Playing the Right Games: Why Scores Quietly Replace Meaning | C. Thi Nguyen

Ryan:
[0:02] C. Thi Nguyen is a philosopher of games. He is the author of a new book called The

Ryan:
[0:06] Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game. Thi, welcome to Bankless.

Thi:
[0:11] Hello. I have no idea what I'm doing here. I was going to ask you this in the pre-show, but you know, maybe we should ask it here.

Ryan:
[0:21] I'm excited. Do you know what's amazing? I enjoyed your book so much and I've enjoyed some of your previous writings because so much of what we talk about on Bankless, which people think of Bankless as a crypto podcast, but what is crypto? It is finance. It is money. What is money? What is finance? It is a game. So much of crypto takes place on another game engine that we call social media, Twitter, X. It's all games all the way down. Got it. This is why I feel like there's so much to learn from you, actually, T. Excellent.

Thi:
[0:53] Then you do not have the wrong person. I'm not walking into the wrong room.

Ryan:
[0:59] No, this will be a lot of fun. I want to talk to you about games and social scalability and all of the interrelated things. But actually, maybe the place to start, give this some salience for Bankless listeners, is the way you start your book. There's a story in the first chapter of your book about someone that I personally

Ryan:
[1:17] identified with and maybe some Bankless listeners might identify with as well. This is a student. She's an overachiever. She's obsessed with her body mass index, her GPA. She's the child of immigrants. Her parents pushed her to get 4.0s through school. She's a competitive golfer, trying to get in the most highly ranked prestigious university. Basically, life gave her a set of these scoring systems. And she was trying to optimize for a high score throughout all of the systems that she was engaged in and what snapped her out of it. The idea that you promote that these things are games, many of these systems that she's engaged in, the rankings, the metrics, if she could step back and get some distance from them, if she could start asking questions about these systems rather than just accepting them. She changed her phone background to this constant reminder, is this the game you really want to be playing? I really enjoyed that because it's a question I think that has some salience for everyone listening. Is this the game you really want to be playing? Why is that an important question to you.

Thi:
[2:21] T? So, God, there's so many ways to talk about this. Maybe the most important thing for me, and this applies both to games, to real games and to game-like systems outside, is the idea that we have a significant

Thi:
[2:37] choice in the games we play. We can pick the games we play. we can pick which scoring systems we engage in and we can pick and fine-tune and tailor them we can shift and move them around and I think like

Thi:
[2:49] I've been trying to figure out for a while.

Thi:
[2:51] I wrote this book in part because this student wrote me that email after I gave an early talk version of a lot of this material. And I was trying to figure out what is it about the framing of how I was talking about things that was really impactful. And I think it's that we know in our hearts that we play games for fun, for enjoyment, for richness, for satisfaction. And then if a game like pulls us in and if we fight all our might to like max out that score and then we end up with like misery and sorrow, I think it's really intuitive to think to yourself like, no, you screwed up, right? Like I've had this experience a lot. Fly fishing. This is, there's one mode of fly fishing I engage in, which is dry fly fishing, which is like very, very difficult, very weird. The point is to get a trout to eat your fly off the surface of the water. It's incredibly beautiful to me. It's incredibly satisfying. It's hard as hell.

Thi:
[3:52] You actually have to stalk and sneak and like move through the undergrowth and you like see a trout and then you like sneak up on the bank and you cast this delicate little cast to like to the trout that you see. There's another mode of fishing that I don't enjoy. Some people really enjoy. It's called uro-nymphing. You're basically like bouncing this heavily weighted fly along the bottom. You can't see it. It's kind of exhausting. I find it miserable. Some people love it, but you catch a lot more fish. and one of the things I've been running into a lot of the times is a certain kind of person I was about to say dude and I stopped myself but I should just say like everybody I met like this is in fact a dude a certain kind of dude who's like you got a euro nymph it's such a better way to catch fish and then they're like I hate it it's like it's miserable I just don't dry fly fishing is so much more fun but you gotta do it because you catch more fish it's so much more efficient and i'm kind of like we're letting the fish go man like this is a game this is a catch and release game like you go out you catch some number of fish and then you let them go and you go home and what is the goddamn point right and i think like this is there are times when you're forced to do something because you need to survive but there are other times where we make these

Thi:
[5:06] Choices and i think like this is this is like i think a lot of the times we

Thi:
[5:10] don't even realize we're making a choice. We think it's forced on us. I think the dude that I'm thinking, there's a specific guy I ran into, just miserable on the side of the river, just like hating his fishing and thinking he had to do this. They thought it wasn't a choice. He thought he had to optimize for this particular score. And I don't know, that seems to... Missed the point of the whole thing. So yeah, that's why it's important to me.

David:
[5:33] I think when we invoke the word game, when somebody invokes the word game in a conversation, people's brains

Thi:
[5:38] Probably go straight to

David:
[5:38] Something like chess or video games. We are obviously talking about games in a more expansive fashion than that, like using games as a lens to view a lot of our behavior that we engage in. How expansive can we really get here? Like how far does this really go? Is like everything a game? No matter what environment that we're in, is it always a game or like or is there is it possible to escape games like how expansive can we really get here

Thi:
[6:04] Right so i mean this is this is really important because i don't think everything is a game i when i started thinking about this stuff i was kind of lost about what a game really was it seemed like really an important concept but i couldn't get my hand my hands around it until i found this incredible book by bernard suits called the grasshopper he's a philosopher he wrote in the 70s. This book is kind of a cult classic. And in it, he gives a definition of games that I think is incredibly useful because it like points to one specific point of life, but not everything. So the short version and a long version, I'll give you the short version first, but I suspect you're going to want the details of the long version. So the short version is that playing a game is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of the activity of struggling to overcome them.

Thi:
[6:54] It is.

Thi:
[6:55] So what a game is, is something where one way he puts it is,

Thi:
[6:59] In a game, there's always like an easy way to get to the goal. And then we put a constraint on ourselves. We take, he says, like the long way on purpose, right? You run a marathon. There are easier ways to get there. You could not only take a shortcut,

Thi:
[7:11] but you could call a lift, right? I'm a rock climber. Like you could climb up the front of the rock or you could go back up the back, which is easy, or you could climb a tree or you could get a ladder, right? There are all kinds of easier ways to get there. And one of the things that Suits is saying is that in games, when we're playing a game, we're trying to hit some goal, but it doesn't count unless we do it under the constraints, right? Like if you thought the goal of basketball was just to pass the ball through the hoop, then logically what you should do is take a stepladder to the court and then pass the ball through the hoop as many times as possible. But that doesn't count, right? So the thing that's really important for Suits is whatever the value of basketball is, it's essentially bound up with doing the activity inside a constraint system. So if you believe that, right, then the world just quickly divides into what Suits calls normal practical activity and game activity. In a normal practical activity, there's some goal you want and you just do as efficiently as possible because all that matters is the goal, right? If you're hungry and you need fish, you take the most efficient means possible, which is actually like a net or like dynamite, right? Or, right?

Thi:
[8:26] When you're, I think people forget about this, but when you're doing this other thing that I do, it's the technical term for angling. You're not trying to catch fish as tricky as any, by any way as you can. You're not using a net. That's what commercial fishermen use because that's actually the most efficient way. What you're doing is you're trying to trick the fish into biting your fake lure or your bait. You're like, you're engaging with the psychology of the fish, right? Like all angling involves tricking the fish into biting a baited hook or biting a fake lure. That is a much harder way to catch fish. And it's a game because if you're doing that, it's like, so I don't know if you know this, but if you're fishing, I don't know why my mind is not fishing today. If you're fishing and you're reeling in and you get something and it turns out that you accidentally hooked the fish on the side, it didn't bite the hook, but you just like, it doesn't count. You're like, oh crap.

