36: C. Thi Nguyen - Measurement, Meaning, and Play

Playing is taking normally useful resources and wasting them for fun. Wasting them for fun. But okay, here's the big but it's only a waste. Galactically if you thought that stuff was pointing. The other notion of playfulness that I find really useful, what she says that playfulness is, is the ability to move lightly between worlds. There's worlds of rules and landscape and meaning. And sometimes you might be in the business world and you're focused on

profits and sometimes you might be in the family world and sometimes you might be in the artist world trying to be expressive. One way is to just inhabit one of these worlds like permanently. But another thing you can do is to realize there are different worlds you can shift between. and not be stuck in them. And she says that to be playful is to inhabit the worlds lightly and creatively. There's two different things, really good at role shifting versus

being willing to completely transform yourself and get yourself stuck in a role forever. One worry might be there's one thing, which is playfully being able to shift into different roles. And there's another thing that this world might reward, which is Psychopathically committing yourself.

To a hyper simplified role and never being playful with it. Attention and value are so interlinked. What you value is what you pay attention to. One of the ways that games work is that the scoring system guides what you're trying to do, which deeply guides your attention. Uh Reiner Kenizia is my favorite game designer, has this moment where he's like, the most important thing in my game design toolbox is the scoring system, because that tells the players what to do.

care about what to want in the game. Games are the art of agency, right? They're they work in the medium of agency. Some games are incredibly good because they give you enormous agency, but some games are really good cause they hyperconstrict your agency. Soccer is interesting because it takes away your hand.

Welcome to Dialectic, episode 36 with C.T. Nguyen. T is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, where he studies values, games, agency, art, aesthetics. metrics and data, and more. His new book, The Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game is Out Now. He's also the author of Games, Agency as Art. where he explores how game designers work in the medium of agency, in the same way that a painter might work in the medium of what we see.

a musician, what we hear, and so on. The game designer sculpts the player's agency by harmonizing their abilities, their goals, and their obstacles, making it easy for the person to

and also allowing the player to take on different forms of agency. I was first exposed to T and this idea in one of my favorite podcast interviews of all time where Ezra Klein interviewed T back in twenty twenty two, where he talked extensively about this, as well as a paper he wrote called How Twitter Gamifies Communication.

Other ideas like why Qnon is very much like a video game and more. I reached out to T about a conversation last year and was excited to hear that he had a new book in the works for January twenty twenty six. And here we are. I flew out to Salt Lake to talk to him and we got to dive deep on the score.

In many ways, the score combines his earlier work on games with so much of his work on values and metrics and data. And specifically he's interested in this question of why scoring systems are so useful in games. They allow us to explore agency, they allow us to be more playful. They allow us to take on different roles and explore our values.

and then scoring systems and gamification in the real world instead flatten us and flatten our values. He has a term he calls value captured to describe this. And in a world that is so value captured, one where we're in such a rush to quantify and measure everything. Unfortunately, we miss out on the things that are harder to measure, and thus, I think, and T would agree that we strip our lives of meaning.

I split the conversation into two parts. The first is focused on the local, the individual side, individual agency, how we explore individual values, what good values might be, what the shape of them are, how video games allow us to explore those. attention and why attention is upstream of almost all value and specifically this really compelling bit where we talk about the difference between recognition and perception.

And ultimately why playfulness and a playful approach is so powerful across all this. And then the second part of the conversation zooms out and goes to more of a global level and talks about society and how metrics and data seem to rule so many of our decisions.

We also talk about how we can still scale trust, we can still benefit from science and technology and trusting experts while also not being exploited by bad actors in the system or relying too much on just trustless systems or trustless contracts.

One of my favorite ideas of Tease is what he calls objectivity laundering, and we talk extensively about why objectivity and truth are not always the same thing. And then finally we end the conversation talking more about technology and why technology is not value neutral as many of us.

often assume it to be. And in fact, it is laden with value decisions everywhere. Uh this doesn't mean we shouldn't build technology, but it does mean we need to be much more thoughtful about the values that sit inside of our systems. and be much more thoughtful about the ethical decisions that go into making any

I hope you are inspired to think more deeply about your values and what you care about and put more intention into how you create meaning. I also hope you are inspired to embody more playfulness as you go about your day. If you enjoy it, I hope you'll support T's work. The score is out now and he goes much more deep into so many of the things we discussed today.

Before we get into the episode, I want to thank Dialectic's presenting partner, Notion. I'm now full-time on Dialectic, thanks to Notion support, and I'm thrilled to be partnered with a company product and tool that is so aligned with Dialectic's values. Notion is built for people doing their life's work. And it's a tool in particular for teams.

who are collaborating in a modern way. That means not only being able to work on ideas together, but also work natively with AI to delegate the busy work, focus on the things that matter, and have everything fit together natively without skipping a beat. It's how so many people turn their ideas into action. It's how I prepare for the conversations I have here on Dialectic. I throw everything I can find on a person, everything that stands out to me into a document.

And then I'm able to synthesize, try to figure out what's actually worth asking them about, what are the connecting dots, and so on. It's been really fun to explore using Notions Agent to uncover things I might have missed in my research process. or identify patterns, whether in an individual episode or across previous episodes. Um I'm excited to do so much more of that this year. I can only

Imagine how much more powerful it's going to be. If you don't use Notion already, you can check it out at Notion.com slash dialectic. Thanks again to Notion for presenting Dialectic and thank you for supporting, listening, reading, and so on.

With that, here is C T Nguyen. C T Nguyen. It's a pleasure. What's up? Welcome to my insane home. They're one of my favorite things about this is I get to go inhabit people's worlds. Yeah. You have a well first off, congrats on the book. Thank you. I guess congrats in the future when this is when when this is released you will have successfully uh published the book. You have a bit early on in the book, uh

And you tell the story about how a student of yours kind of influenced this book. Um and reminded me of a Kwame Apia quote that I love that um you may be familiar with, which is in life the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game, the challenge is to figure out What game you're playing?

Um, what a great place to start. I I I think I I wanna take that last word because I think it's such an important word that we'll come back to a lot. And my first question is pretty simple, which is what does it mean to be playful? Yeah. This is a really good and really deep question. Um

It's funny because there's a way that you can the way the English language is, we have we say that you play a game. And this is not true in other languages. The word play is always appended to games, and we assume they go together. you know, doing a game is always playing. But uh the philosopher Bernard Toots, one of the people that I truly love, pointed out that this is not always true. Um So he was like look

You can be playful and not be involved in a game, right? You can be screwing around with you can be at your job and like Starting to make up new stuff. You can be like Fucking around with like New ways to approach your daily life or cooking. And you can also, he said, play a game, but it's not really play, it's work, right? Like you hate it.

Or someone's making you do it, or you used to be interested in poker and now you hate it, but it's like the way you make money. And that's not playful. That's work, even though it's a game. Um So there are a lot of like attempts to say what it is to be playful. And there are two. I would like I've actually never I've been trying to figure out what play means for like

honestly ten years and I don't have a good single stable foundation. But there are two I think really good stabs. So Bernard Suits says that being playful is redirecting normally useful resources. to autotelic activities. Autotelic means valuable in itself. So what what he means is something like, look, you're um Normally, uh normally I use this like

logical capacity to fix things or to like argue with people or get something. But then sometimes I do like a puzzle and that's just exercising the logical capacity just for the sheer pleasure of doing it. often uselessly. Similarly, like I mean, th this house is surrounded with like weird skill toys like yo yo's and kendamas and there are all these like

balance and physical things you would do with your body that you would normally use for like survival or getting food or getting from place to place. And now you're just screwing around with it for the sheer joy of motion. So that's one sense. That's two systems. Is that Uh one thing I'm hearing inside that almost is like a sacrifice of resources. Is that too strong of language? Like So there's

There's two there's a perspective by which the quick way to put what Suit is saying is that playing is taking normally useful resources and wasting them for fun. Wasting them for fun. But okay, here's the big butt. It's only a waste. Galactically if you thought that stuff was pointless. So to think when you say that, I mean that's an easy way that's what I say to my students, like it you're wasting useful resources for fun. But when you say that you're already implicitly adopting the attitude

that clear outcomes, making stuff, creating goods, accumulating resources, that's what's actually valuable. And action for its own sake. is useless. And I think what Suits actually thinks is no, that that's that's I mean, well like that's that's actually what's important. So it's not actual waste. The

From the philosophical perspective, the actual waste is if you spend all your time on useless activity and have a miserable life and have a pile of goods at the end and you die unhappy. And the actual I mean this is in some ways just utterly up like the actual fulfilling life. is one where you found activity that's valuable to you. So I mean, like to say that wasting useful stuff for fun makes sense and it's also like already using the language that is the trap.

Waste is amazing. It's a it's I love that you use that word though'cause it's we you have a visceral reaction to it. It's so not useful. Right. Okay, so you have that's that's the first one. You I think you had you said you had a second. Right. There's two so the other notion of playfulness that I find really useful, uh my favorite articulation of it is from Maria Legunis, the great feminist philosopher.

And uh in this beautiful paper uh called Playfulness, World Traveling and the Loving Gaze, what she says that playfulness is is the ability to move lightly between worlds. And what she means is like they're normative worlds. They're l they're like r there's worlds of rules and landscape and meaning. And sometimes you might be in the business world and you're focused on profits and sometimes you might be in the family world and sometimes you might be in the artist world trying to be expressive.

And she thinks like one way is to just inhabit one of these worlds like permanently and like stuckly. But another thing you can do is to like realize there are different worlds you can shift between and not be stuck in them. And she says, What she actually says is to be playful is to inhabit the world lightly and creatively. To both be able to move between them and also be able to like

screw with them and like in your mind change the rules of the world that your your soul is inhabiting. Mm-hmm. So I think like the I mean both they're they're they're related to each other. There's differences between them, but I feel like

Somewhere between those is some like deep scent of what it is to be playful. What I like about the second one too is it's it's mo it more captures what you would when you describe someone as playful, yeah, that's kind of what you're pointing at. It's it's this sort of dancing

Is is and I think we'll talk about this more later, but is creativity you used create you used the word creative very early on in your answer, and so I'm curious if creativity is just very common in this idea of playfulness or something more paramount? I mean, this is why this is when the two of them separate. Like I think Bernard Suitz, the the first one, he I mean he's the per the philosopher that I learned the most about.

games from. And I think in that you can see the big difference. So if you're like hyper focused, so on a sport, for example, like rock climbing. You are trying to perfection. a movement and get exactly this movement exactly right. Get your body all in a line.

And you might know exactly what you're supposed to do. Like some some techniques, like I know what the technique is, I know how I'm supposed to balance my hips, I know I'm supposed to move my hands, I can see other people do it, and I'm just trying to find it. Yes. In a sense, that version isn't very creative, but it is like

Refining my movement and taking actions for the sheer pleasure of it. That's that's a case where they th they come a little bit apart. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's helpful.

I wanna talk well Super helpful context. I think this will come back a lot. This might seem strange, and you have I think the way you outlay you you lay out your ideas in the book is quite compelling. I wanted to kind of attack them from two vantage points. The first part being maybe the personal and the local and the local. Yeah. And then we can talk about the sort of global. Um obviously the name of the book is this is the score. Um

Foundational to both sides of this is the notion that we have scoring systems all around us. And I think one thing that thinking about as I as I thought about Playfulness is like we live in this highly gamified world and yet we are increasingly or decreasingly playful, you might say. Um Scoring systems as you as as you illustrate quite well, I think tell us what to desire.

I think the challenges in games, they give us freedom. In the real world, they they constrain us. And so I think to start on the on the personal and the kind of like local front, I actually want to start with agency. Um and and talk about agency in the context of values. So like in many ways There's a central theme here to me, which is

Uh starting with um who am I? Like explore and then exploit. What do I want? You have this um Carol Rovan quote um about agents that I liked. An agent is some entity that considers reasons, makes choices based on those reasons, and acts. And if you change the reasons that you act on, you're chang you change your agency. Um

This notably is not necessarily that close to um a popular conception of agency in my world, in the technology world. Right. Um there's a popular conception of agency that is you can just do things. Right. It's actually less about the reasons behind what you do and more about just doing. Right. Um you don't talk about this kind of frame of agency quite as much.

And so you you focus much more on kind of like a gentle exploration. Um I'm curious what you think about that idea of agency first and foremost. Okay. Let me can I take a long ass step back and do a run up to this? Okay. This this is gonna be uh full of weird details that you may or may not care about. So

I'll I'll give you my personal history of working with a concept of agency. Okay. And it it comes with trying to figure out games. So The reason I started working on games, which is not supposed to be a topic that philosophers are allowed, there's not there's not re there's a tiny bit of stuff, but it was like definitely not something that

you were supposed to, if you're a serious student of philosophy at a serious graduate department, ever work on. Um, I got into it because I was teaching this philosophy of art class and I wanted to do a case study and So a case study I did was our video games art and I read a bunch of stuff and I don't know if this will surprise you, but a lot of the stuff I found

would really emphasize they're like games are art because they're like movies. They have dialogue, they have scripts, they have characters. Right. And like they would like celebrate these games that were the least like a game. They're the ones that were the where you had the least freedom, you had the most like you were most locked in to like these cutscenes or pre-written that were cinematic. And I mean, I like those games, but I it felt like someone was like,

clutching for a familiar sense of importance and like ignoring Amorphic almost. Yeah, like I would read a 300 page book on the art of games and never hear the word play or freedom or choice. And right. So I was kind of like clutching around for it and I think there's this moment. It was I think like a lot of other moments later like I was pretty drunk. And I was like

You know what games are? They're like governments. They're rule systems, but for fun. Games are art governments. Yep. So I started working with that idea. And I also found around then uh Reiner Kenizia, who's my favorite game designer, has this moment in this talk where he's like The most important thing in my game design toolbox is the scoring system, because that tells the players what to care about.

