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

[00:00] 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 pointless. 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.

[00:30] One way is to just inhabit one of these worlds 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 world lightly and creatively. There's two different things. [00:45] 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, [01:15] Reiner Knizia 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 care about, what to want in the game. Games are the art of agency, right? They work in the medium of agency. Some games are incredibly good because they give you enormous agency.

But some games are really good because they hyper constrict your agency. Soccer is interesting because it takes away your hand. [01:39] Welcome to Dialectic, episode 36, with T. Nguyen. T. is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, where he studies values, games, agency, [01:50] Art. [01:51] Aesthetics. [01:52] metrics and data and more. His new book, The Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game, is out now. [02:00] 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, [02:10] a musician, what we hear [02:12] 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 act, and also allowing the player to take on different forms of agency. [02:26] I was first exposed to tea and this idea... [02:28] in one of my favorite podcast interviews of all time, where Ezra Klein interviewed T back in 2022, where he talked extensively about this, as well as a paper he wrote called How Twitter Gamifies Communication. [02:39] Other ideas like why QAnon is very much like a video game.

[02:43] 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, 2026. [02:51] And here we are. I flew out to Salt Lake to talk to him and we got to dive deep on the score. [02:55] 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...

[03:07] explore agency, they allow us to be more playful, they allow us to take on different roles and explore values. [03:12] and then scoring systems and gamification in the real world, [03:16] instead flatten us and flatten our values. He has a term he calls value capture 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, [03:27] 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. [03:39] 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. [03:47] 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. [03:57] 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, [04:27] And we talk extensively about why objectivity and truth are not always the same thing. [04:31] 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.

In fact, it is laden with value decisions everywhere. [04:42] This doesn't mean we shouldn't build technology, but it does mean we need to be much more thoughtful about the values that's inside of our systems. [04:49] and be much more thoughtful about the ethical decisions that go into making anything. [04:54] I hope you are inspired to think more deeply about your values and what you care about. [04:58] and put more intention into how you create meaning. [05:01] I also hope you're inspired to embody more playfulness as you go about your daily life.

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. [05:13] 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's 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. [05:28] And it's a tool in particular for teams who are collaborating in a modern way.

[05:33] 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. [05:54] 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 Notion's agent to uncover things I might have missed in my research process. [06:06] or identify patterns, whether in an individual episode or across previous episodes. I'm excited to do so much more of that this year. [06:14] I can only [06:15] Imagine how much more powerful it's going to be. If you don't use Notion already, you can check it out at com slash dialectic. Thanks again to Notion for presenting dialectic, and thank you for supporting, listening, reading, and so on.

[06:28] With that, here is T. Nguyen. [06:31] T. Nguyen. It's a pleasure. What's up? Welcome to my insane home. One of my favorite things about this is I get to go inhabit people's worlds. [06:41] You have a, well, first off, congrats on the book. Thank you. I guess congrats in the future. When this is released, you will have successfully published the book. You have a bit early on in the book. [06:54] 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 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, [07:13] I want to 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. [07:22] This is a really good and really deep question. [07:29] It's funny because there's a way that you can – the way the English language is, we say that you play a game.

This is not true in other languages. The word play is always appended to games, and we assume they go together, that – [07:43] doing a game is always playing. But the philosopher Bernard Suits, one of the people that I truly love, pointed out that this is not [07:51] Always true. [07:53] So he was like, look, you can be playful and not be involved in a game, right? You can be screwing around. You can be at your job and starting to make up new stuff. You can be fucking around with 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. [08:23] to game. [08:25] 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 I've been trying to figure out what play means for like, honestly, 10 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. [08:49] to autotelic activities autotelic means valuable in itself so what what he means is something like look you're um [08:55] Normally, 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, this house is surrounded with like weird skill toys like yo-yos and kandamas. [09:25] place and now you're just screwing around with it for the sheer joy of motion. [09:29] That's one sense. That suits us now. Is that... [09:31] One thing I'm hearing inside that almost is like a sacrifice of resources. Is that too strong of language? [09:37] No, that's great. So there's a perspective by which the quick way to put what Suits 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 but. [09:54] It's only a waste? [09:56] if you thought that stuff was pointless. So to think, when you say that, I mean, that's what I say to my students. You're wasting useful resources for fun. But when you say that, you're already implicitly adopting the attitude... [10:09] that... [10:10] Clear outcomes, making stuff, creating goods, accumulating... [10:15] That's what's actually valuable and action for its own sake. [10:19] is useless. And I think what suits actually thinks is no, that's, I mean, like, that's actually what's important.

