We’re All Being Played By Metrics

[AUDIO LOGO] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora Lichtman. And you’re listening to Science Friday. Today in the show– are you being played? Point systems are everywhere. Ready for movie night? Consult Rotten Tomatoes. Vetting a new pediatrician? How many stars do they have? And at work, it’s even more pervasive. There’s KPIs, ROIs. Success has to be measurable.

And you may ask, well, what’s wrong with that. How else do you figure out if something is good or not, if something is working or not, if you don’t score it? Plus, is all scoring created equal? Like, scoring helps make games great. So what’s that about? These are some of the big, messy questions that Dr. C. Thi Nguyen has been wrestling with. He’s a philosopher at the University of Utah. And he just published his second book, The Score, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Thi, welcome to Science Friday.

C. THI NGUYEN: Hello, Hello.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I loved your book. I stayed up late in the night reading it, which is a big compliment, because I get very sleepy. And I had millions of thoughts. And I know that philosophers love one-sentence oversimplifications. So if I had to boil the book down, I would call it, hate the metric. Don’t hate the game. What do you think?

C. THI NGUYEN: That’s better than anything I came up with.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I feel like you’re buttering me up, but thank you. OK. So I think it’s going to be music to people’s ears to hear you rail against metrics. But I think the thing that’s really interesting and that I want to talk about right off the bat is that you say that they’re not just irritating, that they’re actually powerful and that they can change us. Will you walk us through that idea?

C. THI NGUYEN: Yeah. One of the core experiences I had in my life was this kind of drift in my values, where I started doing things, like starting to diet, trying to get better at rock climbing, trying to get better at philosophy. And at first, there was a scoring system nearby, and I could mostly ignore it and be like, what I cared about is the interesting questions, is feeling better in my body. And over time, there’s this drift.

What happens with the drift is that I started caring deeply and immediately about the metric. So I’ve been calling this value capture. And value capture is what happens when your values are rich and subtle and then you get put in a setting, typically an institutional setting, that presents you with some simplified and quantified version of your values. And then that starts to take over. You start caring immediately about getting more likes or getting more KPIs or getting higher in those rankings.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Right. So instead of, like, making a great podcast, you try to optimize to get the most downloads as possible.

C. THI NGUYEN: Yeah, yeah. Or like, instead of actually caring about connecting to people on social media, you care about the number of likes and follows. The thing that’s really worrying about value capture to me is when you get this slide, and kind of like, deep inside your soul, the thing that you think is important changes. And your core expression of your value becomes likes, tweets, KPIs, page views, the status ranking of my university.

Another one of my favorite example– I was talking about this stuff. And a pastor said that inside his church, they had constructed an internal leaderboard keeping track of baptism rates and that all the pastors were getting super competitive and that he’d found his own sermons changing and that he was no longer most attentive to the spiritual growth of his flock. And he was trying to write more poppy, peppy sermons that would suck in more people to get up his baptism rates.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. But on the flip side, what if your values could be better? Because a lot of metrics are put in place to eliminate bias, for example. Like, we talk about this in hiring as a way to help us be more objective or combat our own bad values. What do you think about that?

C. THI NGUYEN: I mean, here’s– I think– you started at the top by saying we all love to hate on metrics. And I think hating on metrics with this kind of pure, cold fury actually is kind of a cheap way out. Because we imagine–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Oh, thanks.

C. THI NGUYEN: [LAUGHS] Like, you imagine this world, this better world without metrics. I think the more painful, painful truth is to realize that metrics are both incredibly powerful and incredibly limited and that their power and their limitations are part and parcel of their core function. They offer us clear, simple, objective, unbiased counts, but that there’s also an incredible price to that.

One way to put it is that metrics are incredibly good at capturing the kinds of things that we can all count together easily. And I think the kinds of things they miss systematically are the kinds of things that people are going to count differently, that require some kind of discretion, some kind of judgment, some kind of sensitivity.

When I was thinking about bad metrics, one common response people have is to say, look, maybe the problem is, just this particular metric is locally bad. Maybe we can just find a better metric. Let’s just get a more accurate way of counting good education or good health. And I had this gut feeling in my heart that we weren’t going to get those kinds of metrics for certain kinds of things. I was–

FLORA LICHTMAN: That it was actually impossible, that some things defy measurement.

