Most critics of modern institutionalism are selling something, rending their garments in despair, or both. But C. Thi Nguyen, the philosopher and author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game doesn’t play like that. Instead, he describes the process by which institutions and individuals go from measuring what matters to defining what matters by what can be measured. Nguyen argues that metrics and scores generally don't distort reality so much as mash it into a rollerboard so it can travel between all kinds of contexts – some institutional, others more playful and humane. The big question at the core of his work: What should we pack?
Upper Middle spoke to Nguyen about why transparency is a trap, why cost-benefit analyses are way more subjective than we think, and why scoring makes gameplay beautiful. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The Score, which moved me, is available at Amazon or better places run by better people.
The central claim of your book is that metrics are not neutral. They're engineered to travel, and what makes them portable also makes them lossy. Can you walk us through that?
Qualitative reasoning – reasoning in words and justification – is context sensitive and rich, but it travels poorly between contexts. The essential insight I got from the historian Theodore Porter is that institutional quantification is about creating a nugget that is stable across contexts. That kind of context-independence is really valuable. It enables high-speed coordination and a certain kind of objectivity. The problem is focusing on those nuggets creates a systematic bias in value and attention towards the kinds of things that are easy to measure.
In my field, it's easy to count student graduation rate, graduation speed, and starting salary, and so those got prioritized over virtue, reflectiveness, and creativity. And it's not just the stuff that's impossible to measure. Philosophy majors tend to, over their careers, make more than almost any other major, but because those earnings tend to come later2 and are therefore harder to measure, that measure gets thrown out.
It would be simpler if your book was an argument against metrics. It's not, is it?
It would be easier if this was a story about why metrics are bad and everything is about context. But there are lots of really good metrics. I think of vaccination rates, CO2 emissions, basic poverty levels — there are all kinds of cases where, even when we know it's not capturing everything that's important, the metric allows for coordination in a super powerful way.
Metrics compress information to a centralized source. That's a very costly goal. If you're willing to pay it, pay it. Sometime it’s actually worth it. You should just know that is an incredibly information-costly function.
You coined the term "objectivity laundering" to describe what happens when subjective choices get buried inside mechanical-looking systems. Cost-benefit analysis is your go-to example.
It's when you have a genuinely subjective, value-laden choice – something that at the bottom is just a choice – and then you pile a lot of mechanical processing on it, and that hides the degree to which it's choicey. My favorite example comes from Porter. Cost-benefit analyses have two deep, subjective, value-laden choices at their bottom. One is just how you assign dollar values to particular values – every cost-benefit analysis for the National Park Service has to assign an equivalent dollar value for the joy of outdoor recreation. And two is the discount rate. Every cost-benefit analysis has to decide on a relative value of future events to current events and discount the future to some degree. And that's another completely value-laden choice. Every cost-benefit analysis, as objective as it looks, just sits on top of this highly subjective choice structure at the bottom, and then it hides it.
We know how to deal suspiciously toward people. We're like, what are their motivations? What are their interests? What are they trying to do? And then large-scale technological systems we just ingest unthinkingly. But that shit was made by people for a purpose.
The natural response to that problem is transparency — just show people how the sausage is made. But you argue transparency has its own pathologies.
This is an extension of an idea from the philosopher Onora O'Neill. She says people think transparency and trust go together, but transparency asks experts to explain themselves to non-experts, so they have to lie or – even more worrisome – act like non-experts in order to be comprehensible. That sounds really democratic and awesome and anti-elite until you think about what it looks like in practice.
An example I think about a lot is that leftists tend to believe in both transparency and standpoint epistemology, the idea that particular groups – especially oppressed and marginalized groups – understand certain things about the world that can't be transmitted well. These ideas are deeply in tension and obviously a recipe in combination for bad metrics.
So metrics are lossy, objectivity is often laundered, and transparency doesn't fix it. That's a pretty bleak set of conclusions. But then your book takes this turn into games, and suddenly scoring systems sound wonderful. What changes?
Playing a game is voluntarily undertaking unnecessary obstacles in order to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them. If you have your friends over for a night of cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun. What makes good games special is that they create the conditions for process beauty3, graceful reactions to self-imposed restraints. Institutions can be games too, of course, but they aren't designed around process beauty.
Your book is a critique of accessibility and simplification, written in a way that is extremely accessible and clear. Is that a contradiction?
A lot of it is a complex meta-joke, because it is an attempt to make as accessible and clear as possible a criticism of the process of making things accessible and clear. But there's something more serious going on too. Philosophy tends to be abstract. This book let me alternate between abstraction and story. When philosophers write popular stuff, they think they have to put in stories to dumb down the ideas. What I found was that putting in stories forced me to reckon with the thickness of the world, which then tells you when your abstract theory is a lie.
You write a lot about rock climbing — an activity you clearly love — and how the beauty and profundity of the activity is a product of self-imposed restraints that force climbers to care about the specific rock. It made me think of financialization, which feels a bit like using a ladder and calling it rock climbing. How do you think about the activities you've devoted yourself to — including being an academic and writing books? They are very rock-forward activities, but difficult ways to get up.
The hyper-clarity of the scoring system in rock climbing is what got me to pay attention to my body in the first place. So, again, I'm not saying that all numbers are bad, all scoring systems are bad. That said, there's a reason people go into philosophy and it's not the money. People want to be in it because it is satisfying in and of itself – a refuge for the human and creative. But that demand itself creates an issue: You have a bunch of people that want to move into a space with too few resources. Artists wind up getting dumped into Lord of the Flies.
Last question: what's a game that changed how you see the world?
Imperial. It looks like Risk – it's World War I, different countries are playing against each other – but you play investors trading bonds and stocks in the countries and controlling the war for profit. The first time I played, I invested in one country then tried to win with that country. Then I realized it's a game about shared incentives, about giving your opponents equity in your project and staging fake wars or even real wars to drive up profits. It's a very cold way of thinking about how to navigate the social space, but a useful one. (Editor’s Note: I bought Imperial after this conversation and it’s (disconcertingly) fun.)