Thi:
[9:19] I, the term is, I snagged it. It's not, I didn't really catch it because what you're trying to do is a specific tricking thing right and what makes it a game is that what it matters that you did it that particular hard way right does that make sense and under this under this under the suits description anything could be a game but not everything is a game because it depends on why you're doing it he has this great by the tell me if i'm rambling on too long this is like a topic on which i could talk infinitely but one easy example he says is, imagine two people climbing a mountain together next to each other. One is climbing it because there's some rare medicine at the top that they really want. And the other is a rock climber, right? They're a mountaineer. They're engaged in the game of rock climbing. And the way you can tell that one is playing a game and the other is not, is if like somebody passes by in a helicopter and says, hey, do you want a quick ride to the top?

Thi:
[10:12] Then the person who just wants to get there for the medicine, right? They're like, of course, I just want the goddamn have medicine so I don't die. Get me to the top as quickly as possible. And the mountain climber, and this is really important, it doesn't matter if they're a professional or an amateur, it doesn't matter if they're doing it for the reward of being the world's top mountain climber or if they're doing it for pure joy, the mountain climber who's playing a game will reject the helicopter because

Thi:
[10:35] it doesn't count as climbing the mountain unless you did it under a specific set of constraints.

Ryan:
[10:40] Okay, T, let's test this because I like that definition and I understand it very clearly through the lens of the mountain climber example. So here are some serious, I'll call them serious games that I play, like almost like career games, right? So one is a game that David and I play is maybe the podcast game where we create content and we haven't guessed subjects we want to talk about, but we also have a scoreboard related to that. Like we have downloads, we have views. Another game that David and I play is a social media game where you have tweets and some of them are successful. They get a lot of likes. They get a lot of retweets. Some are not so successful. And we have social media games across YouTube as well, right? It's like the thumbnail. You can optimize a podcast thumbnail to be more clickable. And some thumbnails and titles do better than others. We also have business games that we're engaged in, right? Like revenue, growth type games as we grow our media company. Crypto itself is just like one big financial game, it seems like. All the games I played, computer games in my youth, almost seem to resemble the life games that I'm playing now. I mean, it's just about bouncing around and collecting coins.

Ryan:
[11:51] Profit, number go up. Which of these are games under the suits definition and which of these are... Because if you asked about the podcast, for instance, I don't think that if there was a way for us to generate millions of views in all of our videos and podcasts by, cheating in some way, by I don't know, paying YouTube off or something like this, or paying Spotify. I don't think we'd do it. That wouldn't be fun. And so I guess we're playing a game?

Thi:
[12:19] Yeah, no, you've already answered your own question. So first back up, remember that

Thi:
[12:25] For suits.

Thi:
[12:26] And I think this is really important. What gaming is, is a motivation. And two people can do this, be doing the same activity next to each other. It looks really similar. And what really, what makes one a game and the other not a game is their reason for doing it. Whether they're, whether they're doing it to be involved in the process and the struggle, or that's essential, or whether it's not. And I think you just, so I also want to say it's really important that not everything that's a game-like is a game. There's this whole category of game-ish things, and I think it's really important, that there are a lot of times where we hyper-orient towards a scoring system and they're not always games. A lot of the examples I have in my book are cases where there's a ranking system, there's so much power attached to it, and people just zero on the power via that ranking system. There's no other way to get it except by that ranking system. And I'm not, I don't think those are games. They're game-ish. They look like games. They might grab on some gaming psychology, but they're not games in this sense. But you answered the question already, which is, I mean, here's one way to put it.

Thi:
[13:22] Think about a video game, right? Like, what are you trying to do with a video? You're trying to get to the end screen. How do you know that it's a game, that you're playing it as a game? Because there are all kinds of ways to get to the end screen that don't involve going through the game. You could hack it, right? You could hack the software. You could pay somebody else to play the game for you. Like none of these count because the point, maybe that's an easy example. The point is to do it yourself. And I suspect that there are some people for whom podcasting is not a game because they would do anything to make the number go up. And I suspect for you, we could figure out all kinds of things that would count as cheating. What if I told you that you could get more of an audience by doing an optimized AI simulation of you who would like pander perfectly via focus groups and we'd make your numbers go way up? Or what if, I don't know, you wanted your social media count to go higher, so you bought the social media company and instructed the programmers to, you know, an example out of nowhere, like, to, like, rechange the coding to make your numbers go up, right? I think if it weren't, right, does it make sense? If it weren't a game, you would take any means necessary. And it might not be a game. A lot of these systems, a lot of people respond to ranking systems just because they are incentives or connected to money. They'll do anything they can to make them go up. That's an important phenomenon that's right next to games.

Thi:
[14:43] But if we can find something that intuitively feels to you like cheating, like not the way you wanted to do it. Like if there's anything I could say where you would be like, I wanted that, but not that way. Like what's in some sense, what's crucial to suits is that what a game is, is something where we care about the method that we did it. We care that we did it out of this particular talent or using this particular ability. You probably care that you get podcast counts by people listening to you talk and you doing the interviews live instead of having an optimized bot create

Thi:
[15:19] a similar acronym of you.

Ryan:
[15:20] Can we talk about social media for a minute? I recall you wrote an entire article about Twitter and its gamification. This is something that many listeners are very familiar with. Crypto is overactive on social media. is social media a game and is it a healthy game? What are we doing here?

Thi:
[15:42] What really matters for thinking about social media, I think at some point the question of is this a game by that definition I gave is a boring question. That's not what I actually care about here. What matters is the fact that certain game-like things are happening. And I actually think what's really crucial to understand the damage of the gamification of social media is to understand that it's not a game in a really profound way, but it's superficially game-like and it motivates us in a game-like way.

Ryan:
[16:09] And how is a game-like? Can we maybe get to that definition? Is it because it has points? Is it because it has a mechanism?

Thi:
[16:16] Yeah, I think the crucial thing that when I'm thinking about social media as a gamified platform, I'm thinking that's because it renders a clear singular thing the pronouncement of how well you did. So the crucial thing it has is a scoring system.

Thi:
[16:35] Scoring systems are really interesting to me. So when I wrote my first book about games, my academic book about games and art form, I didn't realize something really crucial, which is that you can have a game without having a scoring system. So I think one way to think about it is that what a scoring system is is it something that yields an instant clear verdict that everyone agrees to right like so if you if we if we play a game we all agree to a particular scoring system and then the scoring system looks at our activities and it spits out a bunch of points and we know exactly how we did and there's no way to there's no way to argue it right so if you're playing like one of the classic german like euro games i'm obsessed with like the game tells you exactly what each sheep is worse than victory points what each like gold and you just added up, right? There's no space for argument. One of the important things I think is that real games, you have that a lot, but you don't have to have them. So the example I've been thinking about a lot is like skateboarding before it went pro before it went official. Like if people go to the skate park in order to, they can have a game and they can compete even to have the coolest trick, but there's no actual system that guarantees that we'll all agree about the coolest trick, right? Like, in fact, you can have this competition, you can, you can have at-home cooking competitions and you don't actually need to agree in a verdict, right? Everyone can come out and be like, right, have a different opinion. That's, that's fine. That's a, that's a possible game.

Thi:
[18:03] The thing that distinguishes, I think a lot of the, of the more formalized games that we're more familiar with is the existence of a scoring system that says something like, we're going to have people jump and then we're going to measure how they jumped on a ruler. And then the winner is the person that went higher on the ruler or that says like we're gonna do this thing and then every time you Every time you like collect a sheep token, you get two points, right?

Thi:
[18:28] That kind of clear scoring system is distinctive to board games. And that's what I think gets borrowed by social media, the existence of a single, I mean, here's one way to think about it. In kind of normal communicative life, there are so many different values that we could be judging ourselves by and that

Thi:
[18:49] We could be

Thi:
[18:49] Aiming for. You could be communicating to be funny or entertain each other, right? You could be communicating to connect. You could be communicating to learn. You could be communicating to figure things out. You could be communicating, right? That plurality of values means that different people can be judging a conversation in different ways. Like sometimes I've had conversations at parties where it's very clear that the other person is trying to one-up me and I was trying to like have an interesting connection, and then they think they won the conversation, I think it was like the worst conversation ever. Like that's, that's completely possible. But if you're on social media, there is a scoring system. And if you orient yourself towards it, then you have an instant and complete way to like, you know, Insta compare each tweet, Insta compare each post, right? And Insta compare different individuals in terms of their like follower or subscriber count. So it's that like reduction to a single dimension that then gets quantized so that we can make instant comparisons. That seems, that to me is like this weird, intense feature that is an artificial feature of some institutions and technological systems. And it's game-ish, so we can get sucked into it and like start relating to it like a game. But there's a crucial massive difference from most games. That crucial massive difference is it's interconnected to the rest of the world.