Right. It tells them what to want in the game. And I was sitting there looking at this thing that seemed to me as a game player like completely uh obvious. You look at a rule book, it tells you it tells you not only what you're trying to collect, but it also tells you

your basic conception of victory. It tells you like if we open up a board game, we might find out that we're trying to kill each other, or we might find out that we're cooperating with each other, right? Victory could be shared. Like so it just tells you And we willingly opt in. Yeah, we willingly opt in. And so What I ended up trying to articulate was that the heart of games wasn't that they told stories. I mean they can, but the heart of games was they

shaped your action so that actions, decisions, and stories like came out of you. And the way I ended up putting it was that games are the art of agency, right? They they work in the medium of agency. And I was reaching for this and I realized that

People would say, like, Oh, they would misunderstand'cause agency just meant for them like activity and freedom. And that's not a good conception of games,'cause some games are incredibly good'cause they give you enormous agency, but some games are really good because they hyper constrict your agency. Right. Like soccer is interesting'cause it takes away your hand. Like Tretis Tetris is interesting'cause it's like Poker like

And that's actually what's beautiful about it. Reiner Knitia, who's like, borrows from poker has this incredible game called Raw and you like you're trying to affect people's incentive structure, you can only do it and again you you're you're only opt you have three coins and you get to bid them or pass and and that's it. And you're trying to do so much. Um and I realized what I was using was an older notion of agency.

So I think Carol Rovane, that quote you read, is a a really natural version of this. And we have this in terms like when we say that you have a literary agent. Or oh your lawyer's your legal agent. Ironically we now or mean ironic, we talk about it in the in AI agents. Yeah, right, exactly. So what it is for you to have a real estate agent or a legal agent

is that when they're performing their job, they're acting on your reasons. Yes. Not theirs. Right. They're shifting the reason structure. And at first you might say, like, oh, this looks really weird. Like, oh my God. Uh like it's very it's this bizarre one off thing that you do in games, that you structure reas you change your reasoning structure. But Carol Rovane, that amazing philosopher is pointing out.

She says that we do this constantly and it's something as simple as her example'cause she's an academic is, you know. I'm on a search committee. And I'm trying to hire someone and I'm not Usually using my own reasons. What I'm doing is a lot of the time I'm not supposed to hire who I like, who I want to hang out with, right? Who would be good for my projects. We're supposed to, as a department, decide what we care about.

Mm-hmm. Right. And then when I'm on the search committee, I if I'm acting really in that role, I look at those reasons and I switch into I mean this is again super familiar so it's like um okay here's here's another example. I think one of the things that happens in games is that we cancel out a lot of our reasons, right? Like if my s if my if my that's a good look. So if my spouse and I are playing a game, normally my standard reasons are I love and support her, right? And in that game

We're gonna kill each other. Yes, yes. Right. Subversion almost. Yeah. Right. And but we do this all the time. So for example, this is This this is this is will perhaps be embarrassing and revealing, but also I think it's very true. When uh I started teaching, I brought my full human self to the classroom. Yeah. And this meant I was

kinder and more open to students who are of my tribe who had my sense of humor, right? Who had like who had my politics, who liked the same music as I did. And that's a bad teacher. You were being quote unquote authentic in a way that was detrimental. Yeah. And I think a l what a lot of us realize is when you're in a particular role, you cancel out a lot of reasons. And I think like

Imagine like going to like a government office and having the person treat you as a full person and giving you better treatment if they like you. You don't want that.

It's it's ironically in games we're doing it for play. In these contacts, we're doing it for duty, right? Or obligation or whatever it might be. But they're yeah. Yeah. But this is the idea. So John Dewey, uh, the great American philosopher, says that in a lot of the art, we take something we do in normal life and we Concentrate it and crystallize it.

for beauty or interest for its own sake. I think there's this thing that we do always in normal life where we enter a role and we cancel out some of our reasons and we change the reasons we act on. And then in games we do the same shit for fun. Or riches or something else. And that makes us s see the thing that maybe we were typically subject to. We're seeing the water a little bit when we play games. Yeah.

Y do you mean like we uh become more aware that Yeah, when we're doing that usually that that whole thing you just laid out, we're not thinking about the ways we're taking on different forms of agency in most of our daily lives. Like we're

I think most people's perception would be like, Yeah, of course I'm not gonna be like I'm gonna be a little different when I'm at work, but they haven't fully and I would argue many of the people who are most successful in modern society are the ones who are really good at this. Right. Maybe it's sociopathic, but Or I mean oh this is

really good there's two different things. Really good at role shifting versus being willing to completely transform yourself and get yourself stuck in a role forever. Mm. And I I like Uh one worry might be there's one thing, which is playfully being able to shift into different roles. And there's another thing that this world might reward, which is

psychopathically committing yourself to a hyper simplified role and never being playful with it. We w we will get to that. Yeah, we will get to it. We will get to that later. Um On this note maybe then of agency and I want to talk about values too because I think it's critical, but since you brought it up, like the Maybe maybe one conception of this would be that games can make it easy to

act to my earlier point, which is like the the you can just do things form of agency. And the other is that they make it easy to explore the possibility space of actions. I think one thing that is important here to keep in mind the kind of two levels of agency involved in games. So there's ki the kind of there's one there's one kind of agency in which a game, a specific game, provides you with one particular

form of agency in the sense that we've been talking about. And it fixes it and you plunge into it during the game. You suddenly become a being of only balance or a being of only like calculation or a being of only like deceit and lying, right? Each of the game focuses you. And then there's another tier of agency. I think of the other sense you're talking about, the freeing sense, the exploring sense. Where games as a whole

let you move between them. Right? They give you the freedom to I get to mean I get to have a choice, you know. In a lot of my work life, I don't have this choice. The work life after this interview, uh, I'm gonna be grading. Like I don't have any choices about this. Like there is a kind of agency that's gonna be pushed into me. But

For my break, right, I can choose. Am I gonna play with the Oyos? Am I going to run around the block? Am I gonna have a quick game of online chess? And each of these is a completely different Kind of action and a completely different feel of action. And I get choice of them because of the enclosed nature of games.

And because the clarity makes that role shifting easier. I think that's something really interesting about games. The hyper clarity of the rules and the points makes the role shifting easier. Yes. Okay. This is pointing something I think is actually really important, which is What I actually think you just described there is maybe part of the difference between incentives and values.

Um, which are two very different kinds of motivators. Yeah. The first one is like I have to grade. Right. And and I wanna come back to the agency point because I think that part of what I'm really interested in is The you can just do things form of agency is sort of acting. It's not acting based on incentives. And it's kind of acting in the world of value. Maybe for a second. Like you you say incentives can provide some motivation, but they don't change your core values.

Maybe to start, like why do you think modernity tempts us so much to overweigh towards incentives rather than acting based on values? Well, I mean I don't I'm not sure that's the right way to formulate the question for me, because my worry is about There are always gonna be incentives. And my worry is when incentives become value.

So an incentive okay. So A value roughly is just I think whatever is your core motivator, whatever is the ultimate guider of your action, whatever sets your choices, whatever ch sets how you're gonna change yourself, your values are where all this springs from, whatever that is. Incentives are things the world gives you where it says if you do this, you'll get those resources. And so I think. There's one way that you can keep the world at arm's length.

Where you say like, okay, the world is giving me certain incentives. It's saying I have to do things this way to make money. I have to do this things this way for people to listen for me or to get get enough people to tune into this show to even hear what I'm saying. So those those are the incentives. And then my the reason I'm entangling with them, the reason my reason for gathering those resources.

comes out of my actual values, right? So that's one structure. The thing I'm worried about is when they collapse and we suddenly forget to think about what our values are beyond the incentives. I mean, this is the s what I'm talking about is the simplest damn thing, which is The one frame of mind is to make enough money to do what you actually want and the other frame of mind is just to be like, Well

Here's what I do. Here's the scoring system. I'm just gonna max out on making money'cause right, and not thinking about the thing it's for. I mean, it's uh I I think that's just that's a that should be a f that sh that difference should be familiar to everyone. And that's a difference between like having a firewall between your true values and your incentives and letting them be collapsed. Yes. I think maybe I was making too big of an assumption there and is sort of assuming that

When I when I said the difference between incentives and values, I'm thinking of values as sort of the things we do despite incentives. Despite clear incentives. Tell me what you mean by that question. Uh do you know who like David Goggins is? Uh yeah. He's like the ultra marathon. He's the he's the guy who's like wake up at four AM and carry the logs and One of my jokes is I like I like don't really believe in willpower. I I think of willpower as this sort of like grittiness despite

Maybe even clear incentives that says like I'm gonna do something hard. Right. Um because on in the long run it's gonna pay off. Right. And I've always kind of related to willpower is sort of like the people who require willpower are the ones who haven't found a way to harmonize their real values and what the world wants or something like that. Yeah. I mean that's pretty romantic. I get to be a philosopher, but let me tell you

I have to grade ten more papers tonight. Yes. And that's gonna need a lot of willpower. Yeah. Okay Um I mean I think let me let me try something. Maybe this will be interesting to you. So When I was first trying to articulate Uh we should just introduce the value capture term. I so uh one of the core ideas of my book is value capture. Value capture is what happens when you have values that are rich and subtle and developing

And then you get put in an institution or a social setting that feeds you s clear, simplified versions of those values, like a metric. And sort of the incentives and the values become you were just talking about. Exactly. Right. So I just I just and then they take over. So value capture is what happens when

You go to school out of an interest in learning and you get focused on GPA. It's what happens when you go on social media to connect to people and you get focused on likes or you start a podcast. to get ideas and then you become focused just on subscriber count. Not as a means to communicate what you really want, but changing what you're trying to say to just max out your subscriber count. Okay. So

I've been worried about value capture for a while and I've been trying to figure out what's wrong with it. And here's a first pass. One thing you might think is the wrong of value capture is that the world is You that you're losing control of your values. So the world is forcing your values out of something you freely choose. I don't think that's actually the right mm.

one and a partially one of the Okay, if that's true, if that were the right account, then if someone were forced to and brainwashed into putting on a uh putting on a watch and just caring about their steps or forced to like pay attention to their BMI instead of their health, that would be a problem. But if someone freely chose and devoted themselves

to weight loss over all else, that would be fine,'cause it's a matter of choice. And I think actually one of the most worrisome things is cases where people enthusiastically and freely They're like, Okay. Yes. They they embrace it. They lose the plot. Right. They say. Uh and they lose the plot because in some ways It's easier, right? Because the world is giving you a quick, easy tracker and everyone else understands it. Yes. So the thing I'm really interested in is trying to explain.

I bet okay, I'm gonna do some abstract philosophy. I think you'll like this. I think it'll be interesting to you. One conception of what The human human well being is This might sound do it, but we've got to talk about what like well being and flourishing and what makes a good human life. Because what we're talking about is how oversimplified values

Screw that up. By the way, that's that's part of I think one of the reasons I wanted to set the table, at least on the more personal side, which is like I we're gonna talk more about all the kind of like global problems we have, but at root, like These things are intuitive. We forget them. The point of living is to live a meaningful, flourishing life. And we can all agree. So let me just say there's so many things I want to say right now, but let me just say one quick way to do it. Like, uh

I'm worried about someone capturing your definition of meaning. Yeah. I'm worried about someone. And this is why like, this is why the willpower question is so interesting to me. Because I think like If the world can change your sense of meaning, it can reorient your will. It can make you send all your willpower and all your grit towards some simplified right? Okay. So let me give you this

This bit of like technical background that isn't in the book because it was a little bit too technical, but you might find it interesting. So There's a standard view in a lot of economics and rational choice theory, and uh it's a prevailing view, uh th the guide social policy that says What people's well being is is just the satisfaction of their expressed preferences and desires. Whatever they say they desire, whatever they say. Give them what they want. Yeah, give them what they want.

They'll be good. And the view is something like, Well, we can't be intrusive We have to let people be autonomous. We have to listen to what they want. This is sort of like the neoliberal late stage capitalism. Right. This but this is also like underneath all of economic theory, right? This is like uh this is underneath actually a lot of political science. It's not it's like Very very progressive, very positive, very t help the world political science.

Scientists often work with this view that what well being is, is d uh ex uh satisfying people's d expressed desires. Also not being paternalistic critically. Because it's that's true. That's that It respects people's autonomy and it respec and it is non-paternalistic if you just listen to what uh what people want. Uh one of the most interesting criticisms of this came out of uh I think eighties and nineties feminist theory. Uh and it

It came because of a worry about what's called adaptive preferences. So it turns out psychologically a lot of this comes from a uh sociologist named John Elster. So if I start to limit your opportunities.

