Reclaiming Agency Over Our Own Metrics

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It's called insureanoia And if that sounds like something you're way too familiar with, you should really think about getting NJM insurance They go to great lengths to do what's best for their policyholders by providing dedicated reps whose priority is you. And that means you'll find more peace of mind with them Relieve your insur anoia with NjM insurance by visiting njM. com for a quote today This is ninety nine percent invisible. I'm Roman Mars Professor C. T. Wen teaches philosophy at the University of Utah, and he says the reason he got into this field is because he is drawn to life's big questions these weird romantic Bizarre Qestions like about The meaning of life And what is art for? like are we just wasting our time doing our dumb hobbies or is it the best part of life? Those were the questions I cared about But when he started teaching philosophy, T learned that what makes a good philosopher at a prestigious school had less to do with pursuing curiosity and had more to do with metrics. Your value as a philosopher seemed based on whether your papers were getting published in highly ranked philosophy journals. There's no moment where anyone told me to care about it, but everybody just talks in that language. And suddenly you just find yourself kind of automatically thinking that your goal is to publish in the top ranked journals And that that's what Success means in philosophy Suddenly, all the joy was sucked out of this thing that he loved so much I was so bored with what I was writing because I was trying to go up this list. It's so miserable that I was gonna to quit the profession after like having burned ten years in it Instead of giving up, T decided to do something that seemed like career suicide He threw out those metrics of success and went after something harder to measure his own curiosity This is the story CT Wen uses to open his latest book, The score, How to Stop Playing Someone else's Game. In it, T expands the definition of games to encompass all the ways metrics and scoring systems play out in our lives for good and for ill, from those dreaded philosophy journal rankings to dolingo, step counting and beyond I love this book and I was so excited to talk to you about it. We had a delightfully meandering conversation about the philosophy of games, the trap of metrics, and how to make sure we're playing the game we want to be playing O chat started with me asking T to define a concept he coined called value capture Value capture is what happens When your own values are rich or subtle or developing in that direction And then you get put in a social setting, an institution or with a technology that feeds you simplified, typically quantified versions of your values, and then the simplified versions take over You have been here, You have been value captured. It happens all the time Maybe you start going to school because you want to learn, or you start walking more for your health. but then you get focused on a metric, like getting all Aids or counting steps. and suddenly you're very far from the values that drove you to do those things in the first place This kind of dynamic is everywhere One are my favorite examples A lot of these things are so insidious that I hadn't realized there's Greetwitch internalize this. and I've been working on this stuff for like five years. and I was sitting there watching my kid being like, you know, I should reduce his screen time. So screen time is his massive metric. for a lot of us But then if you think about it, it's a crap metric. One week, my stream time skyrocketed The reason my screen timee skyrocketed was I was reading two different translations of Kant on my iPad Right? That's not That is not a bad thing for me to do. But I was watching my kid. I'm like, I' supped to reduce screen time. One of the things I noticed Is it sometimes When he's on a screen, he's watching the dumbest possible ASMR videos. Sometimes he is Literally learning geopolitics. He's obsessed with videos that explain the history of the rise of World War one and World WarI. he's nine. Sometimes he is playing dumb clicker games, sometimes he's building architectural masterpieces in minecraft with like coded logic gates. These are not the same thing Right? There's no way in which these are valuable in anything like the same amount, but it's very easy for a device to capture screen time ye. And I think this is part of my core worry here is that We're outsourcing our values through an external product or institution. and sometimes, That's a classical story of evil. Somebody like some Machiavealian tells us what to value. But a lot of the times likeike a lot of outsourcing What we're outsourcing to is a process that's convenient at scale What's determining how a lot of us parent is just that screen time happens to be an easy thing for our devices to measure automatically without any particular input from us. he says that forcing the things we value into the sausage grinder of metrics can often flatten nuance and meaning in favor of generating a value that's more simple and measurable It is and often feels awful and reductive, and yet we can't help being seduced by it Why do you think it is that that you and others actually find this kind of value capture framework so tempting and rewarding enough that pulls you into this type of engagement I mean, life is full of these complicated existential value clashes where you have to make these nauseating decisions. I mean I think