Thi:
[20:11] So I think one of the crucial concepts from a lot of theorizing about games and play is that games are weirdly detached from the rest of the world. There's this concept in the game scholarship that says one of the things, this is from an anthropologist named Johann Hosinga, and he says in the book Homo Ludens that what games and play are is an activity that occurs in something called a magic circle. And a magic circle is a space and time that's separated in some way from normal life

Thi:
[20:38] The way that there's a scholar, Annika Warren, and the way she puts it is we've created this meaning boundary where meanings change. And it, I mean, that sounds fancy, but what it really means is you and I could be, I mean, I could be best friends with Ryan and hate David, but we play basketball and David's on my team and Ryan's the other team. And it doesn't matter what my social relationships are. Those are canceled. And I am all in for cooperating with David and trying to destroy Ryan. And then afterwards, like it doesn't matter, right? It would be really weird for people who were on the opposite team to be like emotionally hurt that I block their pass, right? So another thing that's really important about games is that in not all, but in most games, the points are unattached from ordinary life. So if you, if I, I mean, I mean, this is, I can feel a question back there and I think maybe I'm jumping on the answer, but one quick answer to a lot of questions is, in a game, if I go all out and ignore, think about nothing but the point and think about nothing but maxing out my point at the expense of everybody else, then nothing changes in the world when the game is over. It does not matter if I slayed my spouse or my spouse slayed me. The thing that makes it okay, I mean, you know, my kids have just gotten to the age where I can play video. I've been playing a lot of Super Smash with my like eight or nine year old.

Ryan:
[21:58] It's so fun.

Thi:
[21:59] There's, you know, I was telling my class this. I have a class on the philosophy of games and I was like, you know, it's, It's kind of weird, but it's one of the few ways I just get to destroy, try to destroy my kid all out. And he gets like, I don't have to protect his ego. I can just be like, it's important because I'm really bad at them. So platformers are about the same level and I can just try to fuck him up. And that's cool because that doesn't leave the game, right?

Ryan:
[22:25] Right. It's just a game.

Thi:
[22:26] It's just a game. And on the other hand, if you are social media and the game, the game like thing that people are doing with finances where they go all whatever Jeff Bezos is doing right to max out his score in his activity is not in a magic circle.

Ryan:
[22:47] I see. Okay, okay. I think we're starting to see the distinction between games, which are fun, which don't have real world effects and consequences, and which are time bound to these other game like things, these gamified things that we play in quote, unquote, in real life. And both of them do have a scoring system, at least games don't have to have a scoring system, but many of these gamified objects do. Maybe let's talk about, because that's, I think, more the point of your book, The Score. It's like more about the scoring system and all of these gamified platforms and systems that we're engaged in, like GDP or GPA, as we talked about. Maybe we can go through this and you can help me to settle an argument with my wife. Okay, so this gets into some marriage counseling here. So one thing I love to do is before we watch any movie in my house is I have to look it up on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. I have to. I have to.

Thi:
[23:48] I'm sorry, we can't be friends. Okay. Right?

Ryan:
[23:50] It's like, okay, so let's talk about this. I want to get into the pros and cons of looking it up. I'll give you my rationale. The reason is, look, it's 90 minutes of my life, maybe two hours of my life. I don't want to waste my time on anything that's like 50% and under. And I look at the metrics like with clear eyes, okay? It's not just the critic metric. It's also, you know, there's the user rating and audience rating and I'll cross reference with IMDb. So it's, you know, a bit more pure, but I'm just like not going to waste my time on a low ranked movie, right? My wife is like, this kills it. This kills the movie watching experience. What you should be doing, Ryan, is you should watch movies that you like and you should form your own opinions and you shouldn't go into it with some preconceived notion of how good the movie actually is. Help settle this argument and talk about ranking and scoring systems that I'm seeing.

Thi:
[24:45] We could literally spend the rest like five hours talking about this one question. This is actually, when I started thinking about scoring systems, a lot of my book is about metrics and bureaucratic measurement. But the place I started thinking about it was rotten tomatoes and wine scoring systems. Yeah. I'm on your wife's side,

Ryan:
[25:03] But we'll see. Why? Why? Tell me why she's right. Okay, let me hear this.

Thi:
[25:07] Let me take a simple pass at it and then I'll take the big huge pass so my friend Matt Stroll who's a philosopher of art who wrote the beautiful book Why It's Okay to Love Bad Movies has an essay about Rotten Tomatoes I think it's just it's just called Against Rotten Tomatoes and one thing to note is that he notes if you think about like if you ask most people who love movies to list off great movies by their own taste and you look at them on Rotten Tomatoes one of the things you'll find is most of them sit around 50 or 60% because good movies are often controversial crucial they're often like a lot of things that are incredible often like push against some people are repelled by like david lynch movies right incredible fascinating weird provocative some people are repelled by them some people don't get them right so a crucial thing about a movie that's kind of daring or kind of subtle is some people are not going to get it right so if you're using rotten tomatoes as a measure what you're going to pick up on the kinds of movies that do well on Rotten Tomatoes are precisely the movies that are engineered or made so that everyone will get and everyone will get about equally. So you're not going to get daring movies. You're not going to get subtle movies. You're not going to get provocative movies. You're going to get movies that are kind of

Thi:
[26:19] Acceptable to every taste so you won't get anything that plunges into a particular taste this is by the way this is this is this is different from the question about whether taste is objective or subjective even if taste is completely objective right a measure like rotten tomatoes is going to give you rough okay let me run the case on let me run the case on social media, and then we'll see if this applies to Ron's name. Okay. So here's my case against social media platforms, my worry about social media platforms. One measure of how important a communication is, is how deeply it strikes people and whether it changes people. And sometimes when I'm communicating to people, well, here's something I can do in the classroom. I can say something weird and interesting, and it falls flat on 80% of the people, and like 20% of the people like get it maybe like one one person it like totally moves and i can see in their face that their that their life has been changed at that moment now let's say that instead of looking at their faces i'm interacting with them on a social media platform i do a post and most people do not

Thi:
[27:27] Like it and one person

Thi:
[27:28] Hits like like doesn't register the intensity of their relationship to it. It doesn't matter. It doesn't register the fact that their life was changed by it. It simply counts one, right? So an important thing about likes on social media is there's a flattening aspect. It only picks up like, it only picks up whether or not someone was pro or con and then aggregates. So let me back up. So you're giving me a very suspicious look. So let me try it. Try this. Let's say that your audience is 1000 people. One, one, one tweet that you have kind of slightly clever and a little bit funny, and all 1,000 people find it mildly funny and then forget about it in 20 minutes. That tweet will probably pick up like 1,000 likes or like 500 likes. Imagine you say something else that's weird and thoughtful and almost no one gets it except two people have their life changed by it. That tweet will pick up two likes.

Ryan:
[28:30] I think what you're saying here is the metric itself is like boiling all of the variants out of the signal here. And it's kind of flattening things. And it's one-dimensionalizing things. And you're probably going to say that same argument applies to my Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb rankings. So I don't get any of the high-variance type movies. I just get kind of the low-variance, popular, mediocre, but popular things.

Thi:
[28:54] This is Matt Stroll's point, that if you go back and you look at the reviews of movies that are generally considered great now, I mean, and I'm kind of dodging here because I'm using this like now they're considered great. But if you look back at most of them, most of them were incredibly divided. You had critics exploding like with this is the most amazing thing ever. And other people being like, this makes no goddamn sense. Like everything is incoherent and weird. And like that, when you take that to Rotten Tomatoes, that's going to show up as 50%. Your mediocre crap will show up as 50%, but so will that.

