The Score - C. Thi Nguyen

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading C. Thi Nguyen's The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game as we discuss the question of how one can find their values captured by trying to maximize the "scores" used by our society.

C. Thi Nguyen is a Professor of Philosophy whose focus is on the philosophy of games. Having previously written Games: Agency as Art, he is focused on the idea of games and play as a way to realize the value of a thing by the act of doing it, rather than the pure instrumental value it provides. He often uses the example of his hobby rock-climbing, where the route chosen is not meant to be the "quickest" route to the top, but the one that is most interesting and provides a satisfying technical puzzle to solve.

In The Score, Nguyen extends this analysis of games to the ways in which largely quantitative metrics increasingly dominate people's perceptions of success in their life. He charts the ways in which we begin using metrics to track our values, but eventually the metrics become the end instead of the means, and we find our values captured by the institutions and systems responsible for these metrics.

Ezra Klein Podcast Interview with C. Thi Nguyen
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-c-thi-nguyen.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FlE.X06Q.Phlrv0Lzt7B0&smid=url-share

New Yorker Review of The Score
https://archive.ph/ACEwI