So it's not actual waste. 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 waste [10:38] I mean, this is in some ways just utterly 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.

[10:54] Waste is amazing. I love that you used that word, though, because you have a visceral reaction to it. [11:00] It's so not useful. Right. Okay, so that's the first one. I think you said you had a second. Right. So the other notion of playfulness that I find really useful, my favorite articulation of it is from Maria Laganas, the great feminist philosopher. [11:15] in this beautiful paper called Playfulness, World Traveling, and the Loving Gaze. But 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 like, 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. [11:45] 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 worlds lightly and creatively.

To both be able to move between them and also be able to like [12:04] Screw with them and like in your mind, change the rules of the world that your your soul is inhabiting. So I think like I mean, both they're they're they're related to each other. There's differences between them. But I feel like some where between those is some like deep sense of what it is to be playful. What I like about the second one, too, is it's it's more it more captures what you would when you describe someone as playful.

Yeah. [12:27] That's kind of what you're pointing at. It's this sort of dancing. Is... [12:32] and I think we'll talk about this more later, but is creativity... [12:36] You used the word creative very early on in your answer, and so I'm curious if creativity is... [12:42] Just very common in this idea of playfulness or something more paramount. Right. I mean, this is what this is where the two of them separate. Like, I think Bernard suits the first one. He I mean, he's the person, the philosopher that I learned the most about.

[12:57] games from and i think in that you can see the big difference so if you're like hyper focused so on a sport [13:05] for example, like rock climbing, you are trying to perfect 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 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.

I'm just trying to find it. Yes. In a sense, [13:29] that version isn't very creative, but it is like... [13:34] refining my movement and taking actions for the sheer pleasure of it. That's the case where they come a little bit apart, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's helpful. [13:43] I want to talk, well... [13:45] Super helpful context. I think this will come back a lot. [13:48] This might seem strange, and I think the way 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 then we can talk about the sort of global.

Okay. Obviously, the name of the book is The Score. Okay. [14:07] foundational to both sides of this is the notion that we have scoring systems all around us. And I think one thing that, [14:14] thinking about it as I thought about [14:17] playfulness is like we live in this [14:19] highly gamified world. And yet, [14:22] We... [14:23] are increasingly or decreasingly playful. Yeah. You might say, um, [14:28] And scoring systems, 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 constrain us. And so I think to start on the personal and the kind of like local front, [14:42] I actually wanna start with agency, and talk about agency in the context of values. So like, in many ways, [14:48] there's a central theme here to me, which is [14:50] 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 your chain, you change your agency. Um, [15:12] This notably is not necessarily a [15:15] that close to a popular conception of agency in my world, in the technology world. There's a popular conception of agency that is, you can just do things. It's actually less about the reasons behind what you do and more about just doing. You don't talk about this kind of frame of agency quite as much. And so you focus much more on kind of like a gentle exploration. And [15:39] I'm curious what you think about that idea of agency, first and foremost.

Can I take a long-ass step back and do a run-up to this? Do it. Okay. [15:49] This is going to be full of weird details that you may or may not care about. [15:56] I'll give you my personal history of working with a concept of agency. Okay. And it comes with trying to figure out games. So – [16:02] The reason I started working on games, which is not supposed to be a topic that philosophers are allowed – there's a tiny bit of stuff, but it was definitely not something that – [16:12] you're supposed to, if you're a serious student of philosophy at a serious graduate department, ever work on.

