The Points You Shouldn't Score: A New Year's Resolution

Everyone complains about cellphones. But there's something bigger and more insidious going on, from football teams and Netflix shows to law schools and Instagram. So philosopher C. Thi Nguyen offers some gamified advice for 2026, to plug the downside of data into the upside of your mind: Metrics help you win at work, but can you free yourself from the algo? Hyper-optimization has changed the NBA, but what about your kitchen? We've handed over complexity for competition, but is there time to steal back our humanity from A. I.? Plus: punk points, art governments, sore losers at Twister, a context-invariant kernel... and The Meat Sack. • Read "The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game" https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735252/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen/ by C. Thi Nguyen Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  I feel like the entire purpose of my life is about to be met, because I think the purpose of my life is to be here, talking with you about this question.

• 0:16Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 0:20Speaker 02

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• 1:16Pablo Torre?

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• 2:00Pablo Torre?

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• 2:24Speaker 01

  I wrote this article once about how during pandemic, I fell apart and I realized part of why I fell apart was I didn't have a commute anymore. This is like my basement office and I would just take care of the kids and then walk down here and do work and then be finished with work and there'd be a 20 second buffer to go back upstairs. And I realized during pandemic, I started taking a fake commute walk around for like 10 minutes. Cause like I just like, it was just not possible.

• 2:52Pablo Torre?

  Oh, I relate to that so much. Just the need to, to move the meat sack that is my body just to make sure that the juices start flowing again. It's real, man. It's real. Thank you for doing this, by the way.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  I'm so excited.

• 3:07Pablo Torre?

  Your book, The Score, and I'll read the subhead, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. It's one of those books where I pay at the highest compliment. It made me stare off into the middle distance a lot.

• 3:23Pablo Torre?

  Genuinely. So, Teen Wen, thank you for being the foremost authority in the philosophy of games and also metrics as they relate to each other and to ourselves and to my brain and to the thing I can't stop thinking about, which is, why the [bleep] I didn't realize this until I read your book? Why didn't I see this in the way that you see it so clearly? And I'm excited to, to figure out why I've been an idiot.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Can you tell me what the this is? I want to know what you mean by this.

• 3:47Pablo Torre?

  So you're on a technically sports show.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:50Pablo Torre?

  And so for me, the question of games, of the metaphor of games, the reality of games, that's the entire foundation of this industry that I started in. And then even just the language I use as I try to interpret other aspects of what is left of our civil society and how we behave and how we care about things. And so I'm like the guy who's like, oh, I'm going to explain games to everyone else. And then I realized, oh my God, I have not been articulating the way in which gamification has taken over everything beyond sports and how clearly I've been outsourcing the most fundamental parts of my, I mean, you call it values. They are values.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  I'm sure we'll talk about all this, but like, there's one theory in which people that are really into sports and games should be immune to some of this capture by external metrics because we should be aware of.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  How different scoring systems are and how like they can change our mood. But I think there's also a way in which games prime us to just go into that mind state of just like, there's the point system, let's do it, let's go for it.

• 5:03Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so when I started thinking about how to start the new year on this show, I started thinking about goals and resolutions and all that stuff. And pretty quickly, I caught myself thinking about how a content creator would answer this question. And this led me to thinking about more views and more subscribers and more clicks and more attention. And all of this felt, pretty quickly, bad.

• 5:31Pablo Torre?

  And it felt bad in large part because the PTFO staff and I take enormous pride in using human editorial judgment to report stories that other people simply are not talking about. And stories also that our subjects often don't want us to uncover in the first place. It's kind of our whole mission at this point. But I still found myself strategizing around how to win somebody else's game.

• 5:57Pablo Torre?

  And so this is why I ultimately chose to start this year with T Nguyen, who is an author and philosophy professor from the University of Utah. Because T's perspective on the year 2026 goes so far beyond the cellphone as the technological innovation that we need to grapple with this year, even though the cellphone, by the way, is often identified as the main device which ails us.

• 6:22Pablo Torre?

