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

Jackson Dahl
I, I think 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?
C. Thi Nguyen
Yeah. This is a really good and really deep question. It’s funny because there’s a way that you can, the way the English language is, we have, we say that you play a game and this is not true in other languages. The word play is always appended to games and we assume they go together that, you know, doing a game is always playing but uh the philosopher bernard suit’s one of the people that i truly Love pointed out that this is not always true um so he was like look you can be playful and not be involved in a game right you can be screwing around you can be at your job and like starting To make up new stuff you can be like fucking around with like new ways to approach your daily life or cooking. And you can also, he said, play a game, but it’s not really play. It’s work, right? Like you hate it or someone’s making you do it or you used to be interested in poker and now you hate it, but it’s like the way you make money. And that’s not playful. That’s work, even though it’s a game. So there are a lot of like attempts to say what it is to be playful. And there are two. I’ve been trying to figure out what play means for like, honestly, 10 years and I don’t have a good

C. Thi Nguyen
So Bernard Suits says that being playful is redirecting normally useful resources to autotelic activities. Autotelic means valuable in itself. So what he means is something like, look, normally I use this logical capacity to fix things or to 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 kendamas. And there are all these like balance and physical things you would do with your body that you would normally use for like survival or getting food or getting from place to place. And now you’re just screwing around with it for the sheer joy of motion. So

C. Thi Nguyen
And it comes with trying to figure out games. So the reason I started working on games, which is not supposed to be a topic that philosophers are allowed, there’s a tiny bit of stuff, but it was definitely not something that you were 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 so a case study I did was our video games art. And I read a bunch of stuff. And this, I don’t know if this will surprise you, but a lot of the stuff I found really emphasized, they were like games are art because they’re like movies. They have dialogue, they have scripts, they have characters. I have Zelda. Right. And like, they would like celebrate these games that were the least like a game. They’re the ones that were the, where you had freedom. You had the most like – you were most locked in to these cut scenes or pre-written. They were cinematic. And I mean I like those games. But it felt like someone was like clutching for a familiar sense of importance and like ignoring – Humorfic almost. Yeah. Like I would read a 300-page book on the art of games and never hear the word play or freedom or choice. And right. So I was kind of like clutching around for it. And I think there was 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. Yeah. I started working with that idea.

C. Thi Nguyen
And I was reaching for this and I realized that 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? Like soccer is interesting because it takes away your hands. Like Tetris is interesting because it’s like poker, like limit poker, which is so interesting. It’s interesting because at each stage you have almost, 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, yes. Yeah, Reiner Knettier, who’s like borrows from poker, has this incredible game called Raw. And you’re trying to affect people’s incentive structure. You can only do it. And again, you’re only off. You have three coins and you get to bid them or pass. And that’s it. And you’re trying to do so much. And I realized what I using was an older notion of agency. So I think Carol Rovain, that quote you read, is a really natural version of this. And we have this in terms like when we say that you have a literary agent or a lawyer’s a legal agent.
Jackson Dahl
Ironically, we now are, I mean, ironic, we talk about it in AI agents.
C. Thi Nguyen
Right. Exactly. So what it is for you to have a real estate agent or a legal agent

C. Thi Nguyen
So many things I want to say right now, but let me just say one quick way to do it. Like, I’m worried about someone capturing your definition of meaning. I’m worried about someone. And this is why, like, this is why the willpower question is so interesting to me. Because I think, like, if the world can change your sense of meaning, it can reorient your will. It can make you send all your willpower and all your grit towards some simplified, right? Okay. Does that make sense? So let me give you this bit of like technical background that isn’t in the book because it was a little bit too technical, but you might find it interesting. So there’s a standard view in a lot of economics and rational choice theory. And it’s a prevailing view, the guide social policy that says what

C. Thi Nguyen
And I think part of the deep thing I’ve been convinced of is that desire, preference, satisfaction, theories of well-being aren’t right. And this also means that strict autonomy about values isn’t right, that you can have the wrong values, right? And a lot of what I’m worried about is the systems by which you might be convinced to fully commit yourself to very simplified values that diminish yourself.
Jackson Dahl
Yes, and it’s reflexive. Did I get, are we in the ball ballpark what you want to talk about um you might have the wrong values is something you said um what is this what is the this is a thorny question surely and and It’s clear that maybe

C. Thi Nguyen
One of the things I think that I’ve been convinced by is that the right values for a particular person to have are incredibly dependent on a lot of details about the particular person, Their particular context, their particular psychological profile, their particular place in the world. Elijah Milgram, a philosopher who’s been really influential to me, has this view that you don’t calculate the right values for you from the top down by like thinking about some abstract Conception of the good and then like deducing it. You have to try them out and see if they work for you. And one of the things he ends up saying is we get these signals. If you have a value that works for you, you thrive. And if you have a value that

C. Thi Nguyen
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, going it completely by yourself isn’t going to get you there. And accepting external authority 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. And I mean, I think maybe that’s one way to put it.