I got into it because I was teaching this philosophy of art class and I wanted to do a case study and, and, [16:25] So a case study I did was our video games art. And I read a bunch of stuff and – [16:29] This is [16:30] I don't know if this will surprise you, but a lot of the stuff I found really emphasized, 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 least freedom. You're the most like, you are most locked in to like these cut scenes or pre-written. They were cinematic. And I mean, [16:51] I like those games, but it felt like someone was like – [16:55] clutching for a familiar sense of importance and like ignoring. I mean, yeah, like I would read a 300 page book on the art of games and never hear the word, [17:06] 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 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 i started working with that idea and i also found around then uh reiner canizia is my favorite game designer has this moment in this talk where he's like the most important thing in [17:36] Because that tells the players what to care about.

[17:39] 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, completely obvious. [17:47] You look at a rule book, it tells you not only what you're trying to collect, but it also tells you... [17:52] 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. [18:05] And so – [18:07] 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... [18:17] shaped your action so that actions, decisions, and stories came out of you. And the way I ended up putting it was that games are the art of agency. They work in the medium-sized. [18:28] of agency. And I was reaching for this and I realized that [18:32] People would say like, oh, they would misunderstand because agency just meant for them like activity and freedom.

And that's not a good conception of games because some games are incredibly good because they give you enormous agency. But some games are really good because they hyper constrict your agency. Right. Right. Like soccer is interesting because it takes away your hands. Yes. Like Tetris Tetris is interesting because it's like. [18:51] poker, like [18:53] limit poker, which is so interesting. It's interesting because at each stage, you're trying to do so much with such a tiny action space. And that's actually what's beautiful about it. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, Reiner Knettia, who's like...

[19:07] Borrows from Poker has this incredible game called Raw, and you're trying to affect... [19:13] People's incentive structure, you can only do it. Again, you have three coins and you get to bid them or pass and that's it. You're trying to do so much. I realized what I was using was an older notion of agency. I think Carol Rovain, that quote you read, is a really natural version of this. We have this in terms like when we say that you have a literary agent or your lawyer is a legal agent.

Ironically, we talk about it in AI agents. Yes, right. Exactly. [19:43] what it is for you to have... [19:44] a real estate agent or a legal agent is that when they're performing their job, they're acting on your reason, 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. Like it's very, it's this bizarre one-off thing that you do in games that you structure, you change your reasoning structure. But Carol Rovain, that amazing philosopher is pointing out, she says that we do this constantly.

And it's something as simple as her example, because she's an academic is, [20:14] You know, [20:16] I'm on a search committee and I'm trying to hire someone and I'm not, [20:20] 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. Yes. We're supposed to, as a department, decide what we care about. [20:34] 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, OK. [20:47] Here's... [20:48] Here's another example. [20:51] I think one thing that happens in games is that we cancel out a lot of our reasons, right? Like if my spouse and I are playing a game, normally my standard reasons are I love and support her, right? In that game, we're going to kill each other. Yes, yes. Right? Subversion almost. Right. But we do this all the time. So, for example, this is… [21:13] This will perhaps be embarrassing and revealing, but also I think it's very true. [21:19] I started teaching and, [21:21] I brought my full human self to the classroom.

Yeah. [21:24] 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 my politics, who liked the same music as I did. And that's a bad thing. [21:37] teacher. You were being quote-unquote authentic in a way that was detrimental. Yeah, and I think 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... [21:47] 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 ironically in games we're doing it for play. In these conducts we're doing it for duty or obligation or whatever it might be. But this is the idea. So John Dewey, the great American philosopher, says that in a lot of the art we take something we do in normal life and we – [22:13] 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 see the thing that maybe we were typically subject to. We're seeing the water a little bit when we play games. Yeah. Do you mean like we become more aware? [22:43] out, we're not thinking about the ways we're taking on different forms of agency in most of our daily lives. Like, I think most people's perception would be like, yeah, of course, I'm not going to be like, I'm going to 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, this is probably linking to the later part, but there's. [23:06] 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. And I like 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. [23:26] You're psychopathically committing yourself to a hyper-simplified role and never... [23:31] being playful with it. We will get to that.

Yeah, we will get to that. We'll get to that later. Um, [23:36] 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, [23:41] Like, [23:42] the [23:43] Maybe one conception of this would be that games can make it easy to... [23:50] act to my earlier point, which is like the, the, you can just do things for an 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, [24:04] the kind of two levels of agency involved in games.