  What T thinks about, more deeply than anyone else in America, I think, is scoring systems. Because a scoring system, T writes in his book, is not merely an instruction manual for how to win a game, and it's not merely how money, which we do need, gets distributed, it is also something a lot bigger that has been hiding in plain sight.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  So I went into this trying, first I was thinking about games, then I was thinking about social media. And I was for a while hooked into this thought that like, people are like, oh, this is a new thing. These are algorithmic gamifications, this is new. And when I started, there's this field, science and technology studies, that I think it's too little read. And a lot of what I'm doing is kind of trying to translate this stuff out. Who've been thinking about quantification culture, and I came to see where we're at now as the endpoint of a three to 500 year movement towards bureaucratization and towards like ranking everything that everybody does in clear outputs that large scale governments and corporations can see. And now I think like the algorithmatization is just the little bit of the tip of the iceberg.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  And at the same time, I'm looking at Twitter being like, I think this explains a lot.

• 7:37Pablo Torre?

  Oh my god, just like the ways in which we are living, again, up to an ancient observation, because the other person in your book who you quote, and I again, I'm just like banging my head against the wall, being like, how have I not seen it so clearly? Is Thomas Hobbes.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:52Pablo Torre?

  Right? So what Hobbes says, as you explain, is that the ultimate power is not military or economic power, it is the power to define terms and control language. And this notion, I need you to sort of unpack for all of us, because the Hobbesian argument is, if you control language and define terms, you control people from the inside.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  By the way, I love the fact, so I've been in a few podcasts, like philosophy-y things, and I love that this is, I mean, I guess this is a sports podcast.

• 8:25Pablo Torre?

  Sure, allegedly.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  And this is the place where you've zeroed in on, I think, the most intellectually interesting idea. So Hobbes is a study of power, this is a study of governance and power, and he spends a huge amount of time talking about how governance flows from whoever has power, and people mostly assume that he means military power, but he says incredibly clearly that the greatest power is the power of the definition of words, especially defining words like good, bad, virtuous, vice, because then you are telling people what to do in society, in governance. And I was like, you know what games are? They're like art governments. They're things where we play around with incentives and rules and constraints to shape people's action.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  And with governance, we're normally, we're doing it till we have an okay life. And with games, usually we're doing it for fun or joy or beauty, we hope, right? But what we're doing is we're shaping people. I think this is really what's going on with a lot of metrics. And so like a lot of what I'm really worried about are these cases where some external institution sets a metric and then we take that on as a target. So I call this value capture in the book, like when you have a rich value and you get exposed to a metric and you like internalize it. But I think it's just all a version of Hobbes. Someone telling, setting the meaning, like someone says, here's a watch. It measures your health.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  And if you accept that, you're letting somebody else, maybe like Apple, define what health means for you. It typically defined it in what is easy for one of their devices to measure cheaply.

• 10:06Pablo Torre?

  The value capture concept, so just to explain, to define our terms here, right?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:11Pablo Torre?

  Value is this pretty broad term you use to describe something that is deeper and richer and more subtle than what any single variable can capture, right? So there's always been some sort of concession that we're not, okay. Not everything is going to be a holistic evaluation of your ability to think. We got to create some amount of structure to sort people. And we've all sort of made peace with that. But what you're describing with value capture is the way in which consensually, it seems, or tacitly, lots of people have handed over complexity in exchange for what feels like at first a tickle in what it's like to compete at something. And then you realize that all you're doing is abandoning

• 10:56Pablo Torre?

  that deeper and richer and more subtle thing you actually enjoyed for the thing that helps you compete at a game that doesn't actually make you feel better or more fulfilled. Like, that's the broad strokes of what we're watching happen before us.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  So value capture is any case where your values are rich or subtle or in the process of developing that way. And you go to 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 decision making, your conception of good. So value capture is not just an incentive case where someone says, oh, get a good GPA, then you'll get a job. Value capture is when you start to care about that as the thing you're trying to do. One of the really interesting cases I saw was in this book called Engines of Anxiety by sociologist Wendy Esplund and Michael Souter. And they were talking about what happened when the US News and World Report started