C. THI NGUYEN: Yeah, that some things defy measurement. I was actually sitting there in a conference about six or seven years ago with a bunch of machine-learning experts building the first generation of art-making AIs. And they were saying, oh, we’re doing all this stuff to optimize for really good art-making AI. And I was the one philosopher of art in the room. And I was like, hold on. Hold on. How are you defining good art? What’s your operationalization?

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’d be amazing if those tech bros had figured that out.

C. THI NGUYEN: Right. And what they said was– and this was really striking– they said, we’re just using the Netflix database for engagement hours. And I lost my mind. I said, that’s not good art. That’s not good art. That is addiction. You’re optimizing for addiction. And what they said back was, show us a better large-scale database with a better metric for good art, and we’ll use that instead.

And I said, I don’t think there’s going to be one. And that’s, I think, the kind of path I’ve been going on. I’ve been trying to find a philosophical account of why certain kinds of values will ultimately defy metricization. And I think I found the answer, actually, in a bunch of historians, particularly two amazing figures, Theodore Porter and Lorraine Daston. And they really unlocked for me the kind of core dynamic underneath metrics.

And it’s actually– I mean, it’s not about pure science and the pure heart of what is countable or not. It’s about the logic of bureaucracy. It’s about how large-scale institutions work together. Theodore Porter puts it this way. He’s really interested in why administrators and bureaucrats often compulsively reach for quantitative forms of justification, even when they’re really inappropriate. So what he says is qualitative knowledge is rich and sensitive and open ended and dynamic, but it travels really badly between contexts.

So my favorite example, as a professor and a teacher, is the evaluations I write on my students essays. But what I write is not going to be comprehensible to a business school professor or a CS professor. And what they write on their students won’t be comprehensible to me. So what Porter says is that when we make quantitative data, we pick a chunk that’s going to be steady and stable across contexts. We find a chunk that everyone can understand, no matter their background, across the institution or across the world.

So in education, that’s letter grades, GPA. And I think you can get a glimpse of what’s going on here by just thinking about how different and how rich a qualitative evaluation is and how hard it is to understand at a distance, and how quick and easy a letter grade is to understand and how thin and simplified it needs to be.

I felt like this was my, like, Matrix, “the veil is ripped from my eyes” moment, was that metrics are powerful because they’re designed to be stable across contexts so we can all understand them and we can all collect into them. And that’s what creates this kind of cross-cutting, massive, shareable piece of information. But to make that, we had to cut out the context. That is actually the design feature and the design bug in one. They are powerful because they’re decontextualized.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Right, right. Yeah, no, it’s an interesting problem. So metrics are a way of scoring. And you talk a lot in the book about your own challenges with scoring and getting sucked into the score, right? How do you wake up from that? Do you have a story that might confer some practical advice for our listeners?

C. THI NGUYEN: A lot of the stories involve– I started doing philosophy out of love and because the questions were– I mean, philosophy is not a great thing to do with your life. I think all my parents and all of my relatives thought I was throwing away a good education to go to philosophy, right? You’re giving up on most things that might be a reasonable way to be a productive human adult, to do this weird thing, because I loved it.

And then I got professionalized. I went into graduate school. And I learned that there was an internal ranking system in philosophy. And that internal ranking system was based on the status of the journal you published in. And high-status journals really liked this very specific, kind of extremely technical, extremely dry, extremely disattached from the world kind of work.

And so I started doing that. And I kind of converted my life over to chasing this large-scale scoring system and ended up losing touch with the actual reason that I wanted to do philosophy. And then I got miserable. I got super depressed. I almost quit the profession. And I think in my case, the signal was incredible boredom and despair.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Despair? OK, good. I’ll be on the lookout for that.

C. THI NGUYEN: Yeah. Be on the lookout for despair. There’s a philosopher I love, Elijah Millgram. And one of the things he says is that boredom is this incredibly important signal because it tells you when you’ve picked bad values. It tells you when your values don’t fit yourself and your context. But if you’re–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Ooh, that’s a deep thought. I like that.

