1133: The Philosophy of Scores: How to Measure What Truly Matters and Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game with C. Thi Nguyen

Hobbes actually says that the real source of political power, the ultimate form of political power, is not military strength or might or even economic strength, it's power over language. Because if you can dictate to them what success and failure mean, then you can control them from the inside. And these are the stakes, I think. What metrics actually are a way of fixing what counts as success and fixing what we should all be moving towards.

And if there's some systematic slippage between what actually matters and the kinds of things it's easy to build metrics about, then our entire internal guidance system is going to be deeply rewritten at its core based on somebody else's values. That's Teen Wen. He's an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah who specializes in the philosophy of games and technology, as well as the theory of value. He's also the author of The Score, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game, which I loved reading.

A lot of T's philosophical insights have huge implications for how we behave at work, so you'll learn one, how metrics can co opt our values and behavior, two, the hidden costs of the desire to quantify everything, and three, why the wrong people so often seem to get ahead. And if you want a quick summary write up of some actionable takeaways that T shares, I recommend you sign up for the free Golden Night email newsletter, which you can find over at awesomeatyourjob.com. I'm Pete Makitis. This is how to be awesome at your job.

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