Every day I'm faced with the decision of whether to spend more time playing with my kids or more time doing hobbies I enjoy or more time like staying up late doing extra email. That's terrifying decision that like asks me to weigh these very different values But if you automate it If you've dec there's only one thing that's important and that everything feeds into that thing in a mechanically measurable way, suddenly You're sheltered from the existential storm. you're safe That's one answ The second answer is the seductiveness is making yourself comprehensible and communicable to other people. Yeah. R? Like when I I mean this is this is something I do I have done and I'm very embarrassed about it So You know, while I was researching this book and looking at scoring systems, I started reading about yoyo. and I got reading into yoyo and yoying is super interesting. mododern yoying. There's been technology revolutions. It's gotten super complicated. It blew up with skateboarding. Really interesting and intricate topological structures you build But I just want you to imagine me being an apparently adult philosophy professor at a dinner party, having to tell other people that I've been goddamn yoyoing in my free time. peopleople look at me Like I've gone nuts And they they they they look at me like I'm making a Joke Because because Trying to explain I mean, I think in any of your anybody in any weird obsession you have When you actually get to the reason that's important. the reason that really moves you, it's not going to be very accessible to people that aren't deeply in that thing T argues that one of the reasons youing seems like a goof is because it doesn't really have understandable metrics. We excuse adults doing childish things if there's a record to beat or a score to measure. those things would make youing comprehensible and therefore would make you understood as a human and understood instantly. I think that's That's there's not, I mean, I think there are a lot of weird things that I love that if someone trusts me and we spend some time together, I can transmit that Metrics make you comprehensible instantly at scale Ding all this, it's easy to get the impression that scoring systems and metrics are more or less evil, that although they're alluring and their' simplicity, which can help us feel understood, they end up draining the life out of everything we hold dear But actually, Tee would disagree. He argues that in the right context, scoring systems can also be a way to unlock connection, creativity, and even great joy in the place that this is most readily visible is in gameplay This is the paradox I got obsessed with, right In games, scoring systems are beautif And then in metrics, scoring systems often seem like they're responsible for the worst part of our lives for the destruction of education, the destruction of the arts, for the like destruction of the entire like environment, ecosystem and everything that we care about and it's good. and Like The thing I was trying to figure out is why sccoring systems gave us such delightful play in games and gave us such soul draining awfulness in Metrics T and I both love games and the design of games. And so we got really into talking about the magic of games and why exactly the scoring systems that hurt us in life can make games so rewarding The funny thing about scoring systems is they are kind of little dictators They tell you what you're supposed to want and value And that's the weird thing. sccoring systems are little definitions of success and failure I think one of the bigiggest differenceces is that in games Those definitions temporary and playful and under your control. And if you don't like it, you can throw it away and you never have to play again And institutions They're authorarian Like a true philosopher, he considers all kinds of things games, board games, rock climbing, even fly fishing And something that kept coming up for him and writing this book is the way that in games, scoring systems are an integral part of the fun. One of the things that got me writing this book was that I It spent a bunch of years trying to explain what games were. And they ended up saying that there were these beautiful structures that use scoring systems to give us alternate selves. that they gave us alternate desires and a game just told you Make baskets Cllect sheep Get to the top of the rock And suddenly this thing you might never have cared about before, like getting to the top of some weird boulder. you're like, I need to do it. And then suddenly this whole new activity unlocks. Now I love playing games with my kids and since my kids are all over the country now, we plan game nights like months in advance. and I am just competitive enough inside of a game to make it fun. I am not trying to lose. I am definitely trying to win. But I have to say At the end of the night or even at the end of any round of game, I cannot tell you who won that game. I cannot imagine caring about a game's outcome I've never been able to describe this to people, but Tee explained it to me that there are two types of play, striving play and achievement play. Achievement play is caring about winning, right? Achievement play is caring about is playing because you actually want to win Striving play is when you temporarily get yourself to want to win in order to experience the struggle. So the difference between the two is not about how intense you are about trying to win. You can be a striving player and be trying really intensely. The difference is the striving