Your preferences will adapt to the opportunities that are available to you. And so lower my bar. You'll lower your bar, exactly. So one of the things it turns out was that if systemically women can't find work outside the house and the o and they're not permitted to work in the workplace, then people will adapt their desires.

To be to d to domesticity. So here's the worry. Okay, we create a world where half the people are not allowed to work. They adapt their desires and to fit the s limited situation we have.

According to desire preference satisfaction theory, we've won. We've succeeded. The world is great. I mean you have a falling knife, right? What do you mean? Like you have a fall like Theoretically, like if you wanted to paint a really, really cynical vision of the world, it's just this that that scenario you just described just seeps into more and more of. Yes, exactly. So I I just did this for my students. It was like, look, so if your view is that well being

A good world is one in which people's expressed desires match their situation. Imagine you have Here's a case where most of the world people in the world get twenty thousand dollars a year and their desires are to have sixty thousand dollars a year. There are two ways. To satisfy everyone's preferences. Make the world better or Get people to decrease their property. Yeah. Right. So I mean does it make sense why this is in the background? Yes. So this is this is the wor part of the worry is

that it might look to you like, oh, it's great. If we just get people to collapse their values to incentives, then they will have a ton we we give them everything we want. They want something really simple. They want straightforward things the world can provide for them. They and then things are great. And I think Yeah. desire, preference, satisfaction, theories of well being aren't right. And this also means that strict autonomy about values isn't right, that you can have the wrong values.

Right. And a lot of what I'm worried about is the systems by which you might be convinced to fully commit yourself. to very simplified values that diminish yourself. Yes. And it's reflexive. And and yeah. Did is this did I did I get are we in the ballpark? What do you want to talk about? Um You might have the wrong values is something you said. Um

What is this what is the this is a a thorny question, sh surely, and and it's clear that maybe the wrong values we don't want flattened values. Right. What is the t shape or the texture directionally of good values? Okay. This is the most interesting question. Okay. There's one way I can imagine this conversation going.

in which you ask this question and someone else seated here would try to give a specification of what the right values are. That is not the way conversation can go. Uh One of the things I think that I've been convinced by is that the right values for a particular person to have are incredibly

dependent on a lot of details about the particular person, their particular context, their particular psychological profile, the particular place in the world. Elijah Milgram, a philosopher who's been really influential to me. has this view that you don't calculate the right values for you from the top down by like thinking about some abstract conception of the good and then like

Deducing it, you have to try them out and see if they work for you. And one of the things he ends up saying is we get these signals. If you have a value that works for you, uh you thrive. And if you have a value that doesn't fit you in your situation, you fall apart. And it's some of it's dependent on your personality, but some of it's dependent on the place you're in. There's this great example. I d one of my favorite examples of anything comes from Jane Jacobs.

Um the rise and fall of great American cities. And she has this moment where she talks about How she says a lot of People will come from rural areas to New York. And in rural areas, they'll come in with a value, they highly value friendliness, right? Like making eye contact, chatting with everyone you meet.

And then they come to New York and everyone seems like an asshole'cause no one's making eye contact and like if you try to talk someone up in the subway who got their headphones on, they'll like bite your head up. Yeah. And then you spend some time there and you realize The value of friendliness does not work. When you're in the subway with people all day long. The big city is so packed. that you need to actually deeply value respecting other people's privacy.

And it's not that one of these values like an evolutionary fitness for that environment. Exactly. It's it's a fitness. So it's not like one of these values is better than the other. It's that some values are suited for some contexts and some values are suited for others. And cross multiply the con context sensitivity of values with the fact that different values will be good for different personality types. And what then what you get is

You have the freedom to pick whatever values you want. It's that your values need to be carefully tailored sensitively to your environment and place, often using as a guide the particular signals of your emotions, how you feel.

This is kind of what I'm I guess I'm glad you answered this way. When I guess I'm trying to ask when I say what is the shape of good values, I think is inside of that last statement which you made, which is the point here also I think so much of this is running against like There's a broad feeling that we have like a meaning crisis, especially for young people. Yep. Um your central contention is like.

One of the main reasons is people need to choose their own values. Uh the history of the world is actually that like values are issued to you top down. And not necessarily in this like postmodernity metrics or excuse me, um incentives and values flattening, but in like The state tells you what to value, or the church tells you what to value, or your family tells you what to value. And so I guess there's like I I'm feeling some tension, which is like.

I think it's really profound I and I I'm tend maybe maybe it's'cause I'm a young person in twenty twenty five. I tend to agree that we should choose our own values. And yes. That doesn't mean you should just choose any values. Right. Right. Like there are good values. Right. There's I mean, in the background uh like Hopefully it's all right. You're you're you're getting a particularly wonky philosophy techie version. Okay, good. Um there's

I just want to go back and say like I think we should be really careful about the difference in you choose your own values and you tailor them to the specific context, right? It's not just a matter of choice. I think this is similar like I I was just talking to my spouse about this.

A lot of people want to collapse this to this like distinction objective and subjective. Like either values are objective or they're fully subjective. Almost like morals and feelings or something. And if they're objective, they're universal. And if they're subjective, they're just you and your feelings. I'm saying no.

They're you can have better and worse values, you can get the wrong values, but whatever the right ones are are deeply tailored to what you are. So it's less about choice and more about Sensitive detection. It's a mixture of does it make sense? It's a mixture of both invention and like listening. You can decide. You can dis I mean, one of the things that Lij Milgram's his the this beautiful you would love this paper. It's called On Being Bored Out of One's Mind.

says you might have a theory that this is the right value for you and you go to grad school and you think, I'm gonna do this thing and you and then you're just miserable and you're That misery is a detection system. And then you start relying on willpower by the way. Then you start cranking through and at some point right. At some point you have to listen to the signal that this is a terrible value. You are not flourishing. Right. Okay. Yes, yes. So

Oh my god. We uh w what was the question I I gotten last week? I think what I'm trying to square is is Oh, from outside. From outside. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I think this is so one of the reasons I also really like this kind of Feminist nineties value literature is that

Before this, there's this kind of like fantasy and I think it some of it we inherit from existential philosophy that like, look, you your own true values, your authentic values come from you and values from the outside are alienating and terrible. And that can't be right. Like we get

value like we soak up our values. That's sort of the choose your values. Like sit in a cave and choose your value. Like pure choice. There's this great there's this great uh comment from a philosopher economist named Audrey Kolnai that he says that There's some conceptions of value that are just too heavy and thick that don't have any freedom in them all, but then the existential conception of value is too thin. It's too narrow. It's just pure choice. Like just make something up out of what

Ignore the world. Just make something up. That can't be it. Yes. So So I think we get our values all the time. And even if a lot of our values come I mean, and I I think like there's there's a simple version of this. Like a lot of the way we learn to val value things.

is by learning from other people who guide us through activities. This is a lot of what games do. You show up, you start doing some weird new activity like climbing. And you come in and you think to yourself, Oh, climbing is for like Getting ripped and getting a workout. And then people are and then I mean, and then someone tells you like

You're climbing really brutally. Like try a little more sensitivity in your feet and you're like, What? And then you suddenly learn that actually So much of the beauty on offer and so much of the value in this activity is something you never realized before, which is there could be like, delicate poetry in your own movement. Right? And you learned this like I learned that from other people. Right? Pure existentialism of that kind of like choose your values kind.

doesn't have room for learning from other people. When it's more top down too, right, to go back to your Jane Jacobs or Christopher Alex, any of these ideas are about finding it through emergence and experience. Right. Well I mean there's two

Pure top down is the world tells you your values and take them off. That can't be right. Pure bottom up is like make it up about Immaculate Conception almost. Yeah. Yeah. And in between is something about learning and negotiation, but one of the differences is When they're not fixed from the top down, when you receive a lot of value and candidates and proposals from the world, you can balance them and reinterpret them from yourself. Like the world may tell you, you know,

Like it's a bit like taste. Like explain what you mean. Um Well, taste has been a common guy uh a b a big discussion and something I've I've talked about with people and and I think t I don't know, people in technology figured out taste mattered a few years uh a year or two ago. And I think the conception of taste is Often dis talked about as this like judgment. It's just the judgment. It's the judgment isolated. He has good taste because he knows what things are good.

And taste, of course, intuitively, but also uh we forget is eating a lot of food, first and foremost. It's a lot of inputs. Yeah. Which is w maybe the connection I'm drawing, which is part of what you're maybe illustrating is like Perhaps what games can do, and we can talk more about that, but other things might do too, is d allow us to um refine our taste in our values. I I see what you're going. I think taste is great in the following way. When you're developing taste in something.

Going it completely by yourself. isn't gonna get you there. And accepting external authorities taste isn't gonna get you there. What you need to do when you learn about something like jazz is you listen, you learn, you let people point things, and then you slowly start to also find your own way and refine your own taste. And you do it through this intense exposure and careful attention to lots and lots of examples. And I mean, I think maybe that's that's one way to put it.

The wor I mean, if the w any I I do think if the world is like forcing a very specific value conception on you uh rigidly, this is not good for human beings. But a thing that c often happens, I think That we're losing in the metrified world is more open end the world might give you a bunch of values. Honor, courage, loyalty, family, community. But it doesn't tell you exactly how to apply those concepts. It doesn't give you the precise borders, and it doesn't tell you how they count.

against each other. So you even if the world is generally communicating values to you, you have like a lot of um Freedom of interpreting particular open-ended terms and finding balances and f and that's very different from the world saying from you saying I will value a higher subscriber count. That is a non interpretable, non plural

free play is and that's really different, I think. Yeah, you have a you have a thing where you say precise values embody a closed minded spirit about what's important in the world. And then conversely, you write about poets using like a meaningful ar inarticulateness. Yeah. Um and how values can have these imprecise edges. Like, do you have any maybe this is a lead into the sort of the game role playing stuff, but like what how do we

How do we move towards these fuzzy values? Like how do we sit with them? Um, I mean, there's a sense in which they've been there all along. You just have to let them- I mean, the what we're talking about is

Basically, the value of art. Like, this is not unfamiliar, right? This is what poetry is. Like, um The philosopher Elizabeth Camp, who's this incredible philosopher of language and philosopher of mind, has this beautiful set of essays about what metaphors are. When you know this thing is like that thing, but you don't know exactly how and you're kind of gesturing roughly, being like, I'm not sure, but somehow your soul is like the ocean in some way, but I don't know exactly which way.

And it's a way of pointing at something without defining its edges. Now I think I mean it is it's so common to think uh the more precise the language, the better. And there are two cases where this falls apart. Um Both of which I'm fascinated by. One is when the world is actually vague and fuzzy as it boundaries. When the real world when we're talking about something that is, I mean, a lot of the times I think. These stupid debates like

is something a sandwich or a taco or a hot dog? The answer is those aren't well bordered concepts. They are essentially we have to accept their fuzziness and we not pretend that we know things. The other case where we really get fuzziness is when we're uncertain.

And we wanna express that uncertainty. We wanna mark that uncertainty. We remind ourselves our we're uncertain. And we do that by having like the uncertainty almost. What'd you say? We wanna sit in the uncertainty. Right. I mean I a a paper I'm writing right now. is about the term vibe. And I think I mean I think it's often pointy that's like good vibes really it's very openly fuzzy. It's like

There's something good going on and I can't put my feet more of these by the aura is was the word of last year, right? Like it's interesting that society seems to be or at least young people seem to be trending towards more of these words that are it's the

It's the th the finger pointing at the moon or something. Yeah, I think we're I I do think new slang I mean, this is this is a paper I'm writing right now, actually. I think new slang terms are often people trying to find language to express something that's important and the rise of vibe, and I think you're right about aura. is people wanting to point to the need to sit in unclarity. Yes. And it's not because it's not real. It's actually very real. It's very real. Uh maybe maybe it'll lead into

uh one of the earlier conceptions we were talking about of agency, like your your sort of like central idea of games is that they allow a gentle fluidity. Um we humans have an enormous capacity for a gentle fluidity. Imperial trained me in this mode of getting people to do what you want by giving them a piece of the action. And it's not just training some technical skill. Imperial was a board game. Gave me a whole outlook, a whole attentional focus.

I love that. Like, why does this begin with attention? Yeah. I think so attention attention and value are so interlinked, right? What what you value is what you pay attention to. I think one of the core things The one of the ways that games work is that the scoring system guides what you're trying to do, which deeply guides your attention. And so setting the scoring system is a way for a game designer to sculpt your attention. Right. So it's like rock climbing. The goal is to go up.

The rules are don't use any rope and suddenly your attention has to be on tiny details of the rock. And the way you balance. Right? Like so which you've never paid any attention you you had never looked at that crevice before. Never looked at it. And suddenly it's also I think it's really interestingly it's like an amplif like if you're inattentive to your balance of the rock, you'll fall. And so

that game is constantly like not only telling you what to pay attention to, but refining your attention by slapping you over and over again. We were talking about this earlier with the yo yo. It's like what a great way to just lock in. Right. Yeah. Like there it is it is I I Some people are my spouse is very good at attending to herself. I am not. And so I find um Oh I think this got cut out of the book.

Um Godfrey Devreau, one of my favorite yoga writers, says something like the reason we do hard yoga poses is because it's a tool for meditation, because it amplifies a wandering focus.

