbes' observation that real power comes from defining success rather than merely exercising force. By, I mean, come on. Hobbes' insight here is what underlies military might, it is convincing soldiers to fight in the direction you want. You can just expand that to everyone. The ultimate power is to be able to control people's conception of success. You know, one other line I have memorized from Hobbes because I studied him at some point undergrad, but it's something like this.

55:15The condition of man is the condition of war of every man against every man. And when I first read it as a college student, I didn't really like it. I like it even less today. And I'm sure I'm missing a lot of context behind it. It's kind of a brutalist view of things. Yeah, you didn't ask me to buy, sell or hold about that part. I'll sell that part. Okay, let's move on to number four. we're increasingly letting algorithms choose what we watch, what we hear, what we read, even maybe who we date. Convenience is maybe putting some points up on the scoreboard. T, buy, sell, or hold algorithmic recommendations.

55:54This is where I have to ask you what buy, sell, or hold means. Do I think it's terrible? Yes, sell. Would I invest in it for my own selfish purposes? Yeah, I think humanity is lost to convenience. And we're going to sacrifice in general, most of our important qualities for the convenience of ready automation. Sorry. All right. Number five, I lightly alluded to it earlier by seller hold. Feel free to tell a short story if you like. Ungrading. Oh God, hold. So ungrading is the process of stepping back from grading and emphasizing something besides grades and education. I still believe in the dream.

56:30I don't think it works in my particular classroom when the rest of the world is still grading. And I'm worried that institutionally we'll never be able to step away from it. So complex feelings. The dream is alive, but the particulars are difficult. Hold. Thank you. Number six. For years, we've been told to specialize, but now some of the people who seem to break through are often, I might say, wildly interdisciplinary, comfortable wandering from philosophy to coding, to art, to entrepreneurship. T, you have two young kids I know. What do you want to raise them to be, buy, sell, or hold being a generalist?

57:05Hold, for complex reasons, I think the basic fact of the world is the world is too full of expertises and no one can track everything. And many of the gaps in the world come from gaps between the expertises. And some of the most valuable work is done when people who have one expertise try to learn another and connect a few. The thing that I'm worried about is that sometimes when people believe in this, they stop going deep on everything and basically try to think about the world, understanding everything via two minute TED talks. And I don't think that works well either. What we're trying to navigate is the complexity of the world and the need for expertise and the need to connect expertises.

57:45And the solution to that is not general shallowness. So hold. A lot of holding going on. We might do it again here. Let's see. Now, let me first of all apologize because not once during our hour or so together have we ever mentioned rock climbing, a passion of yours. You write about it in the book. You've mentioned it on both of our podcasts in the past. I know you love it, but I'm going a slightly different direction here. Pickleball has become America's fastest growing sport. It's beloved. It's mocked. It's occasionally blamed for neighborhood noise complaints by seller hold CT Nguyen pickleball.

58:18Buy. And I don't play pickleball, but I believe in it. I think one of the reasons it's mocked is because, from what I understand, it is a highly accessible sport that's enjoyable to all. But I suspect from what I can tell, the skill ceiling is higher in tennis. And I think our world often fetishizes the kind of thing that professionals are really good at. and some of the best games are games that are often optimized for the joy of amateurs or the joy of dabblers and that doesn't sell as many sponsorships but i think games and institutions are built so many people can enjoy them at any skill level is a deeply valuable thing that we should cherish more and i guess the last one for you so jim carrey's lead character gradually discovers that his entire life has been an elaborately constructed television show, forcing him to choose between the comforting illusion he's always known and the uncertain freedom of the real world.

59:24Buy, sell or hold the movie, The Truman Show. Buy. And I'll tell you what, thank you for handing me an opportunity on a silver platter. You know, in the background of this, behind Truman Show and behind Matrix, I think is the old image from Plato, that we are staring at illusions on the wall and unwilling to look at reality. And the thing I'm worried about is that metrics are the illusion on the wall. The thing I'm worried about is that from a certain perspective, large-scale institutions can only see things that they process through data and that they are unwilling to grasp that there are parts of the world that are subtler than large-scale institutional data collection processes can grasp.

1:00:06And I think Truman Show, Matrix, Plato, all of these senses, there is a true weird reality behind a hard shell of easy palatable illusion. They're getting it part of this. It just strikes me as kind of a metaphor that you've been talking about through your own work that's really connected. You know, how about a bonus? Because we have a minute left. buy, sell, or hold a word that you use 64 times in the score. And since it's about 320 pages, my math says every five pages you're using this word, you just did it in the last minute or so. Buy, sell, or hold and explain to us why you love it. The word weird.

1:00:53Buy, obviously. I mean, weird is a stand-in for me for anything that is not easily digestible. or anything that is not, whose value is not highly accessible. And I think the whole push of everything I'm worried about is that many important things in the world take a lot of time and sensitivity to track. And if you're building metrics that define success in terms of kinds of values that everyone can see, and if that becomes dominant, then what we lose is subtle beauty. and from the point of view of a world that demands that everything important be instantly comprehensible, the word for the subtle is weird.

1:01:35And I love it. And certainly people in Austin, Texas who have the bumper sticker, keep Austin weird. I think they get it too. T, this has been a delight. Thank you for reminding us that games aren't just entertainment and scores aren't just for fun, especially when they turn into metrics. I love your book, The Score, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. This was a delight to have you back on Rule Breaker Investing, and I'm already looking forward to your next book and our next time together. Fool on, my friend. Thank you. As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against.

1:02:14So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about Rule Breaker Investing at rbi.fool.com.

1:02:26Thank you.