• 11:53Speaker 01

  ranking law schools, law schools were the first rankings there. And they said that, look, before that, one of the things you noticed was there was no single, single metric. Instead, colleges would like describe their missions and their values in really different language. Like some colleges would talk about, you know, like making money or and some colleges would be like, oh, we're about like deep research and other ones would be like, we're about activism and like social outreach and like serving the community. And students, one of the things they said was when they actually found internet archives of conversations between pre-law students, when faced with that decision between multiple values that were hard to commensurate, basically it triggered this deep, what I think of as

• 12:37Speaker 01

  like existential decision, like what do I care about? Like it triggered like this process of deliberation about what you really wanted from your education, from your career. And then they said, the moment the US News and World Report started issuing its rankings, instantly what they saw in online discussions of pre-law students was that students stopped talking about what they wanted, started assuming that the goal was to go to the best college and started assuming that best was just set by the US News and World Report. And we know what the US News and World Report looks at. Mostly it looks at things like incoming class GPA, incoming class LSAT, rejection rate, and outgoing class employment rate at the nine month mark. It's incredibly thin.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  I was trying to explain what was wrong with this. And the best way I can put it is that you're outsourcing your values. And in particular, you're outsourcing the process of deliberation about your values. You're outsourcing figuring out for yourself what you care about. And you're putting it in somebody else's hands. And sometimes that person might just be evil. But even if they're not, even if they're well intentioned. And the US News and World Report, it sounds like was completely well intentioned. But it also, by presenting a clear, simplified scoring system, it offered people a way to skip out the process of figuring out what they cared about and gave them a kind of prefabricated value system that they could just take on. And here's a bonus, other people now have it too.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  And suddenly, instead of having to have these complex conversations about what we cared about, we can just look at this clear external scoring system that immediately tells us which one of us won at the game of getting into college.

• 14:20Pablo Torre?

  I think about this acutely. And again, you've given me language to think about it more rigorously. Because when you make any sort of digital product, a podcast, a video show, a YouTube video, anything, you're constantly trying to reverse engineer it, right? So like the whole like legend of Mr. Beast and his best practices, right? I've read his manifesto out of a morbid curiosity of what he's figured out. And what he's figured out is here are the things that get prioritized in the YouTube algorithm. Here is watch time, AKA retention. And how do I then edit my video to maximize for that? How do I make it so that the thumbnail on this very video you're in right now

• 15:01Pablo Torre?

  is going to have our faces in ways that are going to attract people to click? All of that stuff is sort of now part of the process of making something that should ideally tell a story. I want to have a conversation. I want to surface these things that are meaningful, meaningful to me personally. And instead, everybody feels this, you're looking at something like, you know, Netflix doing this, right? You write about Netflix and engagement hours. And just the premise of we now have data, right? The big difference is we're talking about systems and data in the present tense eroding the quality that we're really hoping to receive.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  It's really important here for me that there's a huge difference between treating these measures as just incentives or information and internalizing them as your values, right? It makes complete sense to be aware of how the algorithm boosts things. And if you have your own value, you can negotiate. You can be like, how much am I willing to compromise on what I care about in order to get my stuff seen? And how much am I gonna stay true to what I care about in my content and my stories? So if you hang on to your own values, then you can make that trade off in an informed

• 16:17Speaker 01

  way and you can bow to the algorithm in a measured, informed, thoughtful way, keeping in mind the trade offs. If on the other hand, your value captured, and what that means here is you stop caring about anything else and your only goal is to make that number go up, then you will do anything it takes to make your subscriber count go up.

• 16:38Pablo Torre?

