One of the best reasons to write online, which I hadn’t anticipated when I started, was to “find the others”. The people who make you feel less alone in your thoughts. The ones taking the same crazy pills as you, whose minds wander the same alleys.
David Fu is one of those people for me. We bump into each other at the intersections of education, games, and the type of idealism we should have long outgrown. He pings me last week with an email subject:
watched this pod and thought of mathlete vs mathematician
The subject is a callback to Benedict’s reflection math team and other horrible things you do to get into stanford and his message was a paraphrase of an interview he watched:
If we live in a world that hyper awards those with power and those willing to cut out their humanity and hyperfocus on the explicit measure (win math competitions, win status and prestige games like getting into Stanford) then we should expect to get a world in which the people who have the most power to communicate and control things are the people who have been most willing to slash out their humanity and hyperfocus
Sociopaths are running the asylum and I’m still stuck on how we got here, so ok, you got my attention. I open the YouTube link.
Dork f’n Christmas.
It’s an interview with C. Thi Nguyen!
Nguyen is a philosophy professor at the University of Utah with a focus on games. Not game theory but theorizing on games. His first book Games: Agency as Art (my notes) is amazing, but I don’t recommend it unless you are in the market for an academic treatise on the philosophy of games.
Nguyen’s interview with Sean Carroll 5 years ago is still one of my favorites (my notes), so I was stoked to settle in to this one.
It delivers.
Turns out he has a new book and if that wasn’t self-recommending enough, I was delighted to see Dan Davies write:
If you liked “The Unaccountability Machine” and you got a book token for Christmas, spend it on “The Score” by C Thi Nguyen. I haven’t seen an advance copy or anything, but I met the author at a conference and he’s extremely funny and clever. I will be trying to promote the book to as many business podcasts as possible, because I very much think that this is a case in which the dead hand of academic analytical philosophy may have robbed the world of one of its greatest management consultants.
Dan’s another author whose powers of observation are galactic, so I’m getting a lot of convergence on healthy brain food.
I’ll leave you with some of my favorite excerpts:
Hobbes, Power, and Defining Reality
What Hobbes says is that the ultimate power is not military or economic power. It is the power to define terms and control language. If you control language and define terms, you control people from the inside.
Games are like artificial governments. They’re things where we play around with incentives and rules and constraints to shape people’s action.
When someone says, ‘Here’s a watch. It measures your health,’ and if you accept that, you’re letting somebody else define what health means for you—typically in what’s easy for one of their devices to measure cheaply.
Value Capture (Core Concept)
Value capture is any case where your values are rich or subtle or in the process of developing that way and you get put in an institutional setting and that institutional setting offers you a simplified—typically quantified—version of that value, and then that simplified version starts to take over your conception of good…It’s not just an incentive. It’s when you start to care about the metric as the thing itself.
Law School Rankings and the Death of Deliberation
Before rankings, colleges described their missions in totally different languages—money, research, activism, community. Students had to deliberate about what they cared about.
The moment U.S. News and World Report started issuing rankings, students stopped talking about what they wanted and started assuming that ‘best’ was whatever the ranking said.
You’re outsourcing not just your values, but the process of deliberation about your values.
Bernard Suits and what a game actually is
Bernard Suits defines a game as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. In ordinary practical life, the outcome is valuable on its own, so you try to get it as efficiently as possible. But in games, the value is inseparable from the obstacles themselves.
If the goal of basketball were just to pass the ball through the net, you’d use a ladder at night with no opponents. But that’s stupid — because the value of making a basket is intrinsically tied to dribbling, jumping, shooting, and resistance. Whatever the value is, it’s in the process, not the outcome… And when you hyper-optimize for winning, you destroy the spirit of the game.
Why metrics are fun in games — and dangerous elsewhere
The articulation of a metric has clarity, and that clarity is incredibly powerful over us. The best way to talk about this is to explain what metrics do for us in games — and then why that’s okay in games and not okay elsewhere… Games are this incredibly interesting art form where someone designs a new self for you. A game designer tells you what to want, how to pursue it, and what constraints you have, and suddenly you become a different kind of being — a being of feet, or balance, or precision.
What makes games so beautiful is their simplicity and clarity. We all have the same goal. It’s blissfully clear what a good move is… But that same clarity lets us outsource a complicated judgment about ourselves. The system says: I will let you know when you’re doing great. And the danger is that the clarity of a metric can keep us playing even when it makes us miserable.
Goal vs purpose
One of the most important distinctions in thinking about games is the difference between the goal of a game and your purpose in playing the game. The goal is the target you’re trying to hit. The purpose is why you play at all… For some people, the goal and the purpose collapse into one thing — winning. I call these achievement players. But for a lot of us, there’s a deep difference.