C. Thi Nguyen
And the interesting thing about a lot of these other terms are associated with metrics for reasons I’m sure we’ll talk about later, is that they’re very mechanistic and easy to apply. And so it’s very easy to, to stop. I mean, the example I’ve been thinking a lot about is the example of screen time, right? So if I, target, I want my child to be involved in creative or interesting apps, I have to make a complex decision. With screen time, I don’t. It’s automatic. But also screen time is a lousy category because it lumps together like, I don’t know, my kid coding minecraft with the worst youtube shorts ever so i’m wondering so the difference between Recognition and perception is that in recognition you apply a category and then you stop looking at the thing the category is the end of thought and with perception you apply the category And that helps you look at it and you keep looking further and further and i think of like, I don’t know, like a version of this is I know people where if you do something odd, they look for An explanation for it. And when they can put a name to it, they just stop thinking. They’re like, oh, check. He’s just goofing off. Or, oh, that’s like that’s vacation. And then they stop thinking about it. They’ve categorized it and that’s done. Perception is the ability to look at something, have a name for it, put it under a category, and then keep looking at it for peculiarities and differences.

C. Thi Nguyen
One of the core ideas animating this book is Bernard Tews’ definition of a game. For Bernard Tews to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of striving to overcome them. So one way to put it, this is in the quote that you read, is that for Suits, the struggle and the constraints are an intrinsic part of the goal. So it’s not the end themselves. Well, there’s a space. There’s a little wrinkle there. So suit says in practical life, what we care about is the outcome in and of itself. So if I’m trying to get to a particular spot in the city, I just want to get there. Any method will do. If I’m playing a game, if I’m running a marathon, I have to get there by prescribed means. I’m not allowed to take a taxi. I’m not allowed to take a shortcut. It only counts as crossing the finish line if I did a particular way. You have a great line in there, by the way, where you say like cheating in a cosmic sense.
Jackson Dahl
Yeah. Which is so good.
C. Thi Nguyen
So what this means is in games, there’s some incredibly powerful connection between the struggle and the goal. Now,

Jackson Dahl
And you talk about this as kind of one of the core dilemmas we have in this world where we have a huge world. Science is really complicated. You have amazing work on conspiracy theories, which we’ll have to say for another time about how what’s so appealing about them is that they make the world fit into your head. But in the real world, there’s so much complexity. We We have to specialize. You say a few bits I love. First off, from the outside, posers and visionaries can be awfully hard to distinguish, which maybe perfectly illustrates almost the problem. And then you say you have this great section on transparency is surveillance. You say we limit the harm that bad and incompetent people can do, but we also limit what good and competent people can do. Transparency leashes both kinds of people, forcing them all to operate within the public’s comprehension, back to accessibility. And then finally, we often assume that expertise is just technical. Experts are there just to run the machinery, like the McDonald’s people, the fungibility, but the goals and values guiding it all are always obvious and accessible to everybody. But this is a mistake. Expertise involves seeing more deeply into what our true goals should be, grasping the subtle values of the terrain. The whole reason you go to a doctor is that they understand things you don’t. Like, this is, this is a profound problem that like, I don’t think has obvious answers um but i do think like at root it’s about the success it’s almost about we were talking earlier like Um how much we can compress and