  I want to get to explaining just like what about it beyond merely it's the system is just philosophically and psychologically so enthralling because the articulation of a metric is also something that has clarity. The clarity of a metric in terms of its power over us is something that again runs through all the sports, but it also runs through everything else.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  I think the best way to talk about it is to talk about what it does for us in games and then why that's okay in games and why it's not okay elsewhere, right? Like this is, I mean, the kind of, I know we mentioned this at the top, but like for me, this weird puzzle as this person that's been working on this stuff is why these scoring systems are actually often so fun and delightful in games, why they lead us to new places and why they suck out in so much of the rest of life. So in games, I mean, there's

• 17:40Speaker 01

  For me, games are this incredibly interesting art form, where someone designs a new self for you. I mean, the fancy language I have for this is that games are the art form of agency itself. Right? Like, when a game designer is telling you what to want, and then telling you what methods to use, and then creating your obstacle environment. And so suddenly, you know, you're playing soccer, and you're becoming a being of feet. Or you're playing rock climbing, and you're becoming a being that like has to use like balance and precision to like balance your way up the rock. Or you're playing, my new dumb obsession is Kandama. Do you know Kandama?

• 18:17Pablo Torre?

  No, what is it?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  It looks like ball and cup game, but with like multiple balls and spikes. And skateboarding culture got onto it. And like now you do these insane like tricks where you're throwing things and juggling and flipping and then catching in the cup. Like each of these games has a goal, and it has a constraint. And then it like, by playing with those goals and constraints, it can shape a kind of activity. It can tell you exactly what to pay attention to, and exactly how you're going to interact. They can make you, in basketball, hyper-focused on making shots. I mean, think how different basketball would be if there weren't like two and three-point shots. It would completely change the feel of the game. So those little decisions completely shape the feel.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  And with games, usually, we are shaping the feel for our pleasure. You are pushing around the rules and the scoring system to create this beautiful experience. And a lot of what makes the experience so beautiful is its simplicity and clarity. We all have the same goal, and it's blissfully clear. And you can be blissfully concentrated, and it becomes absolutely clear what a good move is and what an elegant move is.

• 19:27Pablo Torre?

  But the definition of what good is, again, to go back to that premise, the clarity of, oh, you're good. This is a good school. You're doing well. You have this number of points. Part of what I think about is how a gamified system allows us the opportunity to outsource what is a complicated decision that ultimately redounds to our own personal sense of self and our confidence. Right? It's saying to us, I will let you know when you're doing great. And so the more you strive to be great by those standards, the more that you can seemingly tell yourself, the box is checked. But the other sort of wrinkle in all of this is the clarity of a metric also

• 20:09Pablo Torre?

  keeps us playing the game even when it makes us miserable, even when it isn't good for us. And how do you explain that aspect of it?

• 20:18Speaker 01

  I think 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. So usually in a game, these are different. So the goal of the game is the target you're trying to hit in the game. And the purpose of the game is why you play the game. For some people, the goal is just to win and the purpose is just to win. I call these achievement players. If your goal and your purpose are the same, if what you want to do is win, then there's no difference. But for a lot of us, there's a deep difference. So I think the easiest place to see this is like party games. In party games, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun. Like if I play Twister or charades, I'm doing it to have fun. To have fun, I have to try to win.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  But afterwards, if we all had a great time and I lost, I would be an [BLEEP] if I felt bad about it. Right? Like if you came in dead last in Twister and everyone had a great time, you should realize the bigger purpose has been fulfilled. Similarly, if you're rock climbing, by the way, I love rock climbing. I'm a terrible rock climber. I am a garbage rock climber. I am mediocre beyond belief and I've been doing it for like two decades now. The reason I rock climb is, I mean, it keeps me healthy, but also it feels amazing to move elegantly. I'm like a very clumsy person and rock climbing, the intense goal of rock climbing forced me to find like delicate movement.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  And also like the absorption in rock climbing is one of the only things that will get my brain to shut up. So I can actually have like silence in my brain. So the goal of rock climbing is to get up the rock. The purpose of rock climbing for me is the beauty of movement and clarity of mind and soul. And the interesting thing there is I cannot get that cleansingness of my soul without trying to win while I rock climb, but it actually doesn't matter. When I go to the gym, if I try and fail all day to hit this climb. When I leave, I still feel good. My body still feels good. My mind still feels cleansed. So one important thing about games, when you have the right attitude towards games,

• 22:30Speaker 01

  and this is not the way everyone does it, you keep goal and purpose separate. The game tells you the goal, but you choose the game for your own purposes. And that, I think, is a huge dimension of freedom that we often don't have with metrics.