So there's the kind of, [24:10] There's one kind of agency in which a game, a specific game, provides you with one particular game. [24:18] 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 [24:33] 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.

[24:43] Right. They give you the freedom to I get to mean I get to have a choice. [24:48] In a lot of my work life, I don't have this choice. Work life after this interview, I'm going to be grading. I don't have any choices about this. There is a kind of agency that's going to be pushed into me. [25:01] For my break, I can choose. Am I going to play with yo-yos? Am I going to run around the block? Am I going to have a quick game of online chess? And each of these is a completely different game.

[25:12] 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 point makes the role shifting easier. [25:30] Okay, this is pointing something I think is actually really important, which is [25:34] What I actually think you just described there is maybe part of the difference between incentives and values. Yeah. [25:40] Um, [25:41] which are two very different kinds of motivators.

Yeah. The first one is like, I have to grade. Right. And, and I want to come back to the agency. You see, [25:48] because I think that part of what I'm really interested in is – [25:51] The you can just do things form of agency is sort of acting like, [25:55] It's not acting based on incentives. [25:58] Thank you. [25:58] And it's kind of acting in the world of value, maybe for a second. Like you say incentives can provide some motivation, but they don't change your core values. [26:06] Maybe to start, why do you think modernity tempts us so much to overweigh towards incentives rather than acting based on values?

[26:14] Well, I mean, I don't... [26:16] I'm not sure that's the right way to formulate a question for me because my worry... [26:21] is about... [26:24] There are always going to be incentives, and my worry is when incentives become values. [26:28] Right. So an incentive. OK, so a value roughly is just I think whatever is your core motivator, whatever is the ultimate guide of your action, whatever sets your choices, whatever sets how you're going to change yourself. Your values are where all this springs from, whatever that is. [26:45] So incentives are things the world gives you where it says, if you do this, you'll get those resources.

And so I think – [26:53] 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 the reason I'm entangling with them, the reason, my reason for gathering those resources is.

[27:18] 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 that [27:26] to think about what our values are beyond the incentives. I mean, this is the – what I'm talking about is the simplest damn thing, which is – [27:32] The one frame of mind is to make enough money to do what you actually want. And the other frame of mind is just be like, well, here's what I do. Here's the scoring system. I'm just going to max out on making money because – right?

And not thinking about the thing it's for. I think that's just – that difference should be familiar to everyone. And that's the difference between like having a firewall between your true values and your incentives and – [27:58] Letting them be collapsed. Yes. I think maybe I was making too big of an assumption there and sort of assuming that 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. What do you think of willpower? [28:14] tell me what you mean by that question

[28:20] Do you know who David Goggins is? He's like the ultramarathon. He's the guy who's like, wake up at 4 m. and carry the logs. And one of my jokes is I don't really believe in willpower. I think of willpower as this sort of grittiness despite maybe even clear incentives that says, I'm going to do something hard. Because in the long run, it's going to pay off. [28:43] I've always kind of related to willpower as sort of like the people who require willpower are the ones who haven't found willpower. [28:49] 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 10 more papers tonight. Yes. And that's going to need... A lot of willpower. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I think... [29:06] Let me try something. Maybe this is not interesting to you. [29:08] So – [29:10] And [29:11] When I was first trying to articulate [29:13] We just introduced the value capture term. So one of the core ideas in my book is value capture. Value capture is what happens when you have values that are rich and subtle and developing – [29:26] And then you get put in an institution or a social setting that feeds you clear, simplified versions of those values, like a metric.

It's sort of the incentives and the values. Yeah, exactly. Right. So 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. [29:56] 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. [30:07] One thing you might think is the wrong of value capture, [30:11] Is it the world is... [30:14] that you're losing control of your values, that the world is forcing your values out of something you freely choose. [30:20] I don't think that's actually the right thing. [30:23] One, and it partially, one of the... [30:27] Okay, if that's true, [30:29] if that were the right account, then if someone were forced to and brainwashed into...