'Cause if you're trying to meditate just seated and your focus wanders, you won't notice'cause your focus has wandered. But if you're in a hard pose and your focus wanders, suddenly you wobble, right? And you feel it's a it's a it's a it is so So a lot of a lot of the times a lot of games there are deception games where uh All the kind of normal like boardplay is taken away from you. And all you have is to stare at someone in the face and try to read their face.

There are other deception games where you're not even allowed to look or talk to other people. And all your mind. Yeah, yeah. Well, the mind's a cooperative game. It's simple saying you're moving stuff around to the board and you're trying to signal and deceive people by like showing your and each of these things like focuses your attention on one particular modality of the world. Um and I think it like

It like refines it. And I I mean, I think we hopefully it's showing it's clear that like the downside of this is if the world says If like if my university says, What matters is student graduation rates, not that's what we measure. And we don't measure happiness or wisdom or ethical growth. We just measure graduation rate. Then the entire institutional attention becomes hyper focused only on those features that immediately

Poop out lock in a measurable outcome. Yeah, lock in is like lock in is such a useful term now. It's like this is scoring systems. Can be give you the most beautiful part of lock in and the most soul deadening, society destroying parts of lock in. What's the difference between recognition and perception? Oh my god. Thanks for hitting that one. I don't know. This is um obviously very related. This is from

I think it's from Dewey. Um my favorite bit, just maybe as a prompt, is you say uh we recognize and categorize something, we stop, perception keeps going. Yeah, yeah. This is this is from Dewey. So one of the things he says is that I mean a lot a lot of what What this is really about is how we categorize things. Yeah. Um and the clarity of our categorization system. Like the whole point is the whole point of a fuzzy term like Interesting or rich.

Uh you have to ask yourself when you do an activity whether it's interesting, whether it's rich. You have to deliberate and fight and interpret. Um, and the interesting thing about a lot of these other terms that are associated with metrics for reasons I'm sure we'll talk about later, is that they're very mechanistic and easy to apply. And so it's very easy to uh to stop th I mean, the example I've been thinking a lot about

is the example of screen time, right? So if I if I target I want my child to be involved in creative or or interesting apps. I have to make a complex decision. With screen time, I don't, it's automatic, but also screen time's a lousy category. Lumps together like, I don't know, my kid coding on Minecraft with the worst YouTube shorts ever. Anyway, so I I'm wondering. So the difference between recognition and perception

is that in recognition, you apply a category and then you stop looking at the thing. The category is the end of thought. And with perception, you apply the category, and that helps you look at it. And you keep looking further and further. And I think of like, I don't know, like.

He a version of this is I I know people where if you do something odd, they're look they look for an explanation for it and when they can put a name to it, they just stop thinking. They're like Yes. Oh check. He's just goofing off or oh, that's like That that's vacation and then they stop thinking about it. They've categorized it and that's done. Perception is the ability to look at something, have a name for it, put it under a category, and then keep looking at it.

First peculiarities and differences. Yeah, one thing you might think about recognition is the problem of recognition is that categories are very abstract. And it just assumes that when you when you say like oh that's a coder, oh that's a business person, oh that's a Gen Zer, right? It assumes that that's all the information you need to know. And it stops.

There's no more information here. Yeah. It stops at a very specific level of abstraction, typically a level of abstraction that's been established socially. And it doesn't Worry. I mean, I mean you're you you you pegged this from the very beginning. Like a lot of

This whole book is about the puzzle of why scoring systems are fun in games and so soul deadening in institutions. And the answer is often that in games we have a playful exploratory attitude where we keep looking. Not always. Yeah. But sometimes. And the th the big interesting puzzle is why The nature of metrics as they occur in large-scale institutions tends to promote this closed, dismissive vision that categorizes things very quickly and then stops.

look at playfulness and perception are s maybe on some kind of continuum. Like are or some kind of similarity of vector space. This is okay. Let me just vomit a bunch of associations at you because this is super interesting. And um I haven't figured out all of this associational network, but The modernization I really like is Jerome Stolnitz's. What Stolnitz says is in normal life

We have a very practical vision. We have a goal and we go through the world and we classify things according to our goal and we just stop looking at things and at features of things that aren't immediately related to our goal. It's very filtered vision. Which is almost animalistic, right? It's like evolutionarily physical. Uh I think that's uh gives animals a bad route. Okay. That's very corporate. I think that's I'm thinking of I guess what I'm thinking of is like survivalist.

Right. It is very it is very survivable. But it's not necessarily natural, to your point. I I suspect that many animals play far more than many uh It's a good chat. Many modern, whatever. Okay. Then he says, Solnet says that, and this is his translation of the Kantian thought, that aesthetic vision. Is vision that is stepped back from purposes and goals. And so it's attention that roves freely over all the features of everything. open to whatever there might be there to find.

He actually has this great moment where he says like what aesthetic vision is, is you let the object take the lead and show you what there is to love about it instead of having your own goal come to it. Right. Right. So this is like this network like where the the the The hyper the more hyper clear the goal and the focus ahead of time, the more your vision seems to be closed and dismissive and non exploratory. The more you pre specified what's important to you. And then there's other things.

Call it art vision, call it aesthetic vision, call it beauty orientation, call it play. Where we seem to be one of the characteristics seems to be a kind of openness of vision to new value. Yeah, you'd be surprised. Like try tr tr why the fuck not? Right? Fuck around and find out, but good. What a nice lead into maybe a a critical part of

what you talk about how games can allow us to explore this fluidity is is the process and outcome stuff. Yep. A couple of things um from you. In games, the value of the outcome is inseparable from the value of the process. In normal life we struggle in order to attain some goal that we really want. In striving play, we adopt a goal to get the struggle we really want. Really nice packaged uh bit there. And then finally,

When I started trying to exercise, I had only the barest conception of what it could do for me. I didn't realize how much I would find in it, how much else I would find in it. Um I think we've talked about this, but uh maybe I'll ask again just in case there's anything else is like what is what about process allows us to

Maybe just what is the link between process and values? What about process? Process allows us to sort of fluidly explore values? I mean, I think I think it's This is gonna hearken back to something we said at the very beginning of the conversation, but I'm worried that that already adopted a modern frame that has crapped on processes too much. So I think I mean, okay, l let's go l let me I'll I'll take I'll go I'll take a running I'll take a few steps so I can take a running start again.

One of the core ideas animating this book is Bernard Soutz's definition of a game. For Bernard Toots to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of striving to overcome them. So one way to put it, this is in the quote that you read, is it for suit the struggle and the constraints are an intrinsic part of the goal.

It's not the end themselves. Well it's gonna that there there's a there's a space uh there's there's some very there's there's a there's a little diff w wrinkle there. So Suit says in practical life, what we care about is the outcome in and of itself. So if I'm trying to get to a particular spot in the city, I just want to get there. Any method will do.

If I'm playing a game, if I'm running a marathon, I have to get there by prescribed means. I'm not allowed to take a taxi. I'm not allowed to take a shortcut. It only counts as crossing the finish line if I did a particular way. You have a great line in there, by the way, where you say like cheating in a cosmic sense. Yeah. So what this means is in games, there's an i there's some incredibly powerful connection between the struggle and the goal. Now

That's stage one. Uh I've added my own little wrinkle to this. I think in games there's two kinds of play, achievement play and striving play. Achievement play is playing for the value of winning, striving play is playing for the value of the profit. Notice though that an achievement player in a game still cares about the struggle. They want to have won that struggle.

Right. And it they wouldn't cheat because it would it would disqualify the achievements. Yeah, it it would mean that they didn't do the h like they wanna win, but it doesn't matter. Like someone that just wants to win the marathon is not gonna take a taxi because they won't then they wouldn't have won the marathon, but they still want to win. The striving player, which is one kind of game player, one motivational state, is the person that wants to win for the sake of the process.

Winning is actually just this thing that it's a constraint that has to exist for the process to be good. Yeah, exactly. So it's like I mean I a lot of the times I think about like I think about how I play board games with my spouse. So my spouse and I are are good at very different things in board games. Once in a while we'll find a board game where we're matched and then we'll have a delicious struggle.

And then I will find a strategy guide afterwards. And I think here here's the argument from the book. If there's uh if I'm an achievement player, there's only one logical thing to do. Read the guide. Wait. Crusher. Right. Crusher. But I don't, because that would make the game boring. Yeah. So what's interesting is galactically, I'm avoiding making moves in life that would make it more likely to win. But during the game I have to try all out to win to have fun.

So win I'm like kind of I don't really care about winning'cause I'm not like reading the strategy guide, but in order to have the process I want, I have to try really Hard you're taking on a form of agency, of course. Yes. I am adopting a win oriented kind of agency to have the pleasure of an interesting struggle. Okay. So let me go back to your original question. So you said what What is it in the process that helps us explore values? I think what I want to say is

The process is where all the values were in the first place. Right? Like it's only this weird delusion. Mm so there are values without process. Yeah. I mean this is just this is just from Aristotle. Bernard Suits, by the way, the the game scholar I love was an Aristotle scholar and he

attributes his notion of games very openly to Aristotle. What Aristotle says is that the value in human life comes from rich the rich exercise of our capacities, our intellect and our body and everything uh and our social capacities. Um And that outcomes, tools, resources that we make They're useful in so far as they allow the exercise of the capacities. But in many cases, what we're trying to do, we're aiming at an outcome, but the thing that is valuable is the activity, the process, right?

And then and There are some I have some theories about why. We have somehow been persuaded that processes are unimportant and all that's important is countable outcomes. The products you make, the money you make, the increased measurements that are applied to your scale and not the actual I mean I mean if I actually wanted to rack up the numbers of success and games, I would play intellectual games because I am physically mediocre. I'm a terrible climber.

For how long I've been trying to climb. Yeah. Right. I cannot justify it in any outcomes oriented way. The only way to justify it is to think No, this is valuable because I get to be moving, because I get to be ref because the process of skill refinement, even if I never end up at most Mediocre, the process of refining the skill is valuable in and of itself. Now I think my response to the question of what is it about processes?

Why is it that that's a place to explore value? My response is something like, That's where the value is in the first place. How did we get to think that you had to look in stuff and piles of things that you made for the value? One of my favorite uh examples you use that links to this is the difference between a recipe and a dish.

Do you want to talk uh I think this comes from John uh Thorne. Yeah. You wanna talk about that just briefly for the listener? Yeah. So uh John Thorne, who's one of my favorite food writers, who it turns out was a philosophy major as an undergrad. Some kind of link, some kind of connection. Um has this marvelous Uh distinction between a pro between a recipe and a dish.

He says a recipe is a dead thing, a writing down of how something was made by someone once, and a dish is a live thing, an idea of balance in a creative cook's head that gets remade anew each time. And one of the things I mean, A Creative cooks who are making dishes are typically

actually better cooks. This is the a lot of people I think my generation generation mostly cook from recipes and we wonder why our parents' generation was better. And it's because they don't have a fixed recipe. They're like adapting. to You have a great line in the book where you say Ma I was you were mad that your mom wasn't giving you a quote unquote real recipe. Yeah. She was giving me this thing where she was like, yo, you gotta you gotta taste this and you have to adjust and you have to

Taste the pineapple and like see if it's sweet or sour today and adjust your vinegar and sugar. And I was like This isn't real cooking. Answer mom. Yeah. Give me the recipe that I can follow. And you know, of course, now that I cook, I'm like, no, that's the real thing. It's not a recipe. The recipe is not the real thing. Um, but I think the re the reason this is related to processes is I think a lot of p I've been really interested in this thing that people have that's like

the perfect the perfect cookbook with the perfect recipe for the perfect dish. And what that often has you do is following something precisely and measuring things precisely. But It's been engineered so you don't have to make decisions. And you do often get a good outcome. But it's a very fixed outcome. I think there's something profound in that sentence you just said that applies to much of what we've been talking about today. Yes.

Exactly. Which is the challenge. That's the trade off is man, it would be nice to have somebody make the decisions for me to simplify things, to reduce the complexity and be able to get a pretty good outcome. Yeah, but l let me let me so let's think about what you get and what you don't get. Because I d I do think for me Cooking is the perfect metaphor. Here's what you get for a clear mechanical recipe.

It's easy. You don't have to make decisions. You don't need any experience if you follow it correctly. you will get a pretty good result. Yeah. And a semi reliable result. And here's an important part. The more the ingredients are fixed, the more the relia uh it'll be reliable. The more you're using the same canned tomatoes and the same flour that's been standardized and is stable.

The more you'll get a reliable outcome. But it'll be kind of the same one. When you cook from a dish, here's what you get. A, it'll take a while to learn. B You will Slowly over time develop the capacity to see the decision space and move around it, to see when you can make it crispier or saltier or softer. C, you'll be able to adapt to changing ingredients and roll with the fact that the tomatoes today are really sour and not sweet. You know how to compensate for that.

And four, instead of being in the mode of rigidly following someone else's roles, you'll be constantly engaged in your senses and making decisions out of your sense of tasting being something like, mm, that's good, but it could use a little bit you'll be engaged in that

You might enjoy the cooking. You might enjoy the cooking. The funny thing about all this too is the when I was hearing you list the f the pros and cons of the first one is the the the most valuable, one of the most valuable parts of the recipe is that you're way less likely to wait.