• 23:01Pablo Torre?

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• 23:57Speaker 03

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• 24:35Pablo Torre?

  Look, I often think about if anyone's giving me a job to do or I'm hired for a job, one of the early questions I want to understand is like, what is my standard of success? What is the reason that you hired me? What am I here to do from that pure, just like, practical purpose perspective? Sports are an interesting laboratory to think about this, right? So like, a bunch of thoughts here, but like, one is, you mentioned like, twos and threes in the NBA. One of the problems with the NBA right now, for lots of viewers, including myself often, is that the metrics have created, or rather even just the basic math, three is more than two, has created this incentive structure where there are lots of threes being taken.

• 25:16Pablo Torre?

  And so, the efficiency of the three-point shot is so omnipresent and obvious that people just take so many threes, more than they ever have. But it is at odds with what the fan is looking for, their purpose, because that's a worse product. And so, there is this disconnect, right? The gap, there's this gap between, oh, I am here for an entertainment, and what I'm getting is an increasingly optimized version of a machine that is trying to achieve, to win.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  When I look at situations like this, so I think less about professional sports and more about like, party games and board games and video games. And a lot of the time, this looks to me like a game design problem, right? Like, you have not tweaked the rule system to give you the experience you want. Then I think sometimes, one of the things that happens is, a lot of games have to be played in the right spirit, keeping the purpose in mind. And what I mean is something like, if you're playing something like charades, you have to try to win while you play it. But you can over-optimize.

• 26:30Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Imagine the person that studies charades technique on YouTube and comes back. I mean, I remember, okay, I'm gonna crap on a close friend of mine, but there is this super great Switch fighting game called Spider Heck, which is this beautiful, like, party fighter. Simple controls, you play like spiders swinging around. You get guns to pick up, but you also get like lightsabers. But part of what's good about it is that it kind of evens the play. It's a new game, it's a weird game. You can come to a party with your friends, you can play it, and you're all pretty good at it. And one of my friends was like, "This is awesome." And then he went home and for like eight months, like, just became amazing at it.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  And then he came back to our gang and he just slayed everyone and then no one wanted to play. And he was like, "What? Wait." And the answer is like, you had to keep the larger purpose in mind. And if, if you wanted to be a competitive player in the online Spider Heck world, awesome. But if your goal was to increase the richness of your experience here, then you should have held back because you should have been a little bit guided by the purpose. The purpose should have been treated a little bit and guided how intensely you go for that goal. And I feel like professional sports is weird because like, we have this purpose of like, interesting play, beautiful play. And then, especially because there's so much money on the line,

• 27:53Speaker 01

  people start to hyper-optimize for the goal and like, forget about the purpose. Although maybe the right response is to tweak the game design.

• 28:01Pablo Torre?

  Oh, no, the whole, I've talked to general managers in the NBA, these executives, these presidents of basketball operations. And they're, they say to me, "My job is to stay ahead of the NBA league office. I need to know what I can spam as quickly and as often as I can. I need to be the friend who masters the game before they change the rules, before they nerf that advantage." But it raises the question, though, of why integrity and fair play and rules and not cheating?

• 28:33Pablo Torre?

  Really, this stuff matters? I wonder if there is an argument in your head that is beyond a moral one, in terms of just like the whole premise of why we're here and why this matters and why we should preserve it mattering.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  I feel like the entire purpose of my life is about to be met because I think the purpose of my life is to be here talking with you about this question. This is the question I've wanted, and this, this is the place I've always wanted to talk about this question. So you're asking me about the purpose of games. I'm going to try to give you an answer and I'm going to try to tell you that

• 29:08Speaker 01

  it's also an explanation of the meaning of life. And then we cannot forget. And then we can talk about how both professional sports and bureaucratic metrics are the opposite of it.