Ryan:
[29:28] Okay, I just want to add one thing. Then isn't that just a problem with the metric itself? We could devise better metrics. So, Tia, your point. Yeah, the metrics are imperfect.

David:
[29:38] I feel like what's happening here is there's two different games trying to be played. There's the critics game, which is people who watch movies in a particular way that the average member of society does not watch movies in that they're not playing the same game. And like me guessing, hypothesizing why Ryan is trying to watch a movie, he is trying to watch a movie so he can sit down, laugh at some stuff, you know, forget about life, forget about the internet and like have a good time for two hours and then resume life. And I don't think he wants to watch a movie that like is like gritty and thought, there's a movie I was watching not too long ago called Mickey 17. And it was like, I think a critic would love that movie because it was a good movie. But part of that movie I was watching and I was just uncomfortable the whole time because the whole thing was just gritty and kind of difficult to watch intentionally so. So the movie did a good job of what it was trying to do, which is make me uncomfortable and like, you know, squirm in my seat. And it wasn't enjoyable by any means, but a critic I think would have enjoyed that.

Thi:
[30:49] Nothing about this has to be great. weird ass comedies. Like some of my favorite Get busting hysterical comedies also don't do great on Rotten Tomatoes because they only appeal to like there's nothing here that is gritty, right? Some of this is just about particularity. But let's let's separate. There's so many things in this Rotten Tomatoes point. But let me separate a few things. There are two questions. One is whether Rotten Tomatoes will accurately give you what you're what you want.

Ryan:
[31:19] Yeah.

Thi:
[31:20] And even if it's a funny light experience, the claim is something like, no, it's going to steer you towards kind of the average funny light experience and not like the weird, peculiar funniness that you'll find. And then there's a bigger point that I think we should shelve for a bit and come back to, which is like being worried that you won't develop your own sensibility, right? That you're giving up some profound independence. So let me, I'm just going to give names to this because I don't want to forget either because I think these are the two, these are the things I want to talk to you to the most. The first one I'm going to, let's call portability. The second one is the value capture stuff that I've been thinking about. So let me, let me, let me go, let me, let me, let's do portability first. So here's, let me give you the kind of like stepped back philosophical answer to what, what you're talking about.

Thi:
[32:12] So.

Thi:
[32:13] So you say, and I suspect you're just teeing me up to say this, so thank you. You say, look, shouldn't we just make better metrics, right? Is this a problem of a particular, of this particular metric? Couldn't we just improve them? It's true that one of the things I've said is something like, oh, it's, you could shift from like the Rotten Tomatoes metric to like thinking about the agreement of the critics in the long term,

Thi:
[32:32] Something like that. But I think,

Thi:
[32:34] I think that's not going to do it. You could do better, but not perfectly and not, especially not in this case, because of the nature of what data is and how data is collected insofar as metrics are based on data. So when I was trying to understand metrics, the thing that helped me the most was this book from Theodore Porter called Trust in Numbers. So Theodore Porter is a historian who works in quantification culture. And he was trying to understand why people kind of like knee-jerkly reach for, he was particularly interested in bureaucrats and politicians and why they always reach for quantitative justification, even when they knew that quantitative justification wasn't that great.

Thi:
[33:15] And his answer was to understand what the particular nature of institutional quantification was. So he ends up saying there are two different ways of knowing things in the world, qualitative ways of knowing and quantitative ways of knowing. And he thinks they're both great at different things. And the problem comes when we don't like find the appropriate one or balance them against each other, but go all in for quantitative in every case. So he says, qualitative ways of knowing are context-rich, sensitive,

Thi:
[33:44] And open-ended, responsive, dynamic, but they don't travel well between contexts because they require a lot of shared background information to understand. So my example for here as a professor is written comments I write on my philosophy major's papers, right? They're long, they're complicated, they're particular, they're responsive to the students, what they're doing. They use a lot of complex in philosophy the language, they use a lot of particular concepts from the class. Someone else from elsewhere in the university or elsewhere in hiring won't understand them.

Thi:
[34:15] Quantitative ways of knowing in institutions work by identifying a context invariant kernel and then holding that kernel stable across different contexts and making sure that everyone collects into the same kernel the same way. So the example here is like letter grades in the university system, right? So an A means about the same thing, a B means about the same thing, a C means about the same thing in every different context. And once we fix that, that information can travel easily. Like my really long, complicated, qualitative discussion of a student is not going to be understandable by the business dean or by someone hiring in Silicon Valley. But A, B, and C are immediately comprehensible. And the reason they're comprehensible is precisely that we've stripped context, high context, high nuance information out of them. Does that make sense?

Ryan:
[35:12] Yeah, it's a trade-off. There's a portability trade-off basically, right? And so if somebody asks me about a movie, rather than give them a commentary, I can just say, well, it got 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. And it's much easier. It's much easier to display in a UI for Netflix too, rating all the movies. And they can say, oh, this one got 42% and this one got 89%.

Thi:
[35:33] Yeah, so that is exactly the view that what you're getting, what quantitative data does and what quantitative data collection does trades away high context, high sensitivity and multidimensionality in exchange for portability. This is generally called the portability theory of data. And so I think the same kind of thing that applies to GPA applies to Rotten Tomatoes, right?

Thi:
[35:57] Like information that I have that I can put down qualitatively. Like this student is not good at test taking, but incredibly good at community building and very original, but a little bit sloppy. Like that's all important information, but that gets squashed out into a bee, right? A bee does not carry that information, but precisely because it's been squashed out, That's what makes it instantly comprehensible. And that's what makes it instantly comprehensible and instantly aggregatable. So the fact that you can create a GPA out of many different judgments depends on us having stripped out all that complexity. Same thing with Rotten Tomatoes, right?

Ryan:
[36:33] I got it. Now, could you talk about the second there? So that's portability. The second flaw in metrics and scoring that you identify, and this is a big theme in your book, is value capture. So what is that? Talk about that.

Thi:
[36:45] So value capture is any case where your values are rich and subtle or developing in that direction. And then you get parked in an institutional setting that gives you a simplified, typically quantified rendition of those values. And then you intake and let take over that simplified, quantified version. So like going to school, caring about education, coming out, caring about GPA, starting to exercise, caring about health and fitness and coming out obsessed with like,

Thi:
[37:16] Step counts or weight or your body weight or BMI or going to social media to connect to people or and becoming obsessed with likes and follows. So my worry about this stuff is that you're outsourcing your values and that part of what outsourcing your values is, is that you're not developing a sense of what matters to you. You're accepting a pre-made value system from outside and because of the nature of the value systems you're accepting they're typically thinned out and portable in exactly the way we talked about before right i think one reason that people often become obsessed with something like weight or bmi and i have been this is like in part like personal confession is it's very easy to communicate because it's just like my knees feel better and i feel healthier and i feel happier when i move through this stuff is very hard to cross compare or communicate right i lost 10 pounds is something that every it makes sense to everyone and that i can quickly compare like i lost 10 pounds you lost eight pounds i did better yo

Thi:
[38:21] So one of the worries about value capture is that you are taking on values from the outside and that those values have a particular character. And it's this like denuanced, decontextualized, portable character. But I think the deepest thing underneath, and this is the thing I wanted to talk about before, was that in value capture cases, part of the outsourcing means you don't have to figure out for yourself what you care about. I mean, so there's this example from, actually you laughed. I want to know why you laughed.

Ryan:
[38:51] And I laughed because I think that's so true. Actually, I think that there's some psychological benefit to considering how well you're doing in your podcast, let's say, or in your social media feed by the number of likes or downloads that you get. Or one example, and I think part of the reason that I was excited to have you on is because, you know, crypto is very much, I mean, we deal in the world of concrete points and numbers, right?

Thi:
[39:22] Finance in general, net worth.

Ryan:
[39:25] It's very easy for people in finance and crypto to just outsource their value to what's their net worth score. And they can check this in an app on their phone. And, you know, they either feel good or bad, depending on the day and what that number says. And it's so much easier than actually confronting the real challenges in your life or in building up your own unique set of values, because this is just what society hands to you. This is just what the industry.

Thi:
[39:56] Hands to you.