The food and your time. Right. Goes back to what we talked about earlier. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. It is there's a perspective from which oh you'll get it right each time you won't waste something. Here's another perspective from which You could have had a lovely hour being engaged and making decisions and being free with your senses and tailoring something to yourself, but instead you spent an hour

Following someone else's being a robot. Yeah, you don't get to cook, you ha you're you you you don't have to cook, you get to cook. Right. Yeah, I mean uh John Thurn says this. into the restaurant mindset where we've turned ourselves into our own menial laborers and we go into the kitchen, close the doors and follow the rest of the precisely in order to have a guaranteed good outcome. Where instead we could invite our friend into the kitchen, cook together, get a little drunk together.

make decisions together, taste together and the outcome might not have been a perfect But we lived. But you you did the thing with the person. And the thing You're there. And and we have somehow been persuaded that the value isn't there. Mm-hmm.

We've covered this a bit, but I wanted to hit it briefly. You talk about object beauty and process beauty. Uh you say in games the beauty shows up not in the game but in the player. Game designers work a step back. They shape the general contours of our action, not the precise details of the game.

I th I know you've also done a lot of work on aesthetics broadly. Um and aesthetics come up in bits and pieces. You talked about a little bit with the rock climbing or maybe the beautiful experience of cooking. Why or how do how do we underrate the virtues of aesthetics? Right. I mean I think this is this is a du with games it's a double underrated. Right. A we're underrating aesthetics and B we're underrating the aesthetics of doing instead of of object. But I mean, I don't know, like...

We are in the world where People that are really good at optimizing industrial processes make a ton of money and that people have soaked their soul into making completely beautiful, moving, emotional, personal indie comics can like barely survive. I mean as as a world we underrate it and I think I mean my suspicion is it's because the aesthetic value is one of the harder things to count in an objective way. There's not a good

metric for aesthetic value and I don't think that's an accident. It's because whatever aesthetic value is, it is by its nature subtle and variable. And high- It's also not recognition, it's perception. It is I mean, yes, it is it is Aesthetic value is about the value of perception. And here's the thing about perception in that sense. It is slow as fuck. If you want to be

Really efficient at hitting some simple top target, you should be a recognizer and not a perceiver. Because you will move quickly, you will ignore everything that's irrelevant. And then you'll be able to optimize for your target. And that is great as long as there's nothing of value in what you threw away and decided to ignore. Mm-hmm. You mentioned earlier autotelic, which is a wonderful word. Um kind of one of the more compelling philosophies for like

How to live, finding love for its own sake, finding your passion. You you actually earlier reacted to my willpower comment about maybe it being a little unrealistic or I d I naive or idealistic, like We aren't suits suits writes about a theoretical future utopia where we live in a world of abundance. We have we live in a pretty abundant world, but not a profoundly abundant one.

Um, great things are clearly not always playful. You do all kinds of things that suck and are hard to get to either whether it be the aesthetic process you want or outcomes that are important. Um And yet I think like aspirationally we all hope to get a little closer to I w me doing this now is a little closer to things I uh to to the autotelic than things I've done in the past.

I'm curious like how you've what your relationship and your career has been to this sort of like finding the love and the joy and the internal motivation with also managing the real messy external things like Is this just a thing we ascrive to until we die? Is it uh like I think people out there want to believe it's incrementally more possible. Perhaps the answer is not to naively think you can just purely be autotelic, but I think you're kinda asking me about

Whether technological progress is good. Is that what you're asking? Or are you asking at that point? It certainly leads into what we'll talk about next. I don't know if I I I I suppose I'm maybe more asking just for a personal reflection on Th a friend of mine who I interviewed, he has this frame that's inspired by Christopher Alexander, this idea of unfolding into a life that fits you. Yeah. Um Kevin Kelly talks about um

Don't be the best, be the only. Have the goal of life is to become yourself by the time you're on your deathbed. Yep. Um a playful orientation to life, a way of finding beauty all this stuff we just spent the last hour talking about certainly feels good.

kind of the way to directionally how to get there. And I'm curious as someone who is spewing these ideas in in a profound way and also has to live in the messiness of being a professor and all these like is it just is that just the struggle? Like how how do you relate to this? I mean the

I mean every profession has its grind and you gotta do the grind and the The question is whether you devote yourself entirely to the grind or whether you make space for s I mean, my my My career through philosophy was really it's like this value capture stuff is

in part just coming out of me pulling myself out of a bad trap in my own career. Like I went uh to philosophy'cause I loved it. And then the same thing happened as everywhere else. I went to grad school and I got the metrics. In philosophy, there's like, you know status rankings for universities and status rankings for journals, and you're aiming at getting a lot of journal articles published in highly ranked journals, it becomes really clear how you would game that out, which is to write

Fair to hyper specialize in a small domain, write very technical small move articles, and like get Published by being a super specialist. And I should also say that a lot of really good work happens that way. But that path made me almost die of boredom. And but I was doing it. I was walking that path. I went in the co course of my professionalization from someone who was like deeply excited about philosophy to somebody who by the time I left high school. I mean uh by the time I left grad school

I was like grimly doing philosophy and I hated do I like didn't look forward to it. I had to work on things I wasn't interested in. I was writing things I wasn't interested in. And like

Like I had to have a dark moment of the soul. And I think I was actually saved, I don't know, by my impatience and my intolerance of boredom, where it's just like, I can't do this anymore. I have to do something else. And now, I mean, still like I mean My it's it's really fun to hear to talk here, and there's this fantasy that you might imagine where I spent all my life talking about I mean I get maybe, you know.

at best a quarter of my life to think about this stuff. The rest of the time it's administration, it's teaching, it's grading, it's like going through policy changes in university to figure out if there's like some horrible trap that's been laid for us by some fund like it There's there's a lot of grind and I think you always have to do the grind, but a previous version of myself

instead of like carving out this little spot where I could do what I wanted, like threw the rest of me into the grossest part of the grind too. Mm. I mean is that is that does that answer the question? Yes. Um

But what a privilege to have the twenty five percent at me. Yeah. What an I mean I I will say like getting twenty five percent of my life to think about this junk is like pure pla I recognize that I'm one of the luckiest people in the world that I get to like just We've talked around it a bunch and we already talked about the value capture stuff.

I think the best place to start is metrics. And the reason maybe i it's it's particularly relevant for me. I I think the worlds I've spent a lot of time in, uh meaning the tech and business worlds particularly Uh they have a classic kind of um guiding principle, measure what matters. Um of course the implication of doing so is that we tend to only value the things we can measure. Um a few uh excerpts, choice excerpts from you in the book on metrics.

Metrics are a technology that standardizes attention. Data is engineered information and metrics are engineered values. Public metrics get rid of intuition. They force us to justify ourselves in the cold light of general comprehensibility. They kill opacity. And finally, scoring systems don't just discover a convergence that was already there. They produce convergence.

There have been many benefits to living in a quantified world. Um I think we our speed of progress, our collective understanding, collaboration, all these things, and yet

You basically spent a third of this book just ripping into the ways that metrics are are ruining us for lack of maybe that's too strong a language. Um why Why can't we tolerate why can't we just tolerate maybe to go back to the first part of the question or uh the conversation, why can't we just tolerate a quantified, metrified world at a global level and leave the subjective value, qualitative stuff for our personal life?

I mean, that would be great if we could do it. And I think the worry is that there's this constant intense suction. We're constantly being I'm not saying get rid of metrics. I'm not saying metrics are bad. I mean, metrics are clear, comprehensible, accessible. And portable and we can unpack all what that means in a bit. But

That's good for a lot of things. And if we just treated them as these simple low quality but useful proxies that were usable in limited ways as limited heuristics as like guidance mechanisms for large scale activity. Great. Cool. But instead what we get what we find over and over again, there's lots of empirical evidence about this, is that Um, when you put a metric in a space, everyone starts to care about it and hyper oriental it. I mean, here's a really interesting example.

We all know that BMI. is a terrible health measure that varies from person to person. It was originally not in t I mean, it's been horribly abused. It was originally proposed as a useful proxy at the population level. So BMI, I mean, we all know that people Some people are perfectly healthy at high BMI, some people are perfectly healthy uh at very low BMI, right? It's this huge ver personal variance.

BMI was originally introduced as an epidemiological measure to see like, oh, if you have a whole population, a whole country, and suddenly there's a huge BMI shift, that's probably a sign that something's going on. And it works. Great. For that. As a Roth first proxy at the population scale looking at national populations and shifts in nutrition for national populations. It's a way to identify among other or like food large scale food deserts. You can use it for that.

But of course what we find is people once you get that number out there tend to hyper orient towards it. It's like a personal scoreboard for real. It becomes a personal scoreboard. It th and it's proxiness is lost. It's people forget about the fact that it's this just really rough population level measure. And I think that's that is the worrisome thing. I mean, the thing you said uh that I really want to talk about is this.

Measure what matters. And I think I mean Uh I'm gonna vomit forth a lot of uh bad examples of metrics. And I think the standard response is, oh, those are just bad metrics. Let's fix them and get better metrics. And the thing that I'm worried about, the thing that I spent a lot of this book arguing, is that metrics are by their nature unable to measure certain things.

That metrics not that metrics are bad, but they're very good at measuring very particular kinds of things. Really roughly, there's gonna be a lot more to say about this, but they're good at measuring are things that it's easy to count together. The things where everyone can recognize the borders. Everyone can pick out the same things and count them in the same way. That is very so Lifespan measured in years. Easy to measure.

Whether or not some intervention leads to death or not, or saved lives, easy to measure, right? Changes in graduation rate. That's just counting how many semesters a student gets through and whether they pe easy to measure. Another example. Uh one of the things that's really interesting in The history of attempts to diversify various institutions is early people in these efforts were always like, we need to diversify among all these dimensions.

what this should not become, please God, let it be don't let it become a quota where you get a certain number of women or a certain number of minorities. Yes. And then there's another line. Because that's because diversity along lines of Intellectual style, creative style, background, cultural background, that's very hard to measure. Number of women hired, very easy to m for everyone to measure together, right? So

So the worry is that the basic intrinsic nature of metrics is very conducive to targeting some things and does it really well. Like there's it is no accident that uh That large-scale data collection systems have given us miracles like antibiotics, because antibiotics lead to a highly measurable result. Bacteria goes away, you stop being sick.

But there are whole other spots of human life. And here I wanna put art, beauty, wisdom, happiness, richness, connection, friendship. All these things are very hard. But also critically I would add, like you as you talk about in the book, health. Yeah. Like I I I just I think it's important to acknowledge like Art, people might be like, oh, but there are a lot of things that are really important, even if you view them as not that subjective, that apply. Yeah. No, I think this is what we

W th we should navigate to help last. I think it's one of the trickiest examples. But I think one of the things I'm really concerned with is when you have something really rich like flourishing and well being or even physical health and then you have near it a simplified proxy like how long your life was

or how low the heart attack rates were. And that proxy begins to capture our sense of health and then minimi and then we start forgetting about the other stuff. And like, I mean, again, it's not that it's not that that lives lived isn't important and it's not that we can't target it. It's like In the war of trade off? What the Metrified World seems to do is get us to hyper focus on what's easy to count at together and kind of like drown or shout out the subtler, quieter, more variable things.

Okay. Now let me let me give you I I w I think you're teeing me up for the vomit, so let me give you the vomit. So um basically When I was trying to figure this out, I was basically I spent a lot of years trying to figure out the question of whether there's something intrinsic about metrics that made them institutional metrics that made them hard to made it really hard for them to capture a lot of what was really valuable for human life.

And I found a bunch of scholarship that really helped me. Uh two key figures here are Theodore Porter and Lorraine Dastin. So Theodore Porter is a historian of quantification culture. Um For the geeks among you in philosophy, he was deeply influenced by a philosopher of science named Ian Hacking. Um and what Porter ends up trying to figure out is why politicians and bureaucrats become so motivated to justify things quantitatively, even when the quantitative measures are obviously bad.

And his answer is to think about the two different kinds of knowing. He thinks there's qualitative knowing and quantitative knowing. And he says that qual qualitative ways of knowing are rich in the world. open ended, context sensitive, dynamic, but they travel really badly between contexts because you need a lot of shared background to understand them.

And then he says quantitative ways of knowing. And here, big asterisk. We're not talking about quantification in principle. We're talking about institutional quantification. We're talking about how bureaucracies and large scale organizations count. He says the way that institutional quantification works is we identify a context invariant kernel, a little nugget. That everyone understands the same. Mm-hmm. And we create this by removing high context detail.

And so create something that's portable that everyone can understand. And now we can all understand what each other means by this single thing and we can all collect into it and it can aggregate. So my standard example for my life is Qualitative assessments are the long paragraphs I write in response to student essays that can respond that can talk about their relative originality or clarity. It can assess what they're doing in particular. It can pivot based on what they want.

It can on the person that's more creative, I can focus on their creativity and also c right. It can do all kinds of things. Really meaningful to that student. Very meaningful to that student. Very meaningful maybe to other philosophers. Very hard to interpret for someone in the business department the school department. Law school or whatever. Incomprehensible to a higher someone hiring in Silicon Valley. And also crucially, it doesn't aggregate. And I think this is really important.

