The Score Review by C Thi Nguyen – A fascinating warning about the manipulation of everyday life | Philosophical books

TTwo years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accumulation of vocabulary was fun. Each lesson earned me experience points – a small reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

But something strange happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favoring the lessons that delivered the most points with the least effort. Things came to a head when I spent an entire vacation glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second kanji lesson over and over again like a pigeon pecking at a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.

Philosopher Si Thi Nguyen’s new book addresses precisely this kind of deviant behavior. He believes that mixing dots with dots is a common mistake that leads us to build our lives and societies around things we do not want. “Capturing value,” as Nguyen calls it, happens when the lines between what you care about and how you measure your progress start to blur. You internalize the measure — in a sense, it replaces your original goal — so that it “redefines your basic sense of what is important.”

He gives the example of US law school league tables, which were introduced to provide an apparently objective measure of candidates who had previously relied on promotional materials and insider gossip. The new data, supposedly difficult, focused on a few narrow metrics.

Whereas previously law schools distinguished themselves with mission statements that defined their unique philosophy and focus, league tables have consolidated these precise, hard-to-measure values ​​into a single number—and forced schools to either chase that number, or lose funding and students. The result, Nguyen tells us, is that “huge shares of university resources have been diverted away from real educational activity and toward efforts designed solely to manipulate the rankings.”

Part of this ranking is calculated by the number of applicants a school rejects each year. Logic goes: the higher the rejection rate, the more elite and desirable the school is. This encourages many law schools to spend money to get applications from students who have almost no chance of getting in, “simply so they have more people to reject,” Nguyen says.

Nguyen is clear, entertaining, and precise, illustrating ideas with a mix of personal stories and real-life examples. He has a special talent for conveying the specific and intrinsic pleasures of his many passions, from the “explosive hip swings” and “sweet joy” of rock climbing, to the meditative alchemy of fly fishing, where he becomes “a nexus point in this wonderful vast flow of information.” The goal of fly fishing is not to catch a fish, it is how you feel while fishing You try To catch a fish.

I’ve always been fascinated by a book that can reference Reiner Knizia (“the Mozart of German game design”) one moment and a speedy Mario Odyssey the next. But this is not a specialized thesis. Appropriating value leads us to waste our lives, Nguyen says. We optimize for a paycheck, YouTube views, or our position on a leaderboard (he admits he’s made himself miserable by obsessing over rankings in philosophy sections and magazines), and we neglect the experiences that make life worth living.

At the societal level, capturing value forces us to focus on metrics such as GDP, employment figures, and test scores. Quantitative data promises to transform highly complex cross-sections of our world into portable summaries. It’s a tempting bargain: “delicious clarity” in the form of a simple score, at the expense of context and nuance. “This is the idea that keeps me up at night, the grim truth about the heart of data,” Nguyen says.

Our uncritical respect for metrics allows for what Nguyen calls “the laundering of objectivity” — where bureaucrats obscure their agency in decisions about our schools, hospitals, and well-being, by invoking “numbers” as neutral arbiters. Those in power choose the metrics they support, and then claim that the actions driven by those metrics somehow transcend ideology.

The result is a compelling read that is urgent but never unsettling. For Nguyen, wonder, absorption, and play are essential to human flourishing. Metrics are an invasive species that threaten to replace our curious, delicate joys with the oblivious epistemological fundamentalism of tables and graphs. Despite – or perhaps because of – the seriousness of these issues, she emerged rich and well-off from them.