C. THI NGUYEN: And here’s another thought. If you listen to that, if you listen to that quiet voice, then you might be able to steer away. But if the clarity of the metrics, by their clarity and their communicability, is so strong that you let that outshout the kind of quiet voice of inner despair, then you’ll ignore that, and you’ll just keep following the metric.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. We’ve been talking about some of the perils, complications of scoring, for the first half of this conversation. But I love this twist. In some contexts, you love scoring, because you are game obsessed. And we’re talking ’90s European board games, social games, video games. And before we go to break, I just want to tell you what’s coming next. We asked listeners to call and share stories about games that changed their lives. And so many people had stories for us and were on board with this premise but not everybody.

ROCKIN’ ROBBIE: Yeah. This is Rockin’ Robbie and the drums. I’ve been listening since about 1987 to NPR and even unconsciously on my teacher’s car stereo, probably 1977. You freaking people with your video games. Tell us about a video game that changed your life– these mamby-pamby topics for young kids who– you know what changed my life? Hearing Motown and “Rock the Boat” in 1973 or Led Zeppelin, The Song Remains The Same, live.

You know that album? No, you don’t, just [INAUDIBLE] music you’re listening to. That’s what changed my life, Led Zeppelin live.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thi, let’s see if we can change Rockin’ Robbie’s mind.

C. THI NGUYEN: I think I know what to say to Rockin’ Robbie. OK.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. All right. After the break, what games can tell us about the meaning of life? Stay with us.

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[AUDIO LOGO]

OK, Thi. So for someone with serious grievances with scores and metrics, you also love games. Does that mean you secretly love points?

C. THI NGUYEN: This is actually where this entire book came from. And a lot of people, when they talk about games, they’ll talk about fancy graphics and movie-like dialogue, and they’ll talk about how much like movies they are. And they won’t talk about the thing I love about games, which is the freedom and the choice and the difficulty and the creativity. When I was trying to understand that, I found this amazing moment from Reiner Knizia, my favorite board game designer. And what he said was that the most important design tool in his toolbox was the scoring system, because the scoring system tells people what to care about during the game. It sets their desires.

And the thing that was super interesting to me was that he had calmly put his finger on this weird, deep part about games, which is, you can just open a game box up and read the rules, and it tells you what to care about. And suddenly, you just do it. You can literally even– my wife and I will open up a board game–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Like amassing hotels. You’re like, OK, I want the green ones. I got to get the green ones.

C. THI NGUYEN: Or building a better network of railway trades or killing each other or– and it’s so deep that you can open up a board game. My wife and I will open up a new board game. And then it’ll tell us whether we’re cooperating to beat the game or whether we’re trying to kill each other, right?

FLORA LICHTMAN: And you take it. And you’re like, sure, great. Thanks.

C. THI NGUYEN: Right. And with games, what this does is– I think games, what they’re doing is, they’re shaping ourselves and our agency. They’re telling us a different desire set to take on. And then they’re using that to design this incredibly interesting experience. So many board games will carefully design this intricate lock of what you’re trying to achieve and what the constraints and methods are. And then, suddenly, you have to do hypercareful logical calculation, or you have to try to guess what’s in people’s mind.

Or in other parts of life, you have to, in my case, climb a rock. Rock climbing is a game that tells you to get to the top of the cliff using only your hands and feet. And then, suddenly, you’re plunged into this life of balancing and delicacy. And the first thing I want to say– wait, who was the person that was hating on you for loving video games?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Rockin’ Robbie.

C. THI NGUYEN: OK, Rockin’ Robbie. First claim– games are bigger than video games. My favorite definition of games comes from Bernard Suits, who said playing a game is taking on a voluntary obstacle to make a certain kind of experience of struggling possible. What he was really interested in was that sometimes we take on constraints specifically because we like that struggle. In a marathon, you could have taken a taxi. You don’t because you want to be running. With climbing a cliff, I could have used a rope to scale a tree, but I don’t. I use my hands and my feet on the rock because that’s more interesting.

Here’s another one, Rockin’ Robbie, I think, in a lot of cases, you could have had more perfect music better by playing a recording or playing a written score. But a lot of the times, we like to do it with ourselves and we like to improvise it ourselves because the challenge is interesting, because the experience is interesting.

One more thing for Rockin’ Robbie– and this is really related to my core, deep, weird fascination here, which is, I’d written a whole book talking about how scoring systems were beautiful in games. And then I was trying to write a bunch of papers about how scoring systems suck the life out of us in education and institutions. And I was trying to figure out why.