• 29:18Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, this is, this is a hell of a way to start the new year. Yeah.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Okay, awesome. Okay. So you're asking what the value of games is and how we can lose out on the value of games by over optimizing in a professional environment. So what is the value of games? I think the best understanding of the value of games, and by games here, I mean board games and sports and all this stuff, comes from a philosopher named Bernard Suits. Bernard Suits wrote in the seventies this beautiful book called The Grasshopper that was kind of lost and then recovered. It's a cult classic. And he defines a game. And he says, what a game is, is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Another way to put it is that in games, the goal is intrinsically connected to the obstacles towards that goal, right? So he says there are two kinds of life, ordinary practical life and game life. In ordinary practical life, you have some outcome and that's just valuable on its own. So you just try to get it as efficiently as possible. Like if I just want to get to a bakery across town to get a bagel, just to be there, then I'm going to take the cheapest slash fastest way to get there, take the direct route, whatever's efficient. If I'm playing a game, if I'm running a marathon, then I have certain constraints. I have to take this particular path, no shortcuts. I have to run there. I can't use a bicycle, call a lift.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  And one way to put it is that in a game, there's this game goal, crossing the finish line. But you have to get there in a particular way. You have to follow the constraints or it doesn't count. If you call a lift, it doesn't count as crossing the finish line of a marathon. Similarly, if you thought the goal of basketball was to pass the ball through the net, period, and that's where the value was, then you would take a step ladder at night with no opponents and pass the ball through as much as possible. But that's stupid. That's stupid because the value of making baskets is intrinsically connected with a particular set of constraints that sets a methodology. The value of making a basket is in dribbling and jumping and shooting, often with opponents.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  So this means that whatever the value is, it is in the process, not the outcome. But if you're hyper-incentivized to win by the rules, then you're going to ignore that spirit and you're going to cheese and spam whatever you can and destroy the spirit of the game.

• 31:54Pablo Torre?

  The guardrails that we've relied on historically, and this now speaks to the actual legal system and politics, as well as all the games we're referencing, has been shame, right? Like, there's this assertion of like, this is [bleeped] up, man. Like, you're a bad friend, you're not fun to play with, this is, you are violating the spirit of what we're here to do. The macro observation that I have, though, is that shame has never felt less effective than it does right now. And it's not merely just who the president is. I also think about, frankly, a system, a capitalist system, in which the one thing that matters is...

• 32:38Pablo Torre?

  Growth is more is the green arrow going up and to the right is the thing that is incentivizing and teaching all of us, conditioning all of us.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:46Pablo Torre?

  We need to win. We're here to win.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  We're so on the same page. One way to put what's happening is the good thing that happens with games is when you play the game with the goals and rules in mind, but you keep your eye on the larger purpose, which is bigger, right? And that purpose could be fun. It could be community. It could be like developing humanity. It could be joy. But when the scoring system doesn't give you that larger purpose, what it misses morally, or spiritually, or aesthetically, we either hold back, or we know how to tweak the scoring system and the rules. If, on the other hand, you become so invested in the scoring system that you forget all the other

• 33:33Speaker 01

  values. If you become hyper focused and let the scoring system set all of your values, if your only values are here's this number, make it go up for your whole life, then you've lost this larger reflective stance to start tweaking the rules and knowing that a scoring system isn't working for you, or knowing that it isn't working for society. And I think here it would be really useful to talk about why scoring systems miss what's really important. One crucial place to start is a big difference between the scoring system of metrics and institutions and the scoring system of games is usually the scoring systems of games are

• 34:15Speaker 01

  totally artificial. They don't transform anything that was already there. But in other places, like on social media, likes are claiming to represent communicative value. And so if they're too thin, they're changing something we care about. Similarly, like steps or VO2 Max or BMI, claiming to be representations of health. And so if you let them dominate, they're going to change our sense of health. This is the Hobbes stuff again. So one question you might have at this point is like, why is this data not going to capture what's important? I started, I started thinking about this because I was, I was invited once to this conference as a philosopher of art and the conference was all besides me, machine learning, CS and cognitive science people, training AI to make art. This was about like eight or nine years back. So