C. Thi Nguyen
Like there is a tension between transparency, accountability, accessibility, and trust and expertise and sensitivity. It’s another trade-offs for you. So your question is how trust scales? I don’t know. The problem is that I understand how trust works on small scale, intimate life. I understand why it’s hard to get trust in people at large scale and why we substitute things like metrics. And I understand why that creates an enormous degree of loss. And I don’t have an answer to I don’t have an answer, but let me tell you two things I find fascinating. There are two moments from my favorite texts that I’ve been obsessed with, and I think if I can understand them, then we will understand the heart of the modern world. One is from Theodore Porter, this quantification guy. He says, because what data is, what information is, is understanding that’s been a special – is a special mode of understanding and knowledge that’s been pre-prepared to travel and Be understood by distant strangers. Yes.
Jackson Dahl
You even use the word engineered to do that. Yep. Right.
C. Thi Nguyen
And then over, there’s this other text I love. One of my favorite pieces of philosophy is a net buyer’s trust and antitrust, where she starts by complaining. This is a feminist philosopher from the, in the 80s. She starts by complaining against social contract theory. And she says there’s this mistake people make where they think that morality can be bounded on contracts where contracts are envisioned as like voluntary agreements between free People. And she says that’s something only rich dudes in a gentleman’s club could have imagined would be the root of morality. Morality depends, begins in dependence and vulnerability and relations between parents and children and dependent. And she ends up saying that the heart of trust is vulnerability and that part of the mistake is trying to secure that vulnerability perfectly. Because what it is to trust someone is to be vulnerable. Yeah, I need a contract to trust you. Exactly. Right. Okay, this is where she’s going. Okay. What she ends up saying towards the end of this beautiful article is, she says, the real reason social contracts are a weird place to build your morality is because it’s a very specific Metaphor. Because contracts are a specific social technology to make fines and expectations explicit to ease and secure one-off transactions between distant strangers.
Jackson Dahl
Yes. Yes. Which, by the way, is beautiful. It’s a loud men’s scale, but the whole premise is actually not about trust.
C. Thi Nguyen
Yes. So, I mean, I kind of think if you can find, I think that buyers comment about social contracts, eliminating trust, and easing one-off transactions with strangers, and Porter’s comment About how data, information has been prepared and engineered to travel to distant strangers. Those are like two pointers to the heart of the modern world.
Jackson Dahl
Maybe it’s just the last thought. Guess my like my reaction to the scaling trust thing would just be and and i’m sure you even talk about some of the challenges here from the velocity standpoint would be like we trust the Other experts yeah like what maybe just quickly like what what are the things that go wrong when we defer theoretically the doctors should all regulate the doctors right um but that We run into the same problems you’re describing even in those cases.
C. Thi Nguyen
I mean, the problem is that we have to trust experts from distant expertises. And then we have – I mean, this is – I was working – when I was a graduate student, the problem I was obsessed with, which I think is still a version of the problem I’m obsessed with. It’s a problem that’s actually as old as Socrates. The problem is how does a non-expert recognize an expert?

C. Thi Nguyen
Exactly. Right. Okay, this is where she’s going. Okay. What she ends up saying towards the end of this beautiful article is, she says, the real reason social contracts are a weird place to build your morality is because it’s a very specific Metaphor. Because contracts are a specific social technology to make fines and expectations explicit to ease and secure one-off transactions between distant strangers.
Jackson Dahl
Yes. Yes. Which, by the way, is beautiful. It’s a loud men’s scale, but the whole premise is actually not about trust.
C. Thi Nguyen
Yes. So, I mean, I kind of think if you can find, I think that buyers comment about social contracts, eliminating trust, and easing one-off transactions with strangers, and Porter’s comment About how

C. Thi Nguyen
Moment where I was talking about this stuff, about trust and vulnerability. And I had a student from the back of my class, like big guy, tanked up. He’s like, this is why I never trust anybody. You can’t trust any, like they might screw you over. You can never trust anybody. You always have to take care of yourself. And I was like, how’d you get to class today? He was like, I drove. I said, did you go on the highway? He said, yeah. I said, how many other drivers and car mechanics have you trusted with your life today? And he actually had a meltdown. One of the things Annette Beyer says is that trust is so intense and deep that we forget how much we’re trusting because trust to us is like water to a fish. We just swim in it all the time so it becomes invisible to us.
Jackson Dahl
Are you an optimist in the cosmic sense? I don’t know. You tell me.
C. Thi Nguyen
But does that that make sense? But I think, so sometimes I walk my students through this exercise of trying to figure out how many people they’re trusting with their lives in this moment, sitting in this building. And like what it introduces is vertigo. Because you suddenly realize how big your trust is. And you realize, and I think there’s this fantasy that we can secure it and know for certain. I mean, in philosophy, I think this is Descartes’ fantasy. Descartes’ fantasy is you could start over from the beginning and only believe in things you’re sure by trusting only yourself. And that is – Yeah, if we just rebuilt the whole world. Right. By the way. Without science. Um funny uh again this mentor elijah milgram in his book the great and dark and darkenment he his joke is that he thinks the great enlightenment um undid itself because it started with The idea of intellectual autonomy and rethinking things and that created so much science that intellectual autonomy became impossible right and that the idea that we could think For ourselves is an old out of date illusion the best count this is a whole separate you ever come across david deutch though uh it’s like his his articulation