player values the experience, not if they win, but if the struggle was interesting one hundred percent a striver, but I still get wrapped up in the goal and drama of the game when I'm inside that game. So my family plays this game called Wingpan, and it's a beautiful little game that is more intuitive than all the little pieces and dense rules would have you to believe. But my stepdaughter hates this game. She hates Wingspan because I swear a lot when I play this game. There are often these scenarios when I need a certain card pull or a roll of a dice to make a very long planned strategy pay off and I often don't get that card that I want, and hence the swearing. since I am a very calm, non volatile presence in her life. She hates hearing me swear. And this game just bringss it out of me more than most. I don't know why. But it turns out this freedom to swear, to connive and compete is actually part of the magic of games. They give us this healthy arena for feelings that aren't so healthy in the real world One of the interesting things about games is there a place where we're released to do something like that Jan Husinga, an anthropologist who studied games in the early twentieth century, one of the first great scholars of play. He said that What makes games and play distinctive is that they occur in a magic circle where The meanings of what you do are screened off from ordinary life So this means is like, you know If we're a close friends and then we're playing basketball against each other and you block my pass I'm not going to come up after you afterwards and be like How could you do that to me? You wounded me, my friend. I thought we were close, right? And because the meanetings are screened off in that way, because the point Part of the point is the points are valueless, right? And we know that galactically, even if in the game, we're really into it, which makes us released to be like, I try so hard my life To be a nice person And to be a kind person, but there's a part of my brain that is a complete Machiavellian asshole And I have to keep that under wraps most of the time. I don't get to do that And in the game environment because it's so screened off. the rest of life in just this simple way, I can do that. It is part of the contract of gaming that when I play with my family or my friend, we can go all out, we can lie to each other, we can You know, manipulate we can deceive each other, we can look for each other's weaknesses and destroy each other because we know. So the gaming environment is designed to turn that into an interesting struggle A great example that you give of striving play is fly fishing, which is the thing I also I don't I' I love it. like I have a fly fishing kit. I went to a fly fishing class. I haven't sort of gotten off my ass to do fly fishing, but I just admire everything about it and the more I learned about it, the more I admired it. Could you talk about The fly fishing in terms of striving play. Yeah. Fly fishing is really interesting to me So I I'm in Utah and in Utah there are a lot of dudes with this very obsessive interest in fly fishing So fly fishing, I thought was about I don't know I thought it was just like about having fancy gear and about like repeatedly casting and casting and casting and what I found about flyfishing was Interesting is that it's actually spport about attention So What you're doing if you're fly fishing, especially in the style I like which is dry fly fishing, which is where you're trying to get a fish to swim up and eat a bug off the surface which you're often doing is walking along a river in a river, looking for either actually being able to see a trout rising, or being able to see the quality of water where a trout is likely to be under the water. And then you have to figure out what kind of bugs it's feeding, which means you have to be really attentive to what is hatching and in the air, which can change every twenty minutes And so what the game does is it it forces you Hyper fous on small, subtle visual details across a huge ecological landscape And one of the things I found interesting is If I go to a river without the fly fishing game, I look at the river for like a minute and then I'm bored and I look away If you give me the game And then I can zero in on the surface of the water have focus. And it's really like two or three hours into focusing intensely on a river that I achieve like, I don't know, like these like weird altered mental states of complete like zend out brain water have flowed together. I think it's really funky. like The game is A support structure for that kind of attention it's very hard to get there on your own. When I try seedated meditation, I can't cook from there. If someone's like, pay attention to the river until your mind empties and merges to the river, I'd be like, I have no idea how to do that. What But if someone's like look for trout and then notice what insects are and then try to cast then That's like a little tangible thread that I can crawl my way into this subtle subtle mental state One of the interesting things about games is You don't need to understand them for them to act on you, right? Like what a game is is it tells you to do something and it gives you some constraints. And you're like, I don't know. what's that for? And you just try it it. Yeah. And then suddenly you have these discoveries of Um I see this all the time, like people playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time, playing like a social communication party game like the Mind for the first