[30:34] putting on a watch and just caring about their steps, or forced to 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 because it was a matter of choice. I think actually one of the most worrisome things is cases where people – [30:56] enthusiastically and freely, [31:00] Choose to be value captured, right? They're like, okay, they embrace it. They lose the plot, you could say. [31:06] And they lose the plot because in some ways – [31:10] It's easier.

[31:12] because the world is giving you a quick, easy tracker, and everyone else understands it. So... [31:17] The thing I'm really interested in is trying to explain – [31:23] Yeah. [31:24] I bet. Okay, I'm going to do some abstract philosophy. I think you'll like this. I think it'll be interesting to you. One conception... [31:30] Of what... [31:31] the human well-being is. I mean, this might sound weird, but we've got to talk about 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 part of, I think, one of the reasons I wanted to set the table, at least on the more personal side, which is like we're going to talk more about all the kind of global problems we have. But at root, these things are intuitive. We forget them. The point of living is to live a meaningful, flourishing life. I think we can all agree. So let me just say, [32:00] There's so many things I want to say right now, but let me just say one quick way to do it.

Like, uh... [32:06] I'm worried about someone capturing your definition of meaning. [32:12] 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, [32:20] 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. Does that make sense? Yeah. So let me give you this. [32:32] 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. [32:40] There's a standard view in a lot of economics and rational choice theory, and it's a prevailing view, the guide social policy that says – [32:49] What people's well-being is, is just the satisfaction of their expressed preferences and desires. Whatever they say they desire, whatever they say they want. 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. But this is also like underneath all of economic theory, right? This is like – this is underneath actually a lot of political science. [33:19] scientists often work with this view that what well-being is is satisfying people's expressed desires also not being paternalistic critically right because it's not that's true that's it respects people's autonomy and respect and it is non-paternalistic if you just listen to what people want uh one of the most interesting criticisms of this came out of uh i think [33:43] 80s and 90s feminist theory. And it [33:46] It...

[33:47] came because of a worry about what's called adaptive preferences. So it turns out psychologically, a lot of this comes from a sociologist named John Elster. [33:56] If I start to limit your opportunities... [33:58] your preferences will adapt to the opportunities that are available to you. I'll lower my bar. You'll lower your bar, exactly. So one of the things that turns out was that, [34:07] If... [34:09] systemically [34:10] Women can't find work outside the house and they're not permitted to work in the workplace. Then people will adapt their desires to be to domesticity.

So here's the worry. [34:24] Okay, we create a world where half the people are not allowed to work. They adapt their desires to fit the limited situation we have. According to desire preference satisfaction theory, we've won. [34:37] We've succeeded. The world is great. I mean – But then you have a falling knife, right? What do you mean? Like you have a – like theoretically – like if you wanted to paint a really, really cynical vision of the world, it's just this – that scenario you just described just seeps into more and more of – Yes.

Yes, exactly. Let me just finish that. So I just did this for my students. It was like, look, so if your view is that well-being – [35:01] 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... [35:12] $20,000 a year and their desires are to have $60,000 a year. [35:16] There are two ways to satisfy everyone's preferences, make the world better or go [35:23] get people to decrease their preferences. Does it make sense why this is in the background?

So this is the – 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 give them everything we've got. They want something really simple. They want straightforward things the world can provide for them. And then things are great. And I think part of – [35:47] The deep thing I've been convinced of is that – [35:52] Desire, preference, satisfaction, theories of well-being aren't right. And this also means that...

[35:58] strict autonomy about values isn't right, that you can have the wrong values, [36:04] Right. And a lot of what I'm worried about is the systems by which you might be convinced to fully commit yourself. [36:12] to very simplified values. [36:16] that [36:18] diminish [36:19] Your self. Yes. And it's reflexive. And, and yeah, did I, did I get, are we in the ballpark? Yes. You want to talk about, um, [36:27] You might have a wrong value, is something you said. [36:31] - What is this, what is the, this is a thorny question, surely, and it's clear that maybe the wrong values, we don't want flattened values.

- Right. - What is the shape or the texture, directionally, of good values? - Okay. [36:44] This is... [36:45] The most interesting question. Okay. There's one way I can imagine this conversation going in which – [36:53] 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. [37:04] one of the things I think that I've been convinced by is that, [37:11] Thank you. [37:12] The right values for a particular person to have are [37:15] are incredibly...