A l and it's by nature, right? If a lot of different people are being open and responsive and context sensitive and issue thousands of different qualitative responses, right? Because the because of the fact, the very fact that these responses are dynamic and tracking different qualities, it means that they don't aggregate, right? Each of the the variability and the open-endedness is what makes them not able to aggregate.

The fact that we fix the meaning of A, B, C, D in the letter grade and we hold it the same is what let makes that information travel well and what permits automatic aggregation. So here's Porter's insight that I find so Compelling and terrifying, which is that institutional quantification is socially powerful by design, and the way it's been designed to do so is that nuance, context, and sensitivity have been stripped out of it.

It is an artificially created easy communication mechanism, and what it's missing is the source of its power. That's the feature. Okay. It's not a bug. It is the feature and the bug. This is this is the trade offs view, right? It is it is like this is I mean This is literally the thought that keeps me up at night. This is the thing that gives it social power is its very insensitivity. Yes. Um So that's stage one. So that's something that so

So what is blotted out? Any kind of value that requires a lot of context to understand or a lot of experience. Systematically removed. Is systematically removed, right? That's one. That's one the other main lesson is from Lorraine Dastin. Lorraine Dastin is this incredible intellectual historian, one of the most important intellectual figures from the last like hundred years. Uh she has this incredible early work about the nature of objectivity and how it changes.

And uh you would be so interested in this. And this this book that really uh basically broke open the secret heart of things for me, uh, on rules. And she says that, um And what we're talking about when we're talking about scoring systems and metrics is rules for evaluation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're rules for counting. They're rules for saying, here's what we pay attention to and here's what makes here's what makes the number go up. Like it's it's rules for what count. So she says,

There are different conceptions of rules and older conceptions of rules are um she says the old the dominant older conception of rule was a pr what she calls a printable. And a printable is an abstract generalization that admits of exceptions. and requires discernment and judgment to apply because you need to know when you might be in an exception case. Mm.

I uh I maybe I have never understood the phrase the exception proves the rule. I think I think the essence of the The point of it is that when you find an exception, it helps you model that the rule is almost always typically taken. i mean one way to put it is Uh so one of my favorite examples of a principle is in creative writing, I learned show, don't tell. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um and people break that.

But also if you understand why they break it and when, you'll understand why the rule generally holds. Yes. And also I need to break it. And the point isn't to throw out the rule. The point is that the rule should hold until it doesn't. Right. And

Th and there's no mechanical way to say it. You you have to get the spirit behind it. Exactly. I mean Wisdom. In some sense, uh wisdom is vibes. Okay, that's the next paper I'm writing. Wisdom is vibes. I mean exactly. That's that's that exactly the point. Right. Um so uh That's a principle. That's a principle. Second kind she says is a model where like basically a role model. Like so she says that the rule of Saint Benedict was just the person Saint Benedict.

To rule yourself that way was to think about what they would do in that situation. Oh, okay. So both these rules require judgment, expertise. Every single time. Every single time. Yeah. There's no automatic way to apply like, you know. What would Jesus do? Exactly. Um because it's com because the model uh the roles are often complicated and subtle. Yeah. And as a result, those two Right.

to for someone to really learn show, don't tell, they have to learn it in a context. I learned to apply it in a context over

several semesters in a creative workshop and apprenticeship, whatever. Yeah. It's it it's the kind of thing that travels exactly in an apprenticeship culture. Yes, yes. Um and then the third kind of rule she says is an algorithmic rule or a mechanical rule. Um And she says this is something that's meant to be applied, uh Unthinkingly, automatically, with no exceptions, exactly as written.

And then she says the thing that I found to be utterly mind blowing, which is she says, People thought that mechanical rules and algorithmic rules arose with computing machines, but they didn't. They arose about a hundred and fifty years earlier. in an attempt to cheapen labor so you didn't have to hire experts who had judgment. You just hire equivalent, you know, basically making labor fungible. They make you they make labor fungible. They make it so you can hire anybody and fire anybody.

'Cause the rule's been made explicit. So I mean again, think about like Recipes. McDonald's has mechanical rules, which means they can hire anybody and slot them in and fire anybody. In Korea, in Mexico City, in LA. Right. Doesn't doesn't matter where you are. Um And note also it works particularly well when you standardize the inputs, when you standardize the bread and the flour and in that case, what it is to be a mechanical rule.

is to be a rule that's applicable consistently by anybody. And when you say mechanical rule you mean algorithmic. Yeah same thing. She she shifts back and forth between them. In my book I s I use the term mechanical. Um

Uh just because I think the term algorithmic has already shifted its use a little bit. I think it's also harkens back to the incentive stuff we were talking about a little bit earlier, which is when values and incentives combine, you get mechanical value sets. Yeah, you get use it something mechanical. Um So here's the next way to put it. I mean w I should say one more thing. I think you I think you might find I think you you'll find this interesting.

When you're talking about this and a lot of the her examples are mathematical, people freak out because they're like, Wait, m mathematics is by its nature mechanical. And I think you have to understand how much of mathematics is not mechanical. So a lot of the times, so In many cases what you get is a complex choice of which

procedure or formula you're gonna apply. You have to decide, am I gonna do statistics? Am I gonna do Newtonian mechanics? Am I gonna do uh modeling? Um they might be mechanical within those Right. It might be mechanical within those. So here Here's my maybe here's the easiest example. I've been I've been trying to find an example here for a while. Um So let's say that you want to split a pie in half. What methodology do you use? You could split it by weight.

You could split it by angle. You could split it with the eye cut you choose. Which is so wonderful. Right. And each of them is a different so by weight is good for nutri for the for nutrition. Like if you're counting calories. By angle is good for visual appearance. I split you choose is good for a sense of equity and fairness between two kids. Each of these is a different procedure. And the point is there's actually there's not here's another way to put it.

Half is kind of already itself a subtly complicated thing. And half by angle is different from half by weight is different from half by deliciousness or appealingness. Right. And so there's a complex choice of procedure. But if you mechanize it, then by the way, if we lived in a nuanceless world, a detailless or a a a world of perfect detail You could do you could mathematically figure out half of a circle, but no pi is perfect. Like

Introducing all of uh Right. It's a it's such a good example. I mean, it is if thing the more I mean this is gonna this is gonna point to the stuff we're gonna say later, I think. But the fewer complex overlapping details there are, the more everything is evened out in the same. If all pies were completely identical this and there was no variation in texture in them, there wouldn't be a problem here. Yes. But they're lumpy and delicious. Most like people. Yes.

Pies people are like pies. So um being delicious, yeah. So here's the sec second stage. What metrics typically not always, but typically Prefer mechanical rules for counting? Which means that they tend to recognize differences between things that are easy for anyone to recognize and highly accessible, and they tend not to pick out Uh distinctions between things that require high discernment. So one I mean, one example is

I mean, this is a very complicated example. And it also this is an example I find interesting'cause it tells us that mechanical procedures are sometimes great. So you might think that the right to vote is tracking something really complicated like intellectual and emotional maturity. But that's something that requires a lot of discernment. So we offer a mechanical rule. 18. And eighteen does not

track intellectual maturity. We have ch we have chosen inside of choosing a team, we have made a set of compromises on that like this is the best we can do. Right. And in this case, I think it's totally great that we make that Compromise, right? We make there's a case where the the cost of not getting it exactly right to intellectual maturity is lower and the cost.

of bias is so high. It's not always like that. Right, right, right, right. Um my y here's something else. I I just I I think I I'm getting more of a vibe with the things you're into. Michael Endicott, who's a philosopher of law, has this great moment where he says When you're switching between discerning judgment and mechanical judgment, you're actually trading off between two kinds of arbitrariness. Yes, I remember this. So good. With discerning judgment, you let in the bias of individual bias.

With mechanical lines, you shut that out, but you introduce instead the bias of arbitrarily sharp lines. What a profound example that ex that that example travels so wide.

Over and over again, where I've ended up thinking about metrics is not metrics are bad, but there's this complex cot set of trade-offs and costs. And we forget we we have the fantasy that there's not a trade off. And in this case, what we're actually talking about is the trade off of accessibility.

And you can see it back in it's like the recipes trade off again, right? If you make a procedure more accessible, you and you make everyone follow that procedure, you also cut off expertise and sensitivity. Yes, yes, yes. And you sometimes you want to do sometimes it's worth We sh I wanna talk a little bit uh a little bit about eligibility and legibility and trust on that note, maybe. Um and you talk about this as kind of one of the core dilemmas we have in this like world where um we have

A huge world. Science is really complicated. You have amazing work on conspiracy theories, which we'll have to say for another time about how. what's so appealing about them is they they make real the world like fit into your head. But in the real world there's so much complexity we have to specialise. Um, you say uh uh a few a few bits I love. First off, from the outside posers and visionaries can be awfully hard to distinguish, which maybe perfectly illustrates almost the problem.

And then you say, you have this great section on uh transparency is surveillance. You say we limit the harm that bad and incompetent people can do, but we also limit what good and competent people can do. Transparency leashes both kinds of people. forcing them all to operate within the public's comprehension back to accessibility. And then finally We often assume that expertise is just technical.

Experts are there just to run the machinery, like the McDonald's people, the the the fungibility. But the goals and values guiding it all are always obvious and accessible to everybody. But this is a mistake. Expertise involves gra seeing more deeply into what our true goals should be. Grasping the subtle values of the terrain. The whole reason you go to a doctor is that they understand things you don't.

Like this is this is a profound problem that like I don't think has obvious answers. Um but I do think like at root it's about the success. It's almost about we were talking earlier, like um How much we can compress and how much we can make accessible, like We are at an all time low in institutional trust. Yep. Um

And so, like, the I I guess the challenge is like to go back to all the metrics stuff. Like, there's there are all of these benefits we get from the from living in metrics world. Yep. Um and yet. metrics world kind of I think makes us want to trust philosophers and academics and doctors less. Like What is m maybe I know this is like a very long winded question. What does trust need to scale? Maybe is my question. Oh my god.

The whole reason we were talking about Dastin and Porter is to understand what metrics miss about values. So what Porter teaches us is that large scale institutional metrics typically remove high context. And what Dastin teaches us is that large scale metrics typically remove expertise and they both in some way are about different kinds of sensitivity and specificity. They tend to emphasize the things that everyone can see consistently and recognize consistently.

So metrics world for context. Yeah. There's no room for context. What metrics world um I mean I've I've experienced here here's the simplest, dumbest version of this. Our department was just cut again, like de the philosophy department's being defunded in favor of AI programs and the business school. And part of it is because we've been labeled an unproductive department. Even though lots of people f like highly ranked department, you know, public lots of important publications.

Uh dare I say it. Well, actually, here's the interesting thing. Uh the reason is that the measure of productivity in my university has become uh grants, research expenditures. Right. Right? Right, right. Philosophers don't need grants. There's a set in which actually we're very efficient. You just need a book budget and a little trick.

the metric has become research expenditures and that metric can't make the contextual shift of being like this this little group over here shouldn't be measured by grants. Yeah, yeah. Should not be measured by research expenditures'cause you don't need grants, right? Um that sir z that's that that's an oversimplified example. Sure. Um I think maybe an a more interesting example.

The the reason I'm worried about this is because this is this is the answer for why metrics can't capture values, because values are context-sensitive, highly expert. Right. And metrics, by their nature, target what is portable, consistent, and accessible. Yes. Um what is legible. Yeah. And Another really an example that I found really fascinating here is the example of Charity Navigator. So Charity Navigator uh was a nonprofit.

Uh uh is a wa nonprofit watchdog that uh for lo uh was designed to tell us which charities were good and which charities were bad, which were good and which were wasteful. And it's by the way, to go back to the posers and visionaries. Like the the the root of this, by the way, is that there's a whole bunch of people if you don't quantify the world Uh abuse systems. Right. This is exact so the whole reason we want transparency is there are fakers out there, right?

And then we impose a method of transparency that makes them that tries to root out the fakers by seeing who can succeed on some publicly legible target. But that will take out two groups of people. It'll take out fakers and then it'll take out people who are trying to target something important. That isn't quantifiable. But not legible or not easily quantifiable. In fact, another worry you might see is then the fakers will simply adapt and game the very

Now clearly concept in the book of the gap. Which is almost like the gap between what we can measure and what actually matters. Yep. The gap is the gap between what may what is easy to measure and what actually matters. And I think The Charity Navigator case is so interesting to me because for a long time what Charity Navigator used, and I was convinced by and I let it guide my charitable giving, was a throughput rating. So the throughput rating is

Efficiency. Yeah. The the the the a ratio of how much money go is given to the to the nonprofit versus how much it expends out on the other end. Right? Seems good. As it turns out, it means that we're not going to be able to Don't hire anyone really talented. Exactly. So it assumes that a a a nonprofit of like research is just there to like redistribute resources and not to do internal resources, not to hire experts, not to make decisions, right?