• 35:00Speaker 01

  this was before the current wave. And a lot of them are like, okay, we're still good. We're optimizing for great art. And I, as the philosopher of art, at the back of the room was like, how are you defining good art? And they said, well, we're just using the Netflix data on engagement hours. And I lost my mind. And I was like, that's not good art. That's addiction. And they said, well, show me another massive data set about good art. And I was like, there's not going to be one? That's not the kind of thing that you can capture in data. And so I've been trying to understand why data is limited, why data is very good for some things, and why it's not for others. One way to put it is the thing that, to get really interested in here, is what I'm thinking of is the gap,

• 35:44Speaker 01

  which is the gap between what's really important and what's easy to measure institutionally. So the thing that was most useful for me here was this book from Theodore Porter called Trust in Numbers. So Theodore Porter is a historian of quantification culture. And he was trying to understand why administrators and bureaucrats often just reach for quantitative justification, even when they knew it was crappy. Even when everybody knew it was crappy. And his answer was that qualitative and quantitative forms of knowledge are good at different things. So qualitative justification is like words, explaining yourself. Quantitative justification is data and metrics. And he said, each of them was good at a different thing. And the problem wasn't that

• 36:29Speaker 01

  data was bad, it's that we compulsively reached for it even when it was inappropriate. Qualitative understanding is rich and subtle and context sensitive and nuanced and open-ended, but it travels badly between contexts. And it's often misunderstood by strangers because it requires a huge amount of shared background knowledge to understand. Quantitative knowledge, as it works out in institutions, works by identifying a context-invariant kernel, something that everyone can understand no matter their context, and isolating it and keeping it stable, and then making everyone collect into the same thing. And so suddenly, what you've created is an engineered piece of information

• 37:13Speaker 01

  that travels easily between contexts, precisely because we've stripped anything context-specific out of it, because we've removed any nuance from it, and anything that requires a huge amount of background experience to understand.

• 37:28Pablo Torre?

  You have a term for this, right? 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 often, 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 judgment, of human decision-making.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  This is so exactly the center of what's going on. It's a painful thought, but the thought is that there's a downside to accessibility, and there's a downside to a kind of fast democratization. I mean, I think a lot about recipes. Lauren Dawson talks about this movement in recipes between a kind of more complicated recipe that requires a lot of apprenticeship to understand, and this kind of hyper-clear, modern recipe. So recipes, as you think of them now, they didn't used to be like that, right? Old-school recipes looked like this. So if you look, I have some cookbooks from the 1920s, and what they look like is they're like, "Well, knead some eggs and some water and flour, and keep adding water until it feels just under-sticky, and knead it till it's nice and gummy,

• 38:50Speaker 01

  and then bake it until it, like, sounds ringing when knocked."

• 38:56Speaker 01

  That's actually a really good recipe if you know what you're doing. Modern recipes are like two cups of sugar, three cups of flour. And what they give you is accessibility. Anyone can follow them. What they rob from you is the cues to adapt and use your judgment. And this is why I cooked from cookbook recipes and I wondered why, even though I follow them exactly, it wasn't as good as my mom's. And the reason is because my mom has cooked the thing thousands of times and she tastes everything and adapts. And the recipe, if you follow it strictly, is not telling you to do that. But the recipe is accessible, right? Anyone can use it. So here's the worry. Metrics are that for values, right?

• 39:38Speaker 01

  What a metric is, is it's telling you something that anyone can use and understand. And I'm not saying accessibility is bad, but I'm saying there's a price and that price is exactly what you're talking about. It's expertise.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 40:35Speaker 02

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• 41:36Pablo Torre?

  So here's a very navel-gazing example. In Apple Podcasts, you don't see download count or view count. It is this weird, almost refuge from just like the transparency of metrics. YouTube, where You can subscribe, but Pablo Torre finds out. There is a total just like overwhelming avalanche of, here's all the other people who are also doing the same thing that you are. And 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.