time, trying rock climb for the first time They don't know what it's for. they don't know the reasons why any to do it. Someone talks to them to do it. They try it. and the rules kind of force them into an intentional posture of looking at the world and seeking out, looking for holes in the rock, looking for little bugs in the air. and suddenly they're doing that. And and then something happens to their mind and body and they find that there's some like weird new radiant kind of beauty that they hadn't known about and that they couldn't have chased directly. This is the magic of games M it with Twind. this This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace Squarespace is an all in one website platform that helps you stand out online Whether you're just getting started or growing your business, it's got everything you need from securing your domain to building a professional side and showcasing your work all in one place. Bring your vision to life with AI powered design or curated templates, plus flexible editing tools that help you create something that truly reflects your style. 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Relieve your insurania with NjM insurance by visiting njM. com for a quote today We're back with CT Len 'm really interested in how to use metrics for good because objective measures and transparencies are key components to good government progressive era politics. And you know we've talked about Robert Moses alone on the show. and before he became the villain of the power broker, he was championing civil service reform and that's all about measuring achievement, taking tests and making sure people got jobs because they deserved them and not because they were someone's nephew. How do we use scores and scoring systems in an effective way to make the world a better place and have them not dominate our lives in a bad way One of the most famous cases, I think is the Qantification of policing in New York police disticts So in the early days, people said like, look, all these police districts say that they're doing well We can't tell if they're doing well So we're going to put clear metrics about what we can measure, which is how many cases get closed, right? How many arrests do we make And what happened was in the first bunch of years It worked great. It detected all kinds of corruption, detected all kinds of bias, and it forced people to read it get that out of the system And then after a little while, I think a story that a lot of people know that I learned from the TV show The Wire R People started like Gaming those metrics, right? You can game those metrics easily. One way to make your case closure rate look good is to discourage people from reporting crimes, right? One way to up your case closure rate is speeding tickets because you open the case and you close at the same time So In the beginning, it gets rid of corruption and bias because the metrics are so brute that everyone can understand them. And after a period of time They seem to drain what's genuinely valuable from the system because they point people at something that's very easily and mechanically checkable and measurable So in T's Pleas an example, metrics start out as being helpful and in service of offering transparency to the public, but eventually they end up being counterproductive and sometimes even dangerous. And he told me that a similar dynamic can play out with population wide statistics where you're trying to get a sense of trends on a really big scale What makes metetrics work well is that they work at scale really fast, so they're really good for us to coordinate around for vast social efforts So if you're going to coordinate the entire world around reducing CO two emissions or increasing vaccination rates, right? That's a really simple thing. And when we count it in the same way, we can We can cooperate, really easily. The cost is there are only certain kinds of things that we all measure in the same way and count in the same way that we can Coordinate around So here's that suggests another answer which is that someome kinds of targets are naturally stable at scale and easy for everyone to count at scale, and it's easier to get good metrics of that. So I'll give you an example It's much easier to get a good metric for Lifespan. and mortality rate than it is to get a metric for Mental health. Everyone counts lifespan and deaths in the same way These other things aren't counted the same way. So it is appropriate in those cases because the kind of thing that's being targeted is the kind of thing that's stable at scale But the worry, the price is that we tend to socially over atttend to those qualities that we over atttend to lifespan and mortality rate instead of mental well being, flourishing, community flourishing social relationships So I guess what the point I'm wondering is like what do we do with all this? Like how do we live and thrive in a world where we have no choice but to engage with these metrics in so many areas in our lives Um Yeah, so I would like to give you the peppy answer of like just grit up and play with the institutions in your lives. But that's not I mean, I think one of the things we know is that if you quit a game, nothing happens and if you quit your KPIs or your you know other metrics of your work, you get fired and then you starve and then your family died The same But I think you can still there are a few things you can do. One thing you can do is At least have some ironic distance. I think there's a huge difference between someone thinking