Yeah. So but here's here's here's the interest here's I think it why it matters. Here's I th I I I didn't emphasize as much as I should have in the book because I think but I think this is super interesting. Um

In order to actually judge nonprofits' actual efficacy, you would have to understand the specific domain of each nonprofit. If you wanted to compare um, nonprofits that worked on housing versus nonprofits that worked on food, you would have to actually understand the complexity of how you improve the uh uh an ecosystem, how you improve like nutritional delivery services. But throughput rating is a matter of accounting and that's the same between each nonprofit. And so there is a single way

To judge them all in an apparently objective mechanical accounting system. And do it efficiently and fast. And do it efficiently and fast. But it ign and so it highlights what is mechanical and similar, which is accounting, and it ignores what's actually important but highly variable. So how do we scale trust?

So I mean, I think this is super inter the charity navigator example is super interesting to me because it's an attempt to scale trust or it's an attempt to get around the problem of trust.

By uh finding some okay, here's the problem. It was an attempt to eliminate trust. That's what that's what I which is very different. T by the way, trustless systems I I have a question later I wanted to ask you about markets. Like trustless systems are interesting and can be really valuable for the world. Yep. But

They can't replace trust. Right. This is here's one way the the one way to put it, well, I was thinking about transparency metrics. A transparency metric which is made to make an inst institutions accountable to the rest of the world to see if they're biased or not. Yeah.

Um, they're trust eliminators, right? They they try to m instead of trusting an expert about their specific domain of what's important, they look for some public way of counting the goods. Um, but what they that means is that They're now forcing

Institutions not to use their expertise about what's important, but to only focus and target only be automatic. Yeah, the simple the simple, easily countable values, the simple, easily countable targets. Um And my favorite examples of this was like when uh Congress put the National Endowment of the Arts

under oversight because they're afraid of bias. They started measuring artistic success by box office receipts. Yes, engagement. What a way to measure artists, Netflix. Exact exactly. But that's there box office sales, ticket sales, uh Uh page views, engagement hours, all of those are mechanically countable. So the problem is, here's one way to put it, the problem of the world is that there are different domains where people understand the special value of different things.

And to actually access that, we'd need to trust people. Yes. But we need to trust people beyond where we can go. Because that's the whole point of trust, right? That people are and the point of specialization. Right. Then the point of specialization. I mean the the whole

paradox of transparency and accountability is the whole reason we want experts and specialists is because we don't understand them. And then we're like, but then you can only attempt to do the things that we can ex understand. Right? Th that's not possible. Like there is a tension between transparency, accountability, and accessibility, and trust and expertise and sensitivity. So your question is how trust scales? I don't know.

The problem is that I understand how trust works on small scale intimate life. I understand why it's hard to get trust in people at large scale and why we substitute things like metrics. And I understand why that creates an enormous degree of loss. And I don't I don't have an answer. I don't have an answer, but let me tell you two things I find fascinating.

There are two moments from my favorite texts that I've been obsessed with, and I think if I can understand them, then we will understand the heart of the modern world. One is from Theodore Porter, this quantification guy. And he says, because what data is, what information is. is understanding that's been a special is a special mode of understanding and knowledge that's been pre prepared to travel and be understood by distant strangers.

You even use the word engineered to do that. Yep. Yeah. Right. And then over there's this other text I love, one of my favorite pieces of philosophy is a net buyer's trust and antitrust, where she starts by complaining. This is a feminist philosopher from the in the eighties. She starts by complaining against social contract theory and she says, There's this mistake people make. There where they think that morality can be bounded on contracts, where contracts are envisioned as like

voluntary agreements between free people. And she says that's something only rich dudes in a gentleman's club could have imagined would be the root of morality. Morality depends begins independent and vulnerability and relations between Parents and children and dependent and she she ends up saying that the heart of trust is vulnerability and that. Part of the mistake

is trying to secure that vulnerability perfectly because what it is to trust someone is to be vulnerable. Yeah, I need a contract to trust you. This is okay, exactly. Right. Okay. This is where she's going. Okay. What she ends up saying towards the end of this beautiful article is She says, The real reason social contracts are a weird place to build your morality is because a very specific metaphor. Because contracts are a specific social technology to make finds and expectations explicit.

To ease and secure one off transactions between distant strangers. Yes, yes. Which by the way is beautiful. It's allowed immense scale, but the whole premise is actually not about trust. Yes. So I mean, I kind of think if you can find I think that buyers comment about social contracts eliminating trust, uh, and using one off transaction strangers and porters comment about how

Data, information has been prepared and engineered to travel to distant strangers. Those are like two pointers to the heart of the modern world. Well uh maybe it's just a last thought. I don't know. I guess my like my reaction to the scaling to trust thing would just be

And and I'm sure you you even talk about some of the challenges here from the velocity standpoint would be like we trust the other experts. Yep. Like why maybe maybe just quickly like what what are the things that go wrong when we defer theoretically the doctors should all regulate the doctors. Right.

Um but that we we run into the same problems you're describing even in those cases. I mean the problem is that we have to trust experts from distant distant expertises and then we have the we I mean This is I was working when I was a graduate student, the problem I was obsessed with, which I think is still a version of the problem I'm obsessed with. It's a problem that's actually as old as Socrates. The problem is how does a non-expert recognize an expert?

And the dumb way to think about the problem is to think, oh, there's some class of special experts, but really most of us are non-experts in ninety-nine percent of the world and experts in at most point zero one percent of the world. So we're constantly having to recognize non-experts and figure out who to trust, but we're constantly Having to overextend ourselves and become vulnerable. And then we try to secure it with hyperaccessible metrics.

Which imagine away the complexity, uh they they suppose that there's some easily accessible moment, some test for real expertise. But I think the worry is if there's not a mechanical, easy test for expertise. Then we're plunged in the I think the true awful existential dilemma of the modern world, which is there we're surrounded by people that are true experts and sensitives about

forms of value and forms of life that we know nothing about, and we're surrounded by posers and fakers and exploiters. And the difference requires expertise as we don't have. The challenge of so much of this that I that I think maybe leads into what we'll talk about next is um We want

security, we want objectivity. We want we want answers. We want we we don't wanna have to consider the possibility we might be we might get scammed. Right. I mean this is I had this moment Well I was talking about this stuff about trust and vulnerability and I had a student from the back of my class.

Tanked up. It's like, this is why I never trust anybody. You can't trust any b like they might screw you over. You can never trust anybody. You always have to take care of yourself. And I was like, How'd you get to class today? And he was like, I drove. I said, Did you go on the highway? He said, Yeah. I said, how many other drivers and car mechanics have you trusted with your life today? And he actually had a meltdown. One of the things Annette Bayer says is that trust is so intense and deep.

That we we forget how much we're trusting,'cause trust to us is like water to a fish. We just swim in it all the time, so it becomes invisible to us. Are you an optimist? In the cosmic sense? I don't know. This is you tell me. Oh, but but does that make sense? But I think so sometimes I walk my students through this exercise of trying to figure out how many people they're trusting with their lives in this moment sitting in this building. Yeah.

And like what it introduces is vertigo. Cause you suddenly realize how big your trust is. And you realize and I think there's this fantasy that we can secure it. And know for certain. I mean, there's this this th for in philosophy I think this is the cart this is Descartes' fantasy. Descartes' fantasy you see you could start over from the beginning and only believe in things you're sure by trusting only yourself. And that is Yeah, if we just rebuilt the whole world. Right. By the way.

Without science. Um funny. Uh again, this m mentor, uh Elijah Milgram, in his book The Great and Endark Endarkenment, he his joke is that he thinks the great enlightenment um Undid itself because it started with the idea of intellectual autonomy and rethinking things. And that created so much science that intellectual autonomy became impossible. Right. And that the idea that we can think for ourselves is an old out-of-date illusion.

The best count this is a whole separate you ever come across David Dewey? Uh oh it's like science. Hi his f his articulation of good explanations, it it maybe rhymes a little bit with your articulation of good science.

Um having a good error metabolism. Yeah, yeah. It's like something that's a sort of somewhat atomically verifiable by an intellect like an intellectually reasonable person. Maybe that's our best hope and then otherwise we Mix some I mean, I I maybe what part of what I'm left feeling here is like on one hand, holding

A loose grip. Yeah. Which is just like actually objectivity is not something we're ever gonna have. We are going to have trust, we are going to have failures, and also trying to make more of the world have good error metabolism. Right. Right.

Okay. I think I have found the best tool to fuck with your mind. Okay. Lorraine Dastin's first book is about what objectivity means. Mm-hmm. And she ends up saying they're very different senses of objectivity and they mean very different things. And the notion of objectivity she thinks that we have settled on in the current era, modern era, is what she calls aperspectival objectivity.

Or what it is to be objective is to be a kind of fact that would be recognized no matter what person is looking and what kind of person they are. So in this case, objectivity and truth come completely apart. Objectivity is the land of highly accessible, consistent judgments, but that isn't necessarily And there's some things that where it's easy for us to get objective about. Again, the world of the easily countable. And there's some things.

in which aperspectival consistency is incredibly hard. But they might still be important things. They might still be true. They might still be true. Right. So part of the I mean, this is this is the whole I mean, the reason we're talking about all this stuff is because the dream of metrics. is that by narrowing things down To entirely objective mechanical rules, we can secure our intellectual behavior and we can secure our judgment.

So we will always know for certain we're right. Theodore Porter actually says the reason that bureaucrats and politicians reach for numbers. is to avoid responsibility. Right.

Oh, it's so good. Not having to make a judgment or exercise your discretion. They take themselves out of the apparent stream of judgment and say, like, it's not me, it's just the numbers. I don't have to trust you. We have a contract. It's the same thing. Right. It's there is it's a dream of If all that was important was easy to count. Together instantly and we could recognize it, then we could be secure in making decisions together. Right. There would be a mechanical method.

But it's not. And if you have subtle values that require context and sensitivity to detect. But you are so obsessed with the dream of security and so obsessed with the hope of objectivity that you will only reason using easily accountable metrics, then you achieve security at the price of any sensitivity. Yeah. Uh we have a little time left and I want to hit I think this ties well into this last kind of section about the way that value judgments are hidden everywhere. Yep. Um which maybe

Yeah. Yeah. Well I think first off it's worth noting, you have a great line. You say standardization may crush souls, but it also saves lives. Uh you are you are decidedly not anti progress, not anti science, et cetera. Um and yet uh

You say when we start using any technology, we're always outsourcing some of our values. Why are technologies not value neutral? Yeah. This is this is because like part of This is the second attack on this dream of objectivity, which is that many of the metrics we think of

They look objective, but there's also a value choice hidden at their core. So this is this is this massive this is, I think, a basic insight from the philosophy of technology and from a field called science and technology studies. So Uh there's a presumptive view that seems really strong in our culture that tools, technologies are value neutral. Yes. That, you know, people just make scientists and engineers just make tools and just empower people, and then the people make the choices.

Um and this seems once you look at the actual details. Obviously wrong. So the one of so there's some classic examples. I mean some of the easier examples are of straightforward bias. Like technologies can be biased in all kinds of ways. One of my favorite classic examples is

uh Robert Moses and the New York Bridges. Do you know this example? I know a bit about Moses, but I'm not sure I know the specific one. He he um managed to Keep out what he perceived to be the rubbish from the good parts of New York. By carefully. setting the standard height for bridges and overpasses as slightly lower than the average bus. So buses Oh my right. So there's there's an easy that's an easy that's like case one to convince like so you can encode a bias.

But maybe that's back up for a second because because it was just just to say, like the counter argument would be like That's not a technology. Exactly. Maybe buses are, but that's an easy first example, but that's not the real thing. So Langdon Winner, who's one of my favorite philosophers in this space, he has this beautiful article called Do Artifacts Have Politics? And he says but He says one of the interesting things is That technologies actually shape and push

society into certain directions, often irrespective of what their designers and users hope for. So his example, one of his first examples is the printing press. So one of the things that he thinks is really interesting is that oral communication is deeply decentralized.

Like, you know, if I say something to you and you say something to them and he's no centralizing power. Right. Right. Like each of us can change the news. Yes. The printing press, no matter the democratic and anti elite hopes of its inventors?

The printing press concentrates communicative power and communicative authority. It requires capital. Yeah. And whoever has enough capital to have a printing press. And then it's instantly demak that's the official news. So he thinks that Well this is the challenge of technology too though is m like so many technologies, they actually start this way and then they democratize. And so we can convince ourselves of these ideals of the all the ways that will democratize access to power. And yet

This this this you could jump way ahead to 2025. The slope of how artificial intelligence is adopted matters a lot. Not just its ideals. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so so In a very abstract sense, like many technologies have world-shaping powers. Uh in the specific case of metrics, one of the things I find really interesting is People think that metrics are neutral and objective, but metrics capture what So to have a metric to count something we need a c a categorization system.

uh to count it together. Right. Yeah. Counting counting can't be value laden, can it? Right. Counting can't be value laden, can it? Um So Jeffrey Barker and Susan Lee Starr have this great book called Sorting Things Out, where they look at classification systems. And what they're really interested in is the interestedness of the classification systems that

are the foundations of data and metrics. Okay. So here's a simple example. What they say is every category so we can't keep track of everything in the world. We need to reduce the granularity in order to store it and aggregate it. But there are decisions about where to reduce that granularity. So a simple example. US Census has categories for black, Caucasian, Asian, Latino.

That is very interested in the difference between Asian and Latino and uninterested in the difference between South Asian and East Asian. Right. It forgets the granularity there. And by the way, that has seeped into how people believe about like we do we just say Asians.