[37:18] dependent on a lot of details about the particular person, their particular context, their particular psychological profile, their particular place in the world. Elijah Milgram, a philosopher who's been really influential to me. [37:31] 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, yes, yes. [37:41] 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, [37:51] Uh, [37:52] You thrive. [37:54] And if you have a value that doesn't fit you in your situation, you fall apart. And 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. One of my favorite examples of anything comes from Jane Jacobs' The Rise and Fall of Great American Cities. And she has this moment where she talks about. [38:13] 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 because no one's making eye contact. And, like, if you try to talk someone up in the subway who's got their headphones on, they'll, like, bite your head off. Yeah. And then you spend some time there, and you realize – [38:39] The value of friendliness does not work. [38:43] 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 – It's like an evolutionary fitness for that environment. Yeah, exactly. 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 context and some values are suited for others and – [39:05] cross-multiply the context sensitivity of values with the fact that different values will be good for different personality types. And then what you get is... [39:17] The view is something like value should be tailored to you, but this is not the same view as...

[39:23] 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. [39:36] This is kind of what I'm, I guess... [39:38] 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 that you made, which is the point here. Also, I think so much of this is running against like,

[39:50] There's a broad feeling that we have a meeting crisis, especially for young people. [39:55] Your central contention is like, [39:57] one of the main reasons is people need to choose their own values. The history of the world is actually that like values are issued to you top down and not necessarily in this like post-modernity metrics or excuse me, um, incentives and values flattening, but in like, [40:12] 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'm feeling some tension, which is like I think it's really important.

[40:22] profound, and maybe it's because I'm a young person in 2025, I tend to agree that we should choose our own values. [40:30] that doesn't mean you should just choose any values. Like, there are good values. There's... I mean, in the background, like... [40:38] Hopefully it's all right. You're getting a particularly wonky philosophy, techie version. This is what I was looking for. Okay, good. [40:44] There's [40:45] I just want to go back and say like I think we should be really careful about the difference between you choose your own values and you tailor them to the specific context.

It's not just a matter of choice. I think this is similar. I was just talking to my spouse about this. [41:01] A lot of people want to collapse this to this distinction between 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. 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... [41:23] 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, I mean, one of the things that Laj Milgram's, this beautiful, you would love this paper. It's called On Being Bored Out of One's Mind. It 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 going to do this thing. And then you're just miserable. And you're, [41:46] that misery is a detection signal.

And then you start relying on willpower, by the way. Right. Then you start cranking through. And at some point, right? [41:53] At some point, [41:54] You have to listen to the signal that this is a terrible value. You are not flourishing, right? Yes, yes. So, oh my God. What was the question I got? I think what I'm trying to square is... [42:07] is... [42:08] Oh, from outside. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I think this is... So one of the reasons I also really like this kind of... [42:18] feminist 90s value literature is that before this, there's this kind of like fantasy.

And I think some of it we inherit from existential philosophy that like, look, 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 values. Yeah, like pure choice. There's this great [42:43] There's this great comment. [42:45] from a philosopher economist named audrey colney but 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 i mean and i i think like there's there's

[43:15] 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 – [43:33] And then someone tells you like... [43:35] 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... [43:42] 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 – [43:48] 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... [44:11] Pure top-down is the world tells you your values and you take them off. That can't be right. Pure bottom-up is like make it up on another thing.

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 in [44:27] candidates and proposals from the world, you can balance them and reinterpret them from yourself. Like the world may tell you, you know, [44:35] It's a bit like taste. [44:37] Like, it's a bit like taste. Like, excuse me what you mean. [44:41] Taste has been a common, a big discussion and something I've talked about with people. And I think, I don't know, people in technology figured out taste mattered a few years, a year or two ago.

And I think the conception of taste is... [44:53] often just 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 maybe the connection i'm drawing which is part of what you're maybe illustrating is like [45:13] perhaps what games can do, and we can talk more about that, but other things might do too, is to allow us to refine our taste and our values.