Thi:
[39:57] One way to put it is that things like having a meaningful life, a satisfying life, a rich life, a fun life, having good friendships, these are all like, they're kind of quiet. And then other things are very loud. I mean, I feel this constantly. I feel like, I mean, some of the stories are like, some food is delicious and makes me feel good. And other food is low in calories. And it's really easy to grab onto that, right? To that number. And it's really easy to track the success of losing weight, which is how like I made myself miserable for a period of my life. It's really, I just went through this thing. I mean, I, there are moments where like,

Thi:
[40:38] You know, for an academic like me, like you get a job offer and the job offers from a place that has a higher status ranking on this list of like what the status is of universities. And you know, I knew that I would be less happy at this other place. I knew that the place that I am at, which is lower ranked on this official external ranking, right? I knew I was happier there. I knew I loved my colleagues there more. I knew I fit in better. And it was still incredibly hard to hang on to that super quiet sense of like, I mean, it's not that subtle. Like I'm happier. I love these people. These are like, we work well together. It's all. And then the other side is something like, but that place is higher ranked. And it's really funny because there's a little quick vision because no one if you

Thi:
[41:28] An academic like me,

Thi:
[41:30] It's funny because academics like to pretend that they don't care about this kind of thing because they don't care less about money. But every academic knows the relative status of their various departments and publications, right? And if I had made a move to a higher ranked institution, I never would have had to explain to anyone my decision. It would have been obvious to everyone, right? Because ranking is a very legible, transmittable. Status ranking is a very external, comprehensible thing.

Thi:
[41:59] If I don't make that decision, justifying your self-turns seems really hard, right? One of the things I say in my book, the pleasure of games is that they reduce value complexity. Like instead of having like a billion values to think about and trying to measure off the value of like health and work and family and all these things and decide, make complex decisions and measure off between these things. There's just one thing and you know exactly how you did. And so if you suddenly accept a clear external scoring system for your life, like the ranking of university or your net worth or, you know, your military rank, it's like, it's wild. I think there are a lot of different institutions where they'll make fun of other places for being obsessed with net worth than they have their own internal system. I was on a podcast with a pastor and a philosopher. And the pastor, when we were talking about this, was like, yeah, in my church, there's an internal leaderboard for baptism rates. And we're all competing to see who gets more baptisms. And he was like, I've definitely found myself writing sermons that I find less meaningful, but I know we'll get people more in the door and more people baptized, right?

Thi:
[43:14] And it's another

Thi:
[43:15] Case where the simple, I mean, this is why the portability stuff matters. The clarity of the score when you have an external system that everyone can comprehend and they know precisely what it means and explain exactly how it's connected makes justification to yourself and other people easy. And it seems to speak really, really loudly. I mean, this is the same, like opening story, what's going on with like Bro who's on the river, who's fly fishing away, he hates and is miserable and says he has to do it because he catches more fish. Because the number of fish seems to be speaking louder than the actual point of what you're doing.

David:
[43:53] When I was reading some of your work, T, I kept on just thinking of Plato's allegory of the cave over and over and over again. Whereas like, you know, maybe just to recap the cave, we haven't talked about it well in Bankless. It's like, it's this idea, this thought experiment from Plato where you're in a cave.

David:
[44:09] Society is collectively inside the cave and then there are the social elites you know the governors the the leadership of society they are casting shadows on the wall using the fire that is in the cave and they point at the shadows on the wall and they tell society this is this is reality this is what this is what real is is the shadows on the wall but really they're the ones making the shadows and then you know the the whole point of the cave is you're supposed to escape the cave and you go out into the daylight where you actually learn what real society is when you are out of the governance of the puppet masters, the people casting the shadows, the people producing the game. And reading some of your work, I was like, oh, what he is doing is he is expanding Plato's allegory of the cave into this game metaphor where the game is the shapes of the hands that are casting the shadows on the wall. You're creating in this environment where you get to dictate what reality is. And the whole, but the difference here was with Plato's allegory of the cave, it was like the whole point was like, it's noble to get out of the cave, like aspire to leave the cave, escape the cave and get out into reality and then write your own rules. But I think what you're kind of saying is like, oh, you know, at times society really enjoys going down into the cave and creating their own shadows, like kind of creating their own game. Well, I think maybe one of the points of like what you're writing is like, let's make sure that people know about the cave that they're in.

David:
[45:33] But like, I wonder if you were thinking about this kind of allegory or this kind of lesson when you were writing some of your work.

Thi:
[45:39] I'm feeling very pleased and understood right now because I actually have on the cutting room floor for this book is a chapter about Plato's cave, which has the motto that metrics are the new shadows on the wall. I mean, here's one way to put it, that the thing that I'm worried about is that we have substituted for our sense of reality that which can be quantified, metrified, and datafied, and that we have put in front of us, instead of a sense of well-being or happiness, like some legible external tracker, and we become convinced that that's the real thing. Now, one thing I want to say, I'm not saying data is bad. I'm not like anti-science. I take my antibiotics. I believe in science. One of the things I think that's really important is that the large-scale institutional methodologies I'm talking about, this kind of portability concept, is very good at measuring some kinds of things. What they're very good at measuring is anything that's context-invariant and easy for everyone to pick up on. So, for example, I mean,

Thi:
[46:44] One of the reasons that,

Thi:
[46:45] I mean, this is vastly oversimplified, But one of the reasons that large-scale database methods are good for basic medicine is because being alive or dying, that's very easy. That's stable across context. Similarly, bacteria leaving your system, right? That's stable across context. That's exactly the kind of thing that large-scale database methods and quantitative methods are incredibly good at capturing. They're capturing a real thing and they're doing it perfectly. The problem is, if there's something that's valuable, that's highly variable between contexts, that

Thi:
[47:18] Needs a lot of

Thi:
[47:19] Sensitivity to pick up on, That's going to be the kind of thing that large-scale data collection methods that demand portable, easily recognizable categories and recognition systems. That's going to be the kind of thing they're really bad at picking up on. This is why, like, when I think about the kinds of things that we're not going to get good data on, I think about things like well-being, happiness, art, beauty, because, not because these things are, like, ineffable, but because they're highly contextually variable.

Thi:
[47:51] Elizabeth Barnes, who's a philosopher of metaphysician who does a lot of stuff on philosophy of health and disability, has this really great discussion of why I think like health, you'll never get a metric on health. And the reason is because health is not a context invariant concept. So she points out that what health is, is highly variable depending on your interests. She's a great example. She's like, okay, you go to a doctor. You're like, is my knee healthy? And she says, look, what a healthy knee means for a 20-year-old Olympian who has four years to train for the Olympics is very different from what a healthy knee means for me, right? For an Olympian, knee health, what really matters is maximum performance over the next eight years. Long-term pain might be worth it, right? For me, I'm a climber. Like what knee health means for me is I want to climb as long as possible. So long-termness matters more. But, you know, I'll take some pain. It's okay. I wake up, my knees hurt every morning. That's okay as long as I can keep climbing. For other people, what health might mean is to walk pain-free as long as they can, right? So this is the – because the concept of health is interest-dependent, it's going to vary between people. And so no metric will capture it precisely.

Thi:
[49:08] Does that make sense? So the, oh God, how did, how did, how did we get, oh, the cave, the cave. I need to go back to the cave. Okay, let me go back to the cave. So here's the word. There are some things that is very, that data is a very appropriate method for, something that's hyper context invariant, something that everyone can pick up on easily. There are other things that are subtle and rich and important that are highly contextually variable and highly dependent on interaction with a particular personality or a particular specialization. Metrics won't be good at picking up on that. the cave for me is when we start treating as reality only the things that we have metrics and data for

Thi:
[49:46] Treating those as the only real things. And then the rest of the stuff falls. So in the university for me, it's like people will target. It's very easy to target student success and graduation rates. And if you want to say something like, but what about making students who are ethical and thoughtful? And you say, I want to do an intervention that might slow things down a tiny bit, but it'll make students more ethical and thoughtful. Since I don't have clear metrics for that, that like falls off the radar. Here's something I think I've been thinking about a lot that I think is, that might be controversial to some people. I think when making public health decisions, we often hyper-target things that involve mortality rates and we don't hyper-target things that involve maintaining communities or traditions. And it's much, I mean, I'm thinking here about COVID responses. And I think like there was a period during that debate where mortality was the only thing that mattered and like mental health and communities did not matter. And I think part of the reason was that one of these things had a very kind of clear reality in the world of easy countability. And the other was like, really, it slips through your fingers when you try to get an easy count on it.