And here’s the first big difference. It’s fine that Rockin’ Robbie hates video games. That’s cool. That’s because nothing in our normal lives– in most of our lives, with games, at least– forces us to play a particular game. I can play ultra-complicated strategic war games, and someone else can play chill, zen-out rhythm games. And someone else can go fly fishing.

And the interesting thing about games is that you can maneuver through this ecosystem of different scoring systems and different constraints to find the action you love. And you can’t with metrics. Metrics are inescapable.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, speaking of using constraints to make a beautiful experience, this is a game that a listener invented. And I want your take on it.

CONNOR: Hello. My name is Connor. I’m calling from New Milford, Connecticut. When one of my dogs passed away, I decided that a good way to help my younger dog, who was still alive, was to hike on the Appalachian Trail. So I started to take her out once or twice a week on the Appalachian Trail, hiking.

And eventually, I realized that it was feasible for us to reach 300 miles that year if I had just really focused. So I decided to make a spreadsheet and record all my hikes. And I just became absolutely obsessed with it. And I have always loved hiking. But this game where I was always checking the spreadsheet has just really changed my relationship with my dog and given me a new hiking companion.

C. THI NGUYEN: Amazing. I have so much to say about the story. So I think one of the interesting things about scoring systems is they can hypermotivate us, and they can create this very motivational clarity that can plunge us deeper into a kind of action. The question is, is it an action that you like or you don’t? Some scoring systems drag you into boring, grinding action. Some scoring systems drag you into something that you find rich and fulfilling.

And this story is like the ideal story. This is someone that added a scoring system. It created an experience that was better. And they acknowledged that. They’re not being sucked into an experience that they do not want. They’re using the scoring system under control to give them the life they want.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. Here’s another amazing game story. This story changed the way that this listener saw the world. Here’s Elizabeth in Rochester, New York.

ELIZABETH: So one evening I was playing Yahtzee with this friend. And he’d never played before. And we were at the point in the game where we had filled in all the categories. And it was his turn. And he only had to get Yahtzee. So he only had one roll left. And he declares that he’s going to roll five sixes. And I was trying to stop him. I’m like, wait a minute, do you what the odds are? And it’s 1 in 7,776 or 0.01286%.

But there’s no convincing him. And so he scoops up all the dice. And you guess what happened. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be calling you about this. He got the five sixes. And anyway, so the way that that changed my life is, anytime I hear these crazy odds, like there’s a 0.001% chance that a giant meteor will hit the Earth in the next few months, I think about this Yahtzee game. And I’m like, it could happen.

C. THI NGUYEN: Yeah. I think one of the things that’s really interesting in games is that we can take wild risks in them that we can’t take elsewhere because they’re detached from ordinary life. This is one of the crucial–

FLORA LICHTMAN: The stakes are actually low.

C. THI NGUYEN: The stakes are actually– so this is not true of every game. Some games, if you’re a professional sports player, there’s real incentives. But for most of us– there’s this concept in game scholarship that games occur in a magic circle. And the idea is that the things that happen in the game that we’re trying for, the points, don’t actually connect to anything in the outside world. And so we’re kind of forced to be much more risk averse in the ordinary world because we’re tied to various incentives, because those points in the real world are tied to things that we can’t escape. They’re tied to resources that we actually need.

In games, the interesting thing about a game is, you can set up a world. You can go all out. You can try to kill each other. You can try to take huge risks. You can win or lose. And then it just evaporates afterwards. The points don’t actually matter. And this enables this kind of wild risk taking. It enables the drama. Because if this person did that and they failed, it wouldn’t actually matter. I think that’s, again, one of these big differences between games and metrics.

The scoring systems in games are temporary and disattached and distinct from ordinary life. And the scoring systems and metrics are aren’t. They’re kind of inescapable, which means we can’t have this kind of playful attitude towards them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What’s interesting to me is that games also can be attached to your real life. Here’s another call we got about a game that many people have strong feelings about.

FRED: Hi. This is Fred in Virginia. The game that has changed my life is Dungeons & Dragons. I found out about it when I was a young teenager. And it changed my life in I don’t know how many ways. I learned about social interaction. I learned about probability. I learned about storytelling. I ended up researching politics and geography and mythology and history. It sparked an entire scholarly interest, absolutely changed my life.

