{"id":4145,"date":"2026-01-02T10:15:01","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T10:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=4145"},"modified":"2026-01-24T10:20:28","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T10:20:28","slug":"superficially-efficient-and-fundamentally-amoral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=4145","title":{"rendered":"Superficially efficient and fundamentally amoral"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Reading The Score by C Thi Nguyen for the Telegraph, 2 January 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

In the Domesday Book of 1086, C Thi Nguyen tells us, English surveyors measured land by the \u201chide\u201d: the area an average family needed to sustain themselves. A useful measure, obviously; but you need local knowledge to use it. Some places are more productive than others. So how much land, exactly, would the average English family need? It could be 40 acres, or 60, or 120.<\/p>\n

If decisions are taken locally, there\u2019s little issue. But as soon as authority begins to centralise, units such as the \u201chide\u201d disappear, replaced by standardised measures that are easier to record and act upon. Local knowledge becomes forgotten. The more centralisation advances \u2013 and in our modern age, it has only advanced \u2013 the greater the problem grows.<\/p>\n

The Score is part-polemic and part-philosophical inquiry. Nguyen\u2019s argument, in essence, is that in an effort to be objective and unprejudiced, our governments have turned metrics into targets, and built rules around them. The result: our civic life has become a superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral \u2013 not to mention inescapable \u2013 game. Nguyen himself is a philosopher, but also a lover of board games, video games, technical climbing and yo-yoing: in other words, he understands the utility of rules. But, he writes, in the desire to make life ever more frictionless and reasonable, we\u2019ve let metrics twist our values.<\/p>\n

Skateboarders can spend an afternoon competing to come up with the coolest tricks, and go home satisfied without ever having had to definitively settle on who actually won. In formal skateboarding competitions, though, nature of the activity changes: aesthetic elements are discarded in favour of clearer, more quantifiable goals, such as jump height and number of spins. As with sports, so with the Church: Nguyen mentions a pastor who, instructed to meet a baptism quota, finds himself ignoring the pastoral needs of the rest of his flock. And Academia, to no-one\u2019s ggreat surprise, is far from immune. Nguyen argues that the U.S. News & World Report\u2019s university rankings have suppressed diversity because prospective students now outsource their reasoning to the U.S. News algorithm. Do you want to fight for social justice, or make a killing on Wall Street? Either way, you\u2019ll apply to the same law school — the one at the top of the list.<\/p>\n

The dean and the pastor and even the professional skateboarder at least work in settings where these problems can be aired. For the rest of us, fixated on their annual targets at work, the number of likes on their social media, and the number of steps recorded on their fitness doo-dad , the external metrics work beneath their notice to replace their original values. I have a thousand friends and took ten thousand steps today \u2014 that makes me healthy and popular!<\/p>\n

More ominous examples follow. There is, for example, a US Department of State metric called TIPS, which measures the effectiveness of policies to reduce modern slavery, and sex trafficking in particular. We know that slavery flourishes in areas of extreme poverty. But if a country reduces its ambient poverty and as a result reduces sex trafficking, the TIPS report\u2019s metrics indicate failure \u2013 because the conviction numbers drop off. As Nguyen explains, the metric only \u201cincentivises countries to keep sex trafficking around so that there will be plenty of traffickers to convict.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nguyen\u2019s most profound insight lies in plain sight: to quote Wordsworth, \u201cour meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things\u201d. Games do exactly that, and offer a refreshing refuge\u2013for a few minutes or a few hours\u2013from the ambiguities of the real world. The gamification of real life, on the other hand, traps us all, with no prospect of ending.
\nSo how do we escape a gamified world? Read more books! Take up the violin! Stick it to The Man wherever you can! This doesn\u2019t sound like much of a call to revolution to me, and I\u2019m not sure Nguyen\u2019s heart is in the fight. Individuals may recover their individual agency, and this book will help them do so, but it\u2019s hard to see why businesses, governments and bureaucracies of all stripes would ever abandon their self-empowering rhetoric of \u201cobjective\u201d metrics.<\/p>\n

Early on, Nguyen says: \u201cI had an entire theory about games, in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened the door to a whole world of delightful play. And I had an entire theory about metrics, in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered.\u201d This is well put, but if I had a criticism of this otherwise trenchant and entertaining book, it\u2019s that Nguyen follows the rules of his genre so very closely. Like every \u201cpopular thinker\u201d on the shelf, he can\u2019t resist sharing with us his personal journey to enlightenment. If you\u2019ve ever read The Hungry Caterpillar to children, you\u2019ll know how much young readers delight in repetition. Nguyen, to me, is the Eric Carle of philosophy. If you\u2019re even roughly up to speed with his topic, his steady circumspection may prove exasperating.
\nBut don\u2019t discard him. A book, too, is a kind of game, in which \u201cwe adopt a goal in order to get the struggle that we really want.\u201d It\u2019s about going the long way, a particular way, using a particular method. If we truly want to understand our civic plight \u2013 and not just tick off some talking points \u2013 then we should read The Score. We\u2019ll find that Nguyen has planned this particular long way round with skill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading The Score by C Thi Nguyen for the Telegraph, 2 January 2026 In the Domesday Book of 1086, C Thi Nguyen tells us, English surveyors measured land by the \u201chide\u201d: the area an average family needed to sustain themselves. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[1244,872,1166,1243,1024,1245,412],"class_list":["post-4145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-conformity","tag-digital-culture","tag-digital-harms","tag-games","tag-metrics","tag-quantification","tag-quantified-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4145"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4148,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4145\/revisions\/4148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}