Thi:
[51:11] Yeah. What I'm hearing from you is that,

David:
[51:12] You know, all of the games that society plays, like using the expansive version of games are like, you know, we learned how to gamify some things or measure certain things. And there's just like a series of games across society that, that like people tend to participate in. One, for example, if we're talking about health and fitness is like, you know, we've really codified down a nutritional label into like protein, carbs, fats and sodium and a few other things and we say like you know make sure you get your points here in the correct way and you know get the American Heart Association gives these points like a thumbs up and then what we lose track of is like some of the more nebulous loose ideas of health which is like you know eating food that was grown you know more domestically closer to you from farmers markets is actually also extremely healthy but hard to codify that into a game when we have the allegory of the cave hard to make your fingers bend in the right way to make that show up on the wall that's particularly hard to make show up on the wall but we can make you know the points around calories and protein and fats those can show up on the wall pretty well and then downstream of that society orients itself around that reality and same thing with like i think when we were talking about social media like pretty easy to orient society around which tweet goes viral versus which tweet has the most amount of meaning.

David:
[52:37] And so like one of the down downstream effects of what your book was talking about with the downstream effects of like a really well produced social structure, call it a game, is like it's actually very easy to get a lot of people in line with these types of points or these types of optimized outcomes. And like, you know, honestly, frankly, a lot of society probably appreciates that even though we might call these people sheeple, including, including myself,

David:
[53:06] Like sometimes I just don't want to think about like how to escape the cave and like think for myself on a wide variety of topics. I really want to outsource my thinking. But then there's like other parts of society where like I actually do want to escape the cave. Like for us, for bankless, it's about like personal finance and, you know, don't live under the shadow of the banks. Like don't let the banks be the puppet masters. But like i don't know if it's totally socially scalable for everyone to be out of the cave amongst all possible subjects

Thi:
[53:37] Right so this is this is amazing i think like this is so good let me let me back up so i think you said to me what you heard in me and so let me say back to you what i think i heard new which is basically i think this is right this is the view the right view is something like one way to put the thing i'm worried about is there's all these things are important in life. And then there's a few things that are very easy for people to count together. And I mean, one way to put it is what I'm really thinking about is what's easy and hard to count together. Some things are really easy to count together because everyone can recognize the lines. And some things are very hard to count together because the lines require a lot of sensitivity or nuance or historical experience to count. And in the metrified world, what's happening in the metrified world is that all our attention is fixated on the things that are easy to count together. Right. And one of the things that's typically squashes out is any kind of value that requires that is highly tailored to you or your sensibility or your experience or your history. Does that, does that, does that kind of track what you're saying? Okay. So there's more. Yeah.

Thi:
[54:52] Then you have this question about, but we don't have enough time. And I think this is exactly right. This is the whole problem. We don't have enough time. So like the thing that I think we have to recognize is I spent a lot of time crapping on outsourcing your deliberations. And the other feature is that we outsource all the time because we don't have enough time to do everything. This is like- Time and just like cognitive capacity. Exactly. This is the most, okay, this is the other half of what I think about in philosophy that barely made its way into this book, but I think is actually the crucial half. The other crucial thing, which is the

Thi:
[55:27] Essential feature of

Thi:
[55:28] Humans right now is that no human being can understand even close to everything for themselves, right? Humans are, the world is vast. We have to specialize.

David:
[55:39] And for everything else, there's a game.

Thi:
[55:41] For everything else, there's a game. No, explain what that means.

David:
[55:44] Well because like I

Thi:
[55:46] Feel like at least

David:
[55:48] Most people are like somewhat at the forefront of at least one domain of knowledge like everyone has something that they are kind of the best

Thi:
[55:56] At or at least

David:
[55:57] The best that they know and for that domain for them they're outside of the cave but for everything else that they do for everything that they don't really know that they're not a leading expert in then they just have to collapse down to like what they think is the best game for them they'll follow kind of the best The path that other people are also following.

Thi:
[56:18] I don't think that's exactly right. It's close, but I want to disagree with one big part of that. So I think part of what's going on is each of us has a domain where we are a specialist and we can really think clearly in that domain. And a lot of other domains where we trust other people because we have to trust other people. We have to outsource stuff all the time. I mean, you outsource stuff because you don't care about it. Right. I mean, I think that's part of what you're doing. Like I, I mean, I'm going to horrify all of you, but I don't think about finance at all. Like I just, like I spent a tiny amount of time. I do totally normal. I just look at some general ranking. I'm like, I'll just put my money in some like whatever mutual fund that people think is right. I don't have the time for this. Look at the expression of horror on your faces. I've just like, I know. I think it's

Ryan:
[57:10] Completely sensible to you. It's completely sensible for a lot of people to just put it in an index fund.

Thi:
[57:15] Yeah. Like whatever, like whatever, like let me find an expert quickly to figure out what to do and they will tell me what to do. And I think that's exactly right. One way to put it is what do you get if you outsource all of your art decisions to either crowdsource or to crowdsourcing via Rotten Tomatoes or to a bunch of experts who tell you the correct things to like? Like what does it get you to outsource that?

Thi:
[57:45] I feel like there's

Thi:
[57:46] A space where developing your own tastes and finding things that please you is far more important than deference to experts because the experience of art is essentially personal. And because I think like developing your tastes is like part of the thing. That's the game. Like, here's my real worry. I feel like I can't think you're cheating if you just let other people push you into the artwork that you like and not cheating because you're bringing some rules like you're cheating yourself. Because the thing that is valuable is the thinking through about what's important and whether you like things or not. And if you just like suck that in from the outside, then you're not doing this like beautiful, you're giving me the, you're giving me the stare. Tell me what you think.

Ryan:
[58:31] No, I mean, I think that makes sense, right? It's like, I think you're losing yourself in the, back to the fly fishing example, you're becoming the person that's just trying to get quantities of fish. This is also, there's an example of people outsourcing all of their thinking to AI or all of their artistic expression to an artificial intelligence, and they're kind of losing their ability to think clearly for themselves. And I think part of your framework is the difference between playing games in an achievement sense for the win or the loss versus in a striving sense where it's more about the process.

Ryan:
[59:09] T, let's talk about this as we start to underline this for folks. And I mean, I think the initial prompt of really your book, The Score, and where we started this conversation was how to stop playing somebody else's game, how to start playing your own game. And I think there might be some people listening that get this sense or feel the sense as I have at various times. I had like a whole burnout episode earlier this year, T, where I had to go and assess like what I was doing, what objectives I had and really think about what wealth I wanted to kind of build and what that meant. And I think many folks are in that similar position of they feel like they're just playing somebody else's game.

Thi:
[59:50] They're just grinding it out.

Ryan:
[59:52] They're not really living. They might feel some of the symptoms that we've talked about. How do they get out of it? How do they start playing the right game? I think there was one idea that you had that spoke to me. Maybe we could start here. It's this idea of playfulness. So if you're finding yourself in a metrified world where you're obsessing over GPAs and algorithmic scores and likes and retweets and performance reviews and all the numbers, earnings reports, all the numbers that society throws out for you, playfulness is a habit that can help you regularly distance yourself from the scoring systems at play. Like have some fun. Is that what that means? Can you talk about that to you?