I see what you're going. I think taste is great in the following way. When you're developing taste in something, [45:29] Going it completely by yourself isn't going to get you there. And accepting external authority states isn't going to 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 tastes. And you do it through this intense exposure and careful attention to lots and lots of examples.

[45:53] And... [45:53] I mean, I think maybe that's that's one way to put it. [45:57] I do think if the world is like forcing a very specific value conception on you rigidly, this is not good for human beings. But a thing that often happens, I think – [46:09] that we're losing in the metrified world is more open. The world might give you a bunch of values, [46:17] 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

[46:28] against each other. So even if the world is generally communicating values to you, you have like a lot of – [46:35] freedom of interpreting particular open-ended terms and finding balances. 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, unidimensional thing that there's no free play in. And that's really different, I think. Yeah, you have a thing where you say precise values embody a closed-minded spirit about what's important in the world. [47:05] particulateness and how values can have these imprecise edges.

Like, do you have any, [47:11] maybe this is a lead into sort of the game role-playing stuff, but, like, what... How do we... [47:16] how do we move towards these fuzzy values? Like how do we sit with them? [47:20] I mean, there's a sense in which... [47:23] They've been there all along. You just have to let them... I mean, the... [47:28] What we're talking about is... [47:31] Thank you. [47:31] basically the value of art like this is not unfamiliar right this is what poetry is like um [47:39] The philosopher Elizabeth Camp, who's this incredible philosopher of language and philosopher of mind, has this beautiful set of ideas.

[47:45] essays about what metaphors are. It says what metaphors are is 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. And I think, I mean, [48:09] It is... [48:10] It's so common to think... [48:12] Uh... [48:13] the more precise the language, the better. And there are two cases where this falls apart.

Um, [48:19] Both of which I'm fascinated by. One is when the world is actually vague and fuzzy as boundaries. When the real world – when we're talking about something that is – I mean – [48:28] 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 – [48:42] that we know things. The other case where we really get fuzziness is when we're uncertain, [48:47] And we want to express that uncertainty.

We want to mark that uncertainty. We remind ourselves we're uncertain. And we do that by having the uncertainty almost. What did you say? We want to sit in the uncertainty. Right. I mean, a paper I'm writing right now is about the term vibe. And I think, I mean, I think it's often pointing that. Like, good vibes, really, it's very openly fuzzy. It's like, there's something good going on, and I can't put my finger on it. We're getting more of these, by the way. Auras was the word of last year, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting that society seems to be, or at least young people seem to be, [49:17] words that are... [49:18] It's the it's the finger pointing at the moon or something. Yeah, I think we're I do think new. 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. [49:34] 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. [49:45] Maybe it'll lead into... [49:47] 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. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. I love that. Like, why does this begin with attention? Yeah. [50:17] are so interlinked, right? What you value is what you pay attention to. I think one of the core things... [50:25] One of the ways that games work is that the scoring system guides games. [50:30] 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. [50:38] 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 – But you've never paid any attention. You never looked at that crevice before. Yeah, never looked at it. And suddenly it's also – I think it's really interestingly – it's like an – like if you're inattentive to your balance of the rock, you'll fall. And so that game is constantly like – [51:05] not only telling you what to pay attention to, but refining your attention by slapping you over and over again.

You were talking about this earlier with the yo-yos. It's like, what a great way to just lock in. Right. Yeah. Like, it is... [51:16] I... [51:18] Some people are – my spouse is very good at attending to herself. I am not. And so I find – [51:25] I think this got cut out of the book. Godfrey Devereaux, 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. Because if you're trying to meditate just seated and your focus wanders, you won't notice because your focus has wandered.

But if you're in a hard pose and your focus wanders, suddenly you wobble. [51:47] Right? And you feel... It is... So a lot of the times, a lot of games, there are deception games where... [51:57] all the kind of normal, like, board plays 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 you're doing... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're moving stuff around...

Well, The Mind's a cooperative game, but you're moving stuff around the board, and you're trying to signal and deceive people by, like, showing... And each of these things, like, focuses your attention on one particular modality of the world. And I think it, like... [52:27] It like refines it. And I mean, I think hopefully it's clear that like – [52:32] The downside of this is if the world says – [52:35] 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.