C. Thi Nguyen
A lot there too i think i have found the best tool to fuck with your mind okay lorraine daston’s first book is about what objectivity means and she ends up saying they’re very different Senses of objectivity and they mean very different things and the notion of objectivity she thinks that we have settled on in the current era, modern era, is what she calls a perspectival Objectivity. Where what it is to be objective is to be a kind of fact that would be recognized no matter what person is looking and what kind of person they are. So in this case, objectivity and truth come completely apart. Objectivity is the land of highly accessible, consistent judgments, but that isn’t necessarily. And there are some things that where it’s easy for us to get objective about, again, the world of the easily countable. And there are some things in which a perspectival consistency is incredibly hard, but they might still be important things. They might still be true. They might still be true, right? So part of the – I mean, this is the whole – I mean, the reason we’re talking about all this stuff is because the dream of metrics is that by narrowing things down to entirely objective mechanical Rules, can secure our intellectual behavior and we can secure our judgments. So we will always know for certain we’re right. Theodore Porter actually says the reason that bureaucrats and politicians reach for numbers is to avoid responsibility.

Jackson Dahl
Joked with you when we first met, you are a philosopher and think a lot about games both of which are kind of like wildly low status or especially games but maybe philosophy too in an area Of technology that should almost certainly be learning a lot from from those two domains um why why can’t we do ethics from first principles maybe it’s just a super simple starting point You you joked to me about that and i think it’s profound um that’s a really intense question maybe a better and question would just be like what what is your caution there to people who
C. Thi Nguyen
Think ethics can be simple okay if ethics is about treating people well and fairly and doing it well involved then doing it well will evolve involve deep attention to the particularities Of people and their context and sensitivity to the emerging complexity of what matters this is i mean this is again from aristotle i learned this stuff from martha nussbaum’s version Of aristotle which is like what what practical wisdom is is being soaked in the moral and value complexity of particular situations and being able to see all… It’s perception, not recognition. Yeah, it is… Exactly. It is… I mean, there are some abstract things I could say that, like, morality, treat people well. Right. But as an actual thing that guides action, if what actually matters to people, what actually hurts them, if what actually helps them is highly dependent on interaction with particular Context, particular personalities, and particular values, then it’s going to require enormous sensitivity and context. And if you expect not just to have a general vague principle of morality, act well and be sensitive. If you actually expect a decision procedure that will resolve ethical debates and you expect it to be mechanistic, then you will start to concentrate on those moral features that are Easily countable. Yes.
Jackson Dahl
And you will ignore the others. And you will ignore the others. What do you say to… We actually didn’t talk about it. You give an example in the book that I love, which is you talk about how maps are value laden as a technology as well. And how, super simply maps have elevation because somebody made a decision a hundred years

C. Thi Nguyen
A lot of the times, I’ve been asked this question about how we’re supposed to survive as individuals, not as your technologist. So what I say about the individual question is often something like, it’s very much like the maps thing. We have to use maps, but what we should hope to do is choose, be aware that different maps reflect different values and choose our maps with care and sometimes make our own. And maybe an echo of this is at the structural level, if you have controls over the structure, then one thing to do is to try to make a map for everyone and force it out. And another thing to do is, and I mean, this will sound super simple, but like help create a variety of maps. Yes. And help people figure out. There are choices. Or there could be choices. Make tools that let people build the maps they need and want and be, to be careful. I mean, okay, let’s focus on this. I’m going to focus on a simple case. I’ve been thinking a lot. I’ve been running into people from the technology space who are concerned about the world. And they have a particular way of what’s wrong with the world, which is that polarization has screwed up a lot of politics in the world.

C. Thi Nguyen
I’ve been running into people from the technology space who are concerned about the world. And they have a particular way of what’s wrong with the world, which is that polarization has screwed up a lot of politics in the world. And so they’re trying to solve for it by optimizing. The way a lot of people are trying to solve by optimizing it for it is to reduce polarization by algorithmically boosting content that’s equally agreed upon by both sides i think they Think this is a value neutral way of proceeding i think it’s a way that clearly emphasizes politically centrist and in particular uh I mean, here’s the uncomfortable version of it. Imagine you went back to 1830 America where half the population still believes in slavery. And then you had your bridging content moderation algorithm that boosted the things that everyone, both sides agreed with, right? That is a very value laden, very choicy. I mean, I think there’s this there’s this fantasy i’ll speak directly i’ve been thinking about this and i think there’s this weird fantasy in the technology world that you’re going To be able to make a not have to make moral decisions not have to make political decisions but somehow improve the world and change it for the better and never have to think any complicated Thoughts about what better is. Does it make sense? Like there’s this- It’s a little bit, I think it’s a little bit oversimplified, but directionally, I think you’re right.