Thi:
[1:00:35] Okay. Awesome. Great. Thank you. Thank you for that question. Let me take a run up to this. Let me back up and take a run up to this question through, I think, some other ideas that you might find interesting. One of the things that I've really learned from a bunch of philosophers of technology and historians of technology is a particular way of thinking about the world where... Technologies and the systems we engage in have an interest. They have a point of view. They have something they're doing. So one of my favorite versions of this comes from a thinker, Dennis Woods, who thinks about maps. And he says that, you know, maps aren't neutral. Maps like have a point of view and you can see that point of view from what they show and what they don't show, right? Like the maps we look at, a lot of the maps we look at are there to serve drivers or people moving through, but they don't show things like where the soundscape is good or where the environment is good or where the people are friendly, right? That's because they're built to serve people that are driving or they're built to serve like, you know, like tax people that are going to tax property owners. They're not built for people trying to look for a good place to hang out, right?

Thi:
[1:01:48] Does that make sense? And one place you can take this is to think that every scoring system also serves an interest. Every scoring system is there to guide us to a particular kind of action. And the first thing we need to say, and I should have said this a long time

Thi:
[1:02:04] ago, is here's something crucial to thinking about games. To think about games, you have to understand that there's a difference between a goal and a purpose. So the goal of the game is what you're doing during the game. And the purpose of the game is why you play the game. For example, the goal of Twister is not to fall over. The purpose is to have fun. And you can tell that those are different because you can lose Twister and have a great time and your time was well spent, right? Does that make sense? So a big reason. So, I mean, I think for some people who play, there's no difference in goal and purpose. And those are people who only care about winning. If your goal is to win, then the goal and the purpose are the same. But for a lot of us, the goal and purpose are completely different, right? In fly fishing, my goal is to catch fish. My purpose is, I think, to zen out on the river and like clear all thoughts from my head and have like a completely non-conceptual relationship with nature where like my senses all tune up, right? Like I, so same thing with climbing, right? My purpose, my goal in climbing is to get to the top of the cliff. My purpose is, my actual purpose is to get my brain to shut up so I can like have a moment of silence in my head.

Thi:
[1:03:17] So, so again, now you think about scoring systems, there's a goal and a purpose. What is the goal of the scoring?

Thi:
[1:03:26] And a lot of the scoring systems we're surrounded by, I think we don't think about who they serve and what they're there for. There's a really convincing paper I read about the history of the American grading system.

Thi:
[1:03:40] They convinced me that what

Thi:
[1:03:42] Grades are for, what letter grades are for, is not for the student's education. It's to serve the interests of employers who want easy mode of certification so they can quickly hire people that have the qualifications that they need to do the job. I mean, I think we could talk a lot more about that, but hopefully it's intuitive that the American grading system doesn't serve the interests of student happiness or even student education. It serves the interests of employers looking to quickly hire someone that can do a job,

Thi:
[1:04:13] Right?

Thi:
[1:04:13] That's what that scoring system serves. One of the interesting things about games is that their scoring systems, not all games are like this, but their scoring systems built to serve you, right? Their scoring system is built to make things fun or delightful or enriching or satisfying. And I think it's really important that like no one tuned GPA to make it fun or even to make it satisfying, right? And they tuned it for some other purpose. Someone totally tuned.

Thi:
[1:04:41] Super Smash, to

Thi:
[1:04:42] Be enjoyable and delightful and to create laughter and hilarity and intensity that's enjoyable in a lot of ways. But there's an even more meta important point here for games, which is not only are games made for people, but you can transition between games to find the ones which suit you, whose purposes suit your purposes, right? I think a lot about which I'm drawn to some weird-ass activities. I like rock climbing. I've been really into yo-yo lately, like modern yo-yo is wild competitive yo-yo. It's like this super intense world. And it's become clear to me that I like games which are super hard, where there's always a harder thing to learn, and where I can lose myself in absorption and hit some nonverbal state, where I'm super into the moment. What I love is this moment where this really hard thing comes into view that I couldn't have before and so running a marathon is really boring to me rock climbing is great because over and over again when you're rock climbing you're like this climb is impossible oh move your hips this way oh my god I got it or like pay just a little bit more attention to where your thumb is oh I love that and so I can hop games and move between them and find the one that works for me and

Thi:
[1:06:04] For me, playfulness, the best account of what playfulness is comes from Maria Lagunas, feminist philosopher. And what she says is playfulness is the spirit of moving lightly and easily between rule sets and normative worlds. Playfulness is the spirit of not being in a world and treating its goals dogmatically, but being able to shift between worlds and shift between rule sets and try on and off different conceptions of how we're supposed to do and what we're supposed to do. I think like a really rich relationship with games is about the spirit of playfulness. I mean, there's terrible ways to relate to games. You can grow up and the only sport anywhere around you is like football and you hate it, but you think you have to play it,

Thi:
[1:06:47] Right?

Thi:
[1:06:48] That is a very non-playful relationship to a game. And a playful relationship is one where you try them on and you see how different they are. And then this affords you, I think, this opportunity to actually reflect on which systems work for you. There's, I think, some of the biggest lessons I've learned from this come from indie tabletop role-playing. I think it's an incredibly fascinating world. Do either of you do tabletop role-playing, like Dungeons & Dragons?

Ryan:
[1:07:18] I have before, but not in depth.

Thi:
[1:07:20] So there's a super interesting history of people that played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. And some people loved it. And then some people really found that it wasn't giving them the experience they wanted. So there's this little indie world that basically their articulated response to Dungeons and Dragons was, this just keeps making me tell stories of anonymous murder. And I didn't want to tell those stories. I wanted to tell like epic character dramas. And then they basically realized that nothing in the rules pushed them. This is early D&D. D&D's change sits in. Or nothing in the rules pushed them to do character work or character drama or like family stories. It was all about killing things and earning money to make weapons, to level up, to kill more things. And so they changed the rules. They built a different rule set. So there are all these rules out there now that have these delightful

Thi:
[1:08:05] Rules that are like,

Thi:
[1:08:08] One of my favorite, very accessible ones is Lady Blackbird. And in Lady Blackbird, if you run out of energy points, you get them back by having a refreshment scene. And a refreshment scene is a quiet moment with another character where you reveal shared backstory. So the game just forces you over and over again, every time you use up all your energy, to invent shared backstory. And it forces you to do it whenever you're in trouble. And it just like pops out narrative, right? And it's a different scoring system. So one of the interesting things is old school D&D, most of the scoring system is built towards like giving people experience points for killing things or completing quests. And one of my favorite new systems. So Lady Blackbird, it gives you experience points for acting in character and it gives you double experience points for getting your team and you into trouble by acting in character. Right? To completely, like, it's, I mean, I think like, does it make sense? It's like these people are, for me, like the heroes where they were like, even in a game, they realized that a game wasn't giving them the experience they wanted. And so they retuned it.

Ryan:
[1:09:15] Is that an example of your concept of reflective control? Yeah, this is like reflective control. Okay, so talk about that more. Is that basically the principle when you kind of, you treat metrics like game rules, basically? The metrics that the system hands you in your life. If you treat them as much more like game rules that can be changed or modified that you can adopt when useful, but discard when they're not useful, they no longer serve your values. Right.

Thi:
[1:09:42] Although I have to say, like, you know, the whole problem is that games are disposable and the metrics are not. Like, it's very hard. Just be like, well, ignore finance. Ignore money. Ignore money. When the world is actually pushing on you and saying like, well, you have to do well by this metric or we're going to fire you or kill your department.

Ryan:
[1:10:03] Yeah, what's the way around that? If you feel like you're indentured into a game that you have to play it, like you have no other option. And in some of the, you know, not true games, but the gamification systems that we mentioned earlier in this episode, some people might feel like, hey, I'm trapped in the wealth game or the keeping up with the Joneses game or whatever.