Right, we just say agents. Similarly, they're really interested in medical record keeping, so they n they they had this this astonishing moment in their book where they look at the ICD ten, which is the classification manual that's the basis of the for mortality and accident statistics that are the that are used for barrel epidemiological and medical research. And they point out, for example, that in the Falls category, there are Separate codes. for the following urban fall.

There are different codes for fall from a bank balcony, fall from a stair, fall from an escalator, fall from a bed, fall from a commode, fall from playground equipment, fall from h hospital equipment, uh Fall from right. There's about ten. And then for rural falls. There's fall from a cliff and fall other. Right? So you can read the interestedness. So metrics seem objective? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But they track We have forgotten the value judgment that was made way back when. Right. We've forgotten there's so many of these cases where we forget the value judgment that's made way back when. Um one of my favorite examples, this is a geeky example, but I suspect you'll be interested in it. Uh a lot of Theodore Porter's book is about the history of the cost benefit analysis. And he notes that

Cost benefit analyses look really objective, but at the starting points, they're all kinds of weird ass, interested decisions. So here's two examples. So one of his examples is If you're trying to do a cost-benefit analysis of, say, how much you spend on a national park, you have to insert into your analysis the value to a visitor of a recreation day.

You have to give attach a number of dollar. Yeah. Yeah. And they just set one. So you'd like you know, in nineteen fourteen they said it was like fourteen cents per visitor day. That's the value of their aesthetic experience. Right. And then you run that and then it looks objective at the other end, but one of the inputs is and we just made it up and expresses our sense of valuation. My other favorite one, and I think

This is one of my favorites. So uh one of the most important numbers in any cost benefit analysis is the discount rate. Okay. Do you know do you know about this? Ba basically. So the discount rate is the relative amount you discount the future compared to the present. Okay. So uh by the way, PS If you set the discount rate to zero, what you get is long termism. Right. Right. Right. Of course. Yeah.

Seventeenth century economists and like Adam Smith worked this out. He's like, Well, if we set the discount rate to zero, you get all these absurd effects where any minor change in the future through compound interest been sorry, any minor change in the present will be justified Because of swamping effects in the future. So you gotta have some discount rate. The present has little basically no value. Right. Yeah. So you have to set some discount rate because you set it at.

There's no correct up. Right. It is the discount rate represents a value choice about the relative value of the future versus the present. And then someone sets it. at the bottom of your calculation and then it gets hidden. And then things look objective. By the way, you could I mean, w you could so easily imagine how Arbitrary discount rates might affect our broad sensitivities for how much the future matters. How much because it goes back to the adoption of technology thing like

Is it okay if we build this technology because in twenty years everything will be great? Right. Or we'll have a ma amazing abundance. And in the the the so much of our thinking is We it's almost like we're avoiding the messiness of these ethical questions. This is this is exact I mean, that is exactly the goddamn point. So the

So the phrase I have in my book for this effect, uh I'm currently calling it objectivity laundering. Yeah, yeah. Like money laundering is you take dirty money, you pile on calculations here, you take a subjective choice, and then you pile on calculations. So I think that's a I mean, the whole thought. In the background, the opening thought for this book was something like games are beautiful because they simplify things.

For once in your life, you don't have to worry about conflicting values. There's a victory point scale. You know exactly how much things are worth. You know exactly who won. And it's so tempting to export that. Simpli oversimplify the rest of the world. Simplicity contained is great. Yeah. Simplicity contained is great. And if you f manage to convince yourself that your metrics measure measure all that matters matters, then you won't experience the tension.

of what you're missing. You'll think, oh, it's easy. And then actually it'll be much more efficient at achieving and optimizing for your metric because you don't get any drag from worrying about all the other stuff. All you had to do was delete from your vision everything else that was important. Maybe that ties in one of the last things I want to talk about, which is

Um mon many people in my audience are technologists. Um I j I joked with you when we first met. You are a philosopher and think a lot about games, both of which are uh kind of like wildly low status. Or uh especially games, but maybe philosophy too.

in a in an area of technology that should almost certainly be learning a lot from from those two domains. Um why why can't we do ethics from first principles? Maybe it's just a super simple starting point. You you joked to me about that and I think it's profound. Um That's a really intense question. Maybe a better answer question would just be like, what what is your caution there to people who think ethics can be simple? Okay.

If ethics is about treating people well and fairly And doing it well invol then doing it well will evolve involve deep attention to the particularities of people and their context and sensitivity to the emerging complexity of what matters. This is I mean, this is again from Aristotle. Uh I learned this stuff from Martha Newswam's version of Aristotle. She says like what

What practical wisdom is, is being soaked in the moral and value complexity of particular situations and being able to see all It's perception, not recognition. Yeah, it is perse exactly. It is Pers I mean, there's some abstract print things I could say that like morality, treat people well, right? But as an actual thing that guides action. If what actually matters to people, what actually hurts them, if what actually helps them

is highly dependent on interaction with particular context, particular personalities, and particular values, then it's gonna require enormous sensitivity and context. And if you expect not just to have a general vague principle of morality, Act well and be sensitive. Sure. Right. If you actually expect a decision procedure that will resolve ethical debates and you expect it to be mechanistic. then you will start to concentrate on those moral features that are easily countable.

And you'll ignore the others. And you'll ignore the others. What do you say to W we we actually didn't talk about it. You you give an example in the book that I love, which is you talk about how maps are value laden as a as a technology as well and how

Um uh su super simply, maps um have elevation because somebody made a decision a hundred years ago for battles and they don't have sound quality. Yep. Uh and critically the answer here is not to not use maps. The answer is to uh not participate in not not to not participate in the world. And so like

We've benefited so much from compounding and uh a ladder of abstraction, particularly in technology, benefiting from the work that others have done in the past, even if they were value laden. Right. Um technology, I think. to a fault, loves to solve for hero matrix and simplicity and like solve for X. But like even for technologists who are mindful of the ethical thing, who want to build quickly and with impact and with with global coordination, like

What do you say to those people? Like, uh part of this is maybe listen to the conversation, read the book, but like if you if you were to Ma maybe a different way to ask this question that's like a little silly is if like I could give you thirty minutes in a room with Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and uh Elon Like what you would try to persuade them of

Which I realize is a different question than the like thoughtful person who's listening to the game. Okay. Um but like what what would you try to have them re You you even you have another bit where you talk about reflexive control and part of uh so much of what I think this is is like remembering remembering to put on a mindset that gives way to these things while still operating in the real world and benefiting from all of that.

So there it's interesting. I a lot of the times I've been asked this question about how we're supposed to survive as individuals, not as your technologists. So what I say about the individual question is often something like it's it's very much like the maps thing. We have to use maps. Which we should hope to do is choose be aware that different maps reflect different values and choose our map. with care and sometimes make our own. And maybe an echo of this is at the structural level.

If you have controls over the structure, then one thing to do is to try to make a map for everyone and force it out. And another thing to do is and I mean this'll sound super simple, but like Help create a variety of maps. Yes. And help people figure out m there are choices. Or there could be choices. Make tools that let people Build the maps they need and want inst and be to be careful. I mean, okay.

I've been thinking a lot, I've been running into people from the technology space who are concerned about the world. And they they have a particular world of what's wrong with uh way of what's wrong with the wor a view of what's wrong with the world, which is that polarization has screwed up a lot of politics in the world. And so they're trying to solve for it by optimizing in a way a lot of people are trying to solve by optimizing it.

for it is to reduce polarization by algorithmically boosting content that's equally agreed upon by both sides. I think they think this is a value neutral way of proceeding. I think it's a way that clearly emphasizes politically centrist and in particular uh political I mean... Here's the uncomfortable version of it. Imagine you went back to eighteen thirty America, where half the population still believes in slavery.

And then you had your bridging content moderation algorithm that boosted the things that everyone, both sides, agreed with, right? That is a very value laden, yeah, very choicey. I mean, I I think there's this There's this fantasy I'll speak directly. Uh I've been thinking about this and I think there's this weird fantasy in the technology world.

That you're gonna be able to make a not have to make moral decisions, not have to make political decisions, but somehow improve the world and change it for the better. And never have to think any complicated thoughts about what better is. Does it make sense? Like there's this It's a little bit uh Yeah, I think it's a little bit oversimplified, but directionally I think you're right. Yeah.

I I mean maybe w we might be thinking about different people, but I have uh big A la I like anthropic and AI labs, they talk about ethics. It's not that it's not part of the discussion at all. So I think we've moved but but

I think that the push that I hope a conversation like this helps people is is like you need to perceive this way more. You need to be well, way more thoughtful about all of the places that values are are laid out. Right. Yeah. I mean I If you think that there's some values that are easy and you can optimize for them, right.

But if you think values are tangled and complicated and you might be missing a lot of it and anything that you do is gonna vastly change the value landscape in a substantive way and there's no easy, neutral way to make the world better without making value and political choices. You might have to be a lot more careful.

Man, I have so many other things I want to ask you. I I I think we have time for just two more. Um maybe three. Very quickly. You mentioned me you have another idea that you think you'll probably spend the next five to eight years working on. Could you give us just a tease? We've already done it. The biggest most interesting question for me is that it's like the question about data spun up. Whenever we coordinate And we have to communicate?

This will require making decisions together about what to ignore together and what to track together. And how do we think about the essential pluses and minuses of coordinated communication. Like not just data, but for everything for our concepts. So cool. Uh you said we give things power by believing in them. Yeah. What do we need more belief in? We've answered this already. Play. I mean, in particular

Maybe p I was gonna say play or humility, but I kinda think they're the same thing. I mean my I guess one worry one way to put my worry about metrics is that the metrics ex Um op the attitude of optimizing for a metric encodes behind it the attitude that we know it's important and we just need to max out for it. That there's no There's no process by which we might wander the world figuring out what we've missed. Yes. And I think. I think that's a good thing.

The spirit of play is like in encoded in it a spirit of humility because you're trying out shit. Even if it looks weird and silly. And r you're open to being surprised. I have just one last question which obviously relates uh Near the beginning of of the grasshopper, uh there's a line from the grasshopper and he says to two of his disciples, I have the oddest notion that you are grasshoppers in disguise, that everyone is really a grasshopper. How do you remind yourself that you're a grasshopper?

I have sometimes I've had some professional success. And I used to be the person that walked into the room and like no one wanted to pay attention to me'cause I was the one working on the dumb stuff like games.

And now I'm getting to the thing where I can see the path of becoming like a senior person where everyone like wants to listen to you. And I like I can start to trust myself too much. And I can start to become overconfident and Uh the way I resign uh in my context, the way I remind myself of the fact that we are all just clumsy, playful, idiotic mud things. These days I bring really weird toys.

I bring some yoyos, I have a new one. I've got these like really silly spinning tops. And I play them with people and fail. And there's something really weird about doing something dumb and hard that you're bad at with other human beings. Being a beginner. Yeah, being a beginner. Um being soaked in the oddity of it, not being particularly good at something, being soaked in an activity where you don't know exactly what it's for and exploring it with people, that uh I don't know.

reminds me that I don't know much about anything. What a great way to end it. T, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening. I hope you were inspired by my conversation with T. And before I leave you, I'd just like to thank Notion one more time for being the presenting partner of Dialectic. If you missed my announcement of the partnership late last year, I wrote up uh just some thoughts on both what patterns had emerged as I had thirty five conversations last year.

As well as the things that stand out to me about the show, what I feel when I'm doing it, the audience and more, those three themes were ideas turning into action, craft, and soul. And I wrote about those and I also wrote about why I think the overlap in those values with Notion made them such an amazing partner for me. I think they're a company and brand and product.

that embodies that is a tool that you can use to turn your ideas into something real, whether it be solo or with a wide range of collaborators. It is a tool that is filled with craft at every level of detail. Um and I think I really admire the way that The Notion team has been able to scale craft. It's not something that's easy to do. And all of these years later, it's something that still goes into

so much of what they do. And then finally soul. Again, probably a a thing that's hard to pin down, but Um something that you can feel and something that is kind of enriched in in humanity and and aspiring to do your life's work, to do something great. I'll link to that in the description uh if you'd like to read it. And once again, thanks to Notion. I'll see you next time.

Thanks for listening. I hope you were inspired by my conversation with T. And before I leave you, I'd just like to thank Notion one more time for being the presenting partner of Dialectic. If you missed my announcement of the partnership late last year, I wrote up uh just some thoughts on both what patterns had emerged as I had thirty five conversations last year.

As well as the things that stand out to me about the show, what I feel when I'm doing it, the audience and more, those three themes were ideas turning into action, craft, and soul. And I wrote about those and I also wrote about why I think the overlap in those values with Notion made them such an amazing partner for me. I think they're a company and brand and product.

that embodies that is a tool that you can use to turn your ideas into something real, whether it be solo or with a wide range of collaborators. It is a tool that is filled with craft at every level of detail. Um and I think I really admire the way that the Notion team has been able to scale craft. It's not something that's easy to do. And all of these years later it's something that still goes into

so much of what they do. And then finally soul. Again, probably a a thing that's hard to pin down, but Um something that you can feel and something that is kind of enriched in in humanity and and aspiring to do your life's work, to do something great. I'll link to that in the description uh if you'd like to read it. And once again thanks to Notion. I'll see you next time.