The easiest place to see this is party games. In party games, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun. You have to try to win for the game to work, but if everyone had a great time and you lost, you’d be ridiculous to feel bad about it… The larger purpose has clearly been fulfilled.
Rock climbing is another good example for me. I love rock climbing. I am a terrible rock climber. I am mediocre beyond belief… The goal of rock climbing is to get up the rock. But the purpose, for me, is the beauty of movement and the clarity of mind it gives me. It’s one of the only things that actually gets my brain to shut up.
What’s interesting is that I cannot get that feeling without trying to win — without genuinely trying to complete the climb. But it also doesn’t matter if I fail all day. I leave feeling good. My body feels good. My mind feels cleansed.
When you have the right attitude toward games, you keep goal and purpose separate. The game tells you the goal. You choose the game for your own purposes… And that separation is a huge dimension of freedom that we often don’t have with metrics.
The gap between what matters and what’s measurable
The thing to get really interested in is the gap between what’s really important and what’s easy to measure institutionally. ‘Likes’ claim to represent communicative value. Steps and VO₂ max claim to represent health. And when those representations are too thin, they don’t just miss what matters — they actively change it.
Qualitative understanding is rich, subtle, and context-sensitive, but it travels badly. Quantitative knowledge works by isolating a context-invariant kernel — something everyone can understand — and stripping away nuance so it can move easily between institutions. The problem isn’t that data is bad. It’s that we reach for it compulsively, even when it’s inappropriate.
Recipes, accessibility, and the loss of judgment, and the “facade of objectivity”
The facade of objectivity as well that this folds into. It’s this notion that we are also being sold this actively sold this by tech companies as well as our governments as if this metric data-driven system is also democratizing, it is populist it is access expanding… but what you’re describing is the thing that I think I have felt and have been frustrated by which is the decline in the value of expertise of editorial judgement of human decision
Old recipes don’t say “two cups of flour.” They say things like “add water until it feels just under sticky.” That’s actually a very good recipe — if you know what you’re doing… Modern recipes give you accessibility. Anyone can follow them. But what they take away is the cue to adapt and use judgment.
Metrics are that for values. They tell you something anyone can use and understand. And accessibility isn’t bad — but there’s a price. And the price is expertise.
When data is genuinely good — and when it turns on us
Large-scale data is really good at optimizing for things that are easy to count. It’s why I am alive and why my child is alive. Not dying of an asthma attack is a very clear target, and data is incredibly good at that.
It’s also incredibly good at debiasing. If an institution is convinced it isn’t biased, numbers are often the only thing that can knock the door down. You can point and say: look, women are getting the same scores, but you’re hiring men nine times as often… That clarity is powerful.
But then you move decades forward. And what you start to see is those same data-driven approaches getting thinned down into numerical quotas and proxies that miss the heart of what they were meant to fix… The system that was good at breaking down the door becomes the system everyone optimizes against.
Data-based approaches are very good at the blunt stuff. And then, over time, they tend to miss the subtle stuff — while capturing everyone’s attention. People start gaming the metric. Institutions start optimizing the proxy. And the thing that actually mattered quietly slips out of view.
Metrics are best at targeting what everyone can count easily together. And the uncomfortable question is how much of what makes life meaningful is actually easy to count together… Because if power accrues to those willing to hyperfocus on the explicit measure and cut out everything else, then we should expect a world run by people who have been willing to slash away parts of their humanity in order to win.
Metrics, Shame, and Modern Power
Historically, the guardrail was shame—‘you’re not fun to play with.’…Shame has never felt less effective than it does right now. We live in a system where the green arrow going up and to the right is the only thing that matters.
…and then there’s this little exchange with a very 90s thought. Where “sell-out” was an insult instead of the goal of a person’s life.
Pablo: When I was growing up, obviously, I knew there were like popular things, but it was not as if I read an article or read a book and had my view of it informed by how many other people simultaneously were doing that…We all feel the way in which stuff is worse. It’s hard for me to say that it’s disconnected from the entire conversation we’ve been having.
One of my takes that I have for the new year, popularity will become uncool. And I say that just because we are all watching the mechanisms of what it is to get all of the views and all of the likes and all of the retweets, right? And I just think we’re due for a movement that we’ve seen before, by the way, in which pop culture becomes uncool. And I just think that that is it’s just one of these things that feels like we’re ripe for.
Nguyen (shooting it down): Yeah. Unless that gets captured and large-scale forces successfully gain this sense of uncoolenness and manage to [garbled]. Like punk points. What happened with punk? It became pop punk, right? Some people resisted and were like screw popularity and then large-scale forces figured out how to game that, market that, and we got, you know, “top” alternative radio.
[Random bit I just noticed: Nguyen teaches at University of Utah. Another one of my favorite thinkers and conversation partners, Robert Wuebker, teaches there. I may need to make a field trip to this Utah place.]