C. THI NGUYEN: Give me one second. I have, like, seven answers I want to give. So let me structure them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Are you wiping tears from your eyes?

C. THI NGUYEN: Yeah, no. I’ve had the same experience. I think this stuff is like–

FLORA LICHTMAN: You have?

C. THI NGUYEN: Yeah. Some of the most holy and precious moments to me are in the space of Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games. For me, in my book, Dungeons & Dragons players in particular, people that start modding the system are the real heroes. The opposite of bureaucracy is house-ruled Dungeons & Dragons.

For me, there’s this– one of the core questions behind all of this stuff is the question of what strict rules are doing for us and to us. And you might think that strict rules push us away from play. I was trying to understand this. And I had a yoga teacher explain to me that people think that total freedom is good, but if you give people total freedom of movement, they just repeat their normal habits. And you need the strict rules of yoga to push you into a new posture and help you be flexible.

And I think Dungeons & Dragons is one of the clearest cases where the strict rules force you into a new habit of soul. They ask you to look at things from a different angle, to approach things from a different character, to approach things in a different world. One of my favorite variants of Dungeons & Dragons is apocalypse world.

And depending on the character you play, it often restricts what you can do. Like, one of the characters, the only thing you can do– you can’t really attack people. You can’t really make money. The only thing you can do is probe their soul for vulnerabilities. And if you’re forced to play a character whose only way of moving through the world is getting people to open up about their vulnerabilities, this forces you into a completely different angle on the world.

And I think games are the most freeing when they push us and encourage us to take on different angles and they’re least freeing when they lock us into a kind of single, pervasive value system that we cannot leave and that we’re kind of trapped in.

FLORA LICHTMAN: A new habit of soul is such a beautiful turn of phrase. And also, I feel like the D&D people are like, finally, someone gets it. You’re a philosopher. I understand that a biggie for you all is understanding the meaning of life. So I thought you might enjoy this caller.

JENNY: Hi. This is Jenny. I’m calling from Arizona. I wanted to share the story of my grandfather, who did crossword puzzles every day. And I used to sit at the kitchen table while he did crossword puzzles at a very young age. And he would ask me questions. And when I got older, I started delving back in. And now I do the New York Times crossword puzzle daily, the Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle daily.

I love them all. And it just opens your world to so much to learn just what one word can be. And you just keep looking and searching. And that’s what life is all about, finding the answers.

C. THI NGUYEN: So the secret truth is, I’ve written a book about games and metrics, but it’s actually secretly– not that secretly– it’s a book about the meaning of life. Because I think games and metrics actually teach you something really intensely about the meaning of life. The philosopher of games influenced me the most, Bernard Suits. At the end of his great book, he has this moment where he says, imagine utopia, where we’ve solved all our practical problems. What would we do with our time? We would play games, or we would be bored out of our minds. So games must be the meaning of life.

What he’s saying is actually an idea from Aristotle. What Aristotle thinks is that the meaning of life is in the actions we do, the exercise of our capacities, not our outcomes. And I think one of the things that the modern world has convinced us of is that the only thing of value are portable outputs.

And I think what Suits reminds us of and what Aristotle was pushing was the idea that it’s actually the process of inquiry, the figuring of things out, the exercise of your abilities, figuring out how to balance something, figuring out the puzzle– that is actually the thing that makes a human life valuable.

And I think we all know that, in a sense. And yet, we’ve somehow been persuaded that a delightful, beautiful, fascinating, lovely process of doing an interesting puzzle, that we should feel ashamed of that or that it’s weird to love it because it doesn’t result in some kind of portable outcome that you can sell or process down the line.

FLORA LICHTMAN: There you have it, the meaning of life right here on Science Friday. Dr. C. Thi Nguyen is a philosopher at the University of Utah and author of The Score, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Thi, thank you so much. This has been truly a pleasure.

C. THI NGUYEN: Thank you so much. I didn’t realize, but the format that I’ve always wanted was to riff on people calling in about the games they love. That’s the ideal thing that I’ve always wanted to do in my life.

FLORA LICHTMAN: To read an excerpt from Thi’s book, head to our website, sciencefriday.com/thescore. This episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. Thank you you all for listening. And happy gaming, especially you, Rockin’ Robbie. I’m Flora Lichtman. We’ll see you next time.

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