Thi:
[1:10:22] I think we have to acknowledge that a lot of the world scoring systems have a deep impact on us, practically, and there's no way of completely disentangling ourselves with them. But there's a huge difference between knowing that something gives you some useful goods and that you all participate in it insofar as you get the goods you want versus taking it to heart as the – I mean, simplest example is just like, there's a big difference between paying attention to how much money you have and how big your retirement account is so you don't starve and have enough versus thinking, my goal in life is to max out my money score no matter what. Right? Like, I mean, in some sense, it's like a super simple thing to say. But like, I mean, there are a bunch of things that the world tracks about me as an academic. my publication rate, my citation rate. And it's a completely different thing to be like, well, I can't keep this job unless I hit this minimum versus my goal is to maximize my publication citation rate any way I can. I think if you recognize it as a merely external system, then you will

Thi:
[1:11:37] As we say,

Thi:
[1:11:38] Like play the game to some extent, but then distance yourself from it and take control where you can. And I think like, you know, there's some people, I mean, if the more, the less power you have, the more you can't exert this kind of reflective control. But by the time you get to, I suspect, the stage that I'm at and that you're at, I suspect that you two crypto experts are moderately financially independent and you're not about to starve and you can get healthcare if you need it. If you're at that stage, then you have a real question about whether or not the scoring system of continuing to max out your financial wealth is the one that's valuable to you, or whether that is a useful resource that can be used as a background to

Thi:
[1:12:31] for some other pursuit. Does that track? Does that make sense?

Ryan:
[1:12:36] It does. Yeah. I love it because I think the message of your book is one of agency with respect to the games that you play and the scores that you use to measure your pursuits and your progress. At the end of your book, T, you have two different endings. It's like a choose your on an adventure. There's like an A and a B. One is a cynical, sad one, and the other has a bit more hope, measure of hope. I preferred the second. I preferred the measure of hope version. I think that the second reflects a bit more agency, maybe, in the individual than the first ending.

Ryan:
[1:13:14] Why did you write two different endings to your book? This whole thing, I feel like very much as I was reading the score, I saw sort of the trade-offs, a landscape of trade-offs, The pros and the cons of scoring systems and gamification of everything, some of the pros are, wow, we've really scaled out society, haven't we? I mean, nation states bring all of these and bureaucracies bring all of these improvements to our net welfare overall and look at the GDP growth and look at post-enlightenment, everything. It's all fantastic. And then also this acknowledgement of the costs of that score, the one dimensionalization, almost the feeling that we're all part of this machine and the loss of purpose, the loss of hope. But it is a tradeoff, right? And I'm not sure that I'd want it, you know, I'm not sure I'd want to go back to 400 years ago before the metrification of the world and the way things are. But anyway, why two endings to the book? Why a few of two minds on this whole scoring system?

Thi:
[1:14:16] We're recording this before this book has come out. And I'm just super happy right now because I feel like mostly I've shown this book to other people in philosophy, so I have no idea how it's going to hit elsewhere. And talking to you too makes me just incredibly happy because I feel like I keep hearing like the quiet things I hope would come out. And I think the biggest quiet thing that I hope would come out is this trade-off. Because I think the thing that, what we're thinking about this stuff has really convinced me is, and I think this is something that is obvious to you because you work in finance, but not to me in philosophy because I work in philosophy, is the importance of scale.

Thi:
[1:14:52] The biggest driving force in what I've been thinking about is what scale does the nature of information collection and what scale does the nature of judgment, right? The whole point is the bigger the scale and the more we can coordinate on some clear measure, the more efficient we are at hitting exactly what we've coordinated on. And also the more likely we are to miss anything that we're not coordinating on, right? So if you set up, if you, I mean, the bureaucratic institutional world is so good at optimizing for anything you can measure. And what, what I'm just trying to point out is that there's a cost and it's not that we should give up on institutions. I mean, I, without large scale bureaucracy and large scale data collection, I would have died at age 11, right? I'm an asthmatic with poor health. Like I would be dead 40 times over without this stuff. So I'm not saying go back. I am saying, I mean, you picked up exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying that the vast power of scale also comes with this seductive call to forget that there's anything else outside of what the institution can measure.

Thi:
[1:16:06] And I'm just trying to say like, no, there's a trade-off. know that there's other stuff that you've forgotten and know that sometimes it's okay to detach yourself there's got to be what I'm hoping for it's a middle ground where it can be like yes to science yes to increase GDP maybe not yes to like defining our entire lives only in terms of our network why two endings

Ryan:
[1:16:27] I mean I'll give you a simple.

Thi:
[1:16:29] Version There are times when I look at this and I'm like, this is shit. This is terrible. This is so depressing. The world is so efficient in squeezing out everything good and human. And there are other times I'm like, no, this is just another trade-off. This is just another trade-off thing. We just have to be careful about the trade-off. And there's something we should be careful about, which is going too far in the direction of only metrifying and only recognizing as important what we can measure via large-scale institutional data. But we can pull back from that. So part of it that I'm of two mind, but there's a deeper, there's a deeper, there's a, this is my artsy fartsy reason. The two endings to the book are kind of my own private glorious joke. I know.

Thi:
[1:17:13] And the joke is this, this whole book is about what kinds of external systems tell you what's important versus what kinds of external systems let you find what's important for yourself. What kind of external systems squash agency and which kinds of ones permit agency. And one of the interesting things to me is that large scale institutional metrics, even though they superficially look like games, are agency squashing machines because they tend towards singular renditions of value that suck everybody in. And games, I think, are agency promoting machines in that they let people jump between different scoring systems and try on different things. And towards the end of the book, you probably know it's like there's this moment where I'm talking about this stuff and I'm like, hey, look, there's some kinds of technologies and ways of presenting things that encourage agency and other ones that don't. And my example of an agency encouraging. So I think there's some earlier in the book, I talk about agency destroying cookbooks that just tell you this is the right way to do things. This is the perfect muffin. This is in the end going to go back to why your wife is right about we're on tomatoes.

Thi:
[1:18:16] Look, this is terrible because you make this thing and it's good, but you're never going to explore and find out what's the muffin for you. And then there's this other cookbook, Jacques and Julia Cook at Home, where the whole structure of the book is in every recipe, there's Jacques' version and Julia's version, and they're different. And then they argue with each other about why theirs is better, and there's no conclusion. It ends you in an inconclusive choice where you're allowed to try out different ways of making a burger. And I think that's agency promoting.

David:
[1:18:44] And it sounds like it gives you space to understand the gap between the two versions and understand why there's a gap there.

Thi:
[1:18:50] And it's great because it has the authority and it does what cookbooks are good for. It shows you the expertise, it lets you imitate them, but then it doesn't tell you what you have to do. It tells you, look, here's the version that makes the salmon super crispy and here's the version that makes it super. And then you get to try them both and find out what you like and also learn how you can move between them. And the two innings of the book are supposed to be that. I don't want to tell people It would be really ironic if I wrote a book about agency and exploration and ended it telling people what they should think. So I want, like, the inner joke is that it's just supposed to be my own version of the Jacques and Julia cook at home.

Thi:
[1:19:32] Like, here's a happy ending and a sad ending. You choose. I'm not going to tell you.

Ryan:
[1:19:36] That's great. And the way to get out of this metrification, of course, is at the local level, right? You promote this idea of value federalism, right? Where you can make decisions in your own life, irrespective of what the system is telling you and what the metrics that the system wants to support. And I think that's the best way to adjust moving forward. T, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining us. Hey, I had just one last question because I mentioned it so many times here in your book. Why do you not like the game Civilization, the computer game? You said it makes you miserable. It's one of my favorite games.

Thi:
[1:20:07] I mean, this is the whole point of the book, right? Civilization makes some people miserable and some people happy and that's okay and that means you can play it and I don't have to. For civilization for me is like 15 turns of interesting decisions and then a time-loss nausea of micro-optimizations that I do not. I just don't. Civilization is something that I feel like I just lose months to. And there are other games. I mean, rock climbing. I've been playing. I mean, Super Smash with my kids is like way richer for me than Civilization. And I think the key point of the book is, I guess, the dumbest possible message. If you like civilization, play civilization.

Thi:
[1:20:56] If you don't, don't.

Ryan:
[1:20:59] That's right.

Thi:
[1:21:00] Don't optimize for it if the game sucks for you.

Ryan:
[1:21:03] Yeah. Make the games you're playing better. That's the message to you. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thi:
[1:21:07] Thank you.

Ryan:
[1:21:08] Bankless Nation, got to let you know, of course, games are risky. Crypto is just another one of those games you put in.

David:
[1:21:15] The wrong game is even riskier.

Ryan:
[1:21:15] That's right. Play the right games, kids. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.