• 42:19Pablo Torre?

  And now, when it comes to just like what we've accepted, right? I think it's important to just point out visually, we're clearly people who have played a ton of video games. We have studied and understood science and data to some extent. In the stereotype of who we are, two Asian dudes talking about like data and stuff. I get the value, so to speak, the upside of data in being able to rigorously assess things free of bias, right? The pre-data era had its own wave and ocean of issues in terms of human bias. But the pendulum, man, has swung so far away from the original purpose. And I am just thinking to myself,

• 43:01Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  And I'm with you. I will never say that data is bad, right? Large-scale data is really good at optimizing for things that are easy to count. Like, I don't know. What stops an asthma attack? One thing I have to say is large scale data approaches are why I am alive and why my child is alive, because they're incredibly good at very clear targets. Right?

• 43:33Pablo Torre?

  Yep.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Not dying of an asthma attack, very clear. Second, they're incredibly good at de-biasing. So if you have some like company that's like super gender biased, they won't believe that they're gender biased. And the thing that knocks the door down is just numbers. They're so clear, that's the point. You cannot ignore them. You're like, look, even though the women are getting these test scores just as good, you're hiring men nine times as like, those are really clear. That's what tends to break down the door. And then you move 30 years forward and what you get are diversity efforts that have been thinned down to like numerical quotas of how many people from each group need to get in and seem to be missing the heart of the thing.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  And so the database approaches seem to be really good about at knocking down the door at the really blunt stuff. And then decades later, they tend to miss the subtle stuff and capture everyone's attention. So everyone just games and optimizes for the little thing that's measured. The whole point is that what metrics are good at targeting is what everyone can count easily together. And then the question is how much of what makes our life valuable is actually easy to count together?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  And then if you think not a lot of it is, then you get the second problem. If the world we're in is the world that hyper rewards with power, people who are willing to cut out the rest of their humanity and hyper focus just on the explicit measure, 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 willing to slash out their humanity and hyper focus.

• 45:20Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:36Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, unless that gets captured and large-scale forces successfully game this sense of uncoolness and manage to, I mean, this is what's happened, like, you know.

• 45:59Pablo Torre?

  Punk points, punk points.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. 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.

• 46:18Pablo Torre?

  Can I free you from this prison I've locked you in, in which you teach me philosophy? With a question. One more question, because in your book, I was really moved when you explained the reason you wrote this book, like, the person who inspired you to write this book? Because all of us, we're on all of these devices and these apps and we're playing these games. And we are only now maybe beginning to open our eyes to like what we've signed up for. And the person who inspired you to write this is not a famous or ancient philosopher. It's somebody else.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  You have this talk, it was like something about games and then something about value capture. And I was like, God, these seem connected. And I don't know why, but here's, you know, here's what I understand. And I got this email from an undergraduate. And she was like, your talk pulled me out of a five-year depressive cycle. She told me I turned out, you know, like me, Asian immigrant kid, pushed to get a 4.0 GPA, also a varsity athlete, also, she said, anorexic. And what she said was she realized that her life had been trapped in bad games and that she hadn't even known she had like, had any choice.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  That she had just taken the games that the world had shoved at her and they were making her suffer. And that she said something about this framing let her be able to think to herself that she had some choice.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  About what she was doing and how she was going to be measured. And so she changed the background of her iPhone to remind her every day of this. And what she had changed it to was the words, is this the game you really want to be playing? I got that email and then I cried and then I was like, well, I guess, I guess. You should think about this some more because if that's like, what more do you want from, from life than to reach somebody like that?

• 48:26Pablo Torre?

  Is this really the game you want to be playing? Is, I think, a great thought for all of us to begin 2026. So, Tien Nguyen, thank you so much for asking the question and yeah, helping us think about it.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. It's been an amazing time.

• 48:50Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

• 49:17Speaker 05

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• 49:32Speaker 04

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 50:05Speaker 02

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