Episode 303: Measure This

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. People talk about filling the void as if it's a bad thing. It's actually full of nerve endings.

[00:01:11] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Kendrick Lamar and Drake Step Aside. There's a new beef in town. Joe Henrik versus Steven Pinker. Okay, Dave, I'll ask you the same question I asked about the Super Bowl. Who you got? Okay, so first question is, has Pinker replied? Because I know Pinker has like this closed off account. So I know Pinker posted something. Henrik replied with a smackdown.

[00:01:41] Yeah. I don't think they can go back and forth. I know. I think Steven Pinker is trying to subtweet his way out of this beef. Yeah, no one can reply to his actual posts. You have to quote tweet them. Yeah. First of all, I have never been more on a side of any like beef or rivalry than I'm on Joe Henrik's side versus Steven Pinker.

[00:02:06] Yeah, that was going to be my answer is that I just, I think Joe's got this one for this topic, especially. You know, I don't like that Pinker is playing it more passive aggressively. I do like academic beef. So I think we need to bring him back. They haven't been that many. That two people can be as interested in a topic and have as sort of like relevant thoughts on the same topic to the point that they can disagree with each other in a way that's like that they can post evidence and go back and forth.

[00:02:34] Although again, I do think there's something just, I know why Pinker doesn't allow replies. I'm sure he got just a lot of, you know, shit, but it strikes me as a little bit like having your cake and eat it too. Like you get to post on Twitter, but you don't have to deal with any of the consequences. It's like a UFC match where you could just go in and pop some dude in the face, but he's not allowed to hit you back.

[00:02:54] Yeah. It's not real. You know, he's, uh, he's a studio gangster and Henrik doesn't normally enter these kinds of phrase. So he must be just really annoyed. And now he's also into it with Chaz Firestone. But there's more respect there on both sides.

[00:03:12] Yeah. Joe said, you know, we had Joe Henrik on. I would never have us like, uh, put money on that. He would come at Pinker like this. He goes, the work featured in this blog was dismantled limb from limb. Get his ass. Joe, I love it.

[00:03:31] But Henrik is good because he's, he's not like the caricature of a blank Slater, you know, like everything is culture. He has a very nuanced, I think, view of how these things work. And so I do trust in a lot of what he says.

[00:03:46] Yeah. I'm sad. I like Chaz Firestone, but he's kind of, you know, he finds himself more on Pinker's side here and Pinker is like quote tweeting him as part of his like passive aggressive shots at Henrik. But that's going to happen, I guess, in these beefs, you know? Yeah. It's like, it's what we talked about in the, you know, you end up unwittingly being part of a team that you never signed up for.

[00:04:07] Yeah. Yeah. I would just get off that. I would just say there is a Mueller-Lyer illusion and that it is culturally determined or something like that by like carpentry or whatever. Yeah. Or else you're on the risk of capture, Temler. Yes. Nice job bringing us back to the topic at hand, or at least that will be at hand in the second segment. We are going to talk about a paper called Value Capture by C.T. Nguyen.

[00:04:33] And it's a great paper. It's very much up my alley, but I know that you like it as well. Yeah. It's about how the metrics and quantification can creep into our value formation as both individuals and groups and communities and institutions. All those levels. Really interesting paper. I have a good amount to say about it. So that's what we'll talk about in the second segment.

[00:05:01] But in the first segment, because we are both analytic philosophers, you in spirit and me, you know, reluctantly by training, yeah, we are doing some conceptual analysis. And this is, I think, the first time we've gone off C, C words. Yeah. We ran out of C words.

[00:05:20] We ran out of C. Well, I still think we have one. There's one left that we never got to. But yeah, we're on to the S words. And the concept in question that we will dissect and give a, I don't know, definitive account of is smug. That's what we'll work for. I mean, if we don't have a definitive account by the end of our conversation, it will be a failure of our analysis. It will be a failure of, yeah, analytic philosophy. Yeah, of the process.

[00:05:49] Show the limits of analytic philosophy as a method. So, smug, what do you got? What's your first pass at it? All right. So, it's interesting. Like, I don't use the concept that much in everyday life. Like, I'm not tossing it around. Like, I was thinking about some of the other concepts, like corny, that I think, like, constantly pop in my mind.

[00:06:11] But here's what I got so far. Like, a person being smug, say a person, has to have arrogance. There has to be some excess of confidence compared to, like, actual ability. And I think, in addition to that, a feeling of superiority. Yeah. Because you can't just think you're great. You also have to think you're better than other people. Yeah. And you think arrogant people don't necessarily, that's what the distinction between arrogant and smug, they don't necessarily.

[00:06:40] Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. This is just the, this is my initial feeler. And I feel like when somebody is smug, there is also some degree of contempt for the people they're superior to. Definitely, yeah. Yeah. And then my last thing is, I actually don't think that this is true in all cases of smugness, that superiority has, like, a deep value, like a moral superiority or aesthetic superiority, something that is like, I don't know what to call it.

[00:07:08] It's just definitely value laden. It's not just, like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had, like, trying to capture the same thing you're capturing with the feeling of superiority. It's the feeling that I'm better than you. Yeah. And the better definitely is morally tinged. Yeah. At the very least. Yeah. Yeah, so I also have, this is for a person, we can talk about this in terms of art, because we do talk about smug art and stuff.

[00:07:34] Like, excessive pride or excessive self-satisfaction. I think it's self-satisfied as part of smugness, you know? Yeah. Like, I'm better than you. I'm smarter than you. I'm more sophisticated than you in some way. So I was thinking, and this will only probably connect with our older listeners, but Dennis Miller was such a paragon of smugness, you know? Yeah. Bill Maher is. Oh! Yeah. How did he? Bill Maher is, yeah.

[00:08:03] He's the epitome of it. He's the personification of smug. Well, this is the thing, I think, and it's true for both of them, but it's even more true for Bill Maher, is, yeah, that feeling of contempt. I'm smarter, I'm more sophisticated, and there's a kind of oozing quality to it, and that's what I think is the difference between arrogance and smug, is smug kind of oozes in a way that arrogance definitely, I don't even think, like, it can to be arrogance.

[00:08:32] Like, once it starts to ooze, it's like, it's smug and not arrogant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I'm surprised that at least I haven't seen any work on facial expressions of just smugness, because to me, there is just a look, there's that smug look that people give, and what popped into my head is Junior Soprano. Every once in a while I would give this look of pride. But like, oh, Junior Soprano. Junior, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought you were talking about AJ.

[00:08:59] Uncle June. No, no, no, Uncle June. Uncle June does this, like, thing where he stands up, he stands up very straight and looks kind of like with a smile, like a kind of smug smile. Of course, again, for him, the joke is that he's powerless. Yeah, yeah. Whereas with Bill Maher, one of the frustrating things about it is that in his own little sick world, he's very successful. Yeah. And, you know, same with like Matt Iglesias, who's the Twitter version of smugness, like just the epitome.

[00:09:27] But like those two, I think... I feel like punchable is very close to this concept. Yes. Yeah, there's a lot of the Venn diagram of punchable face and smugness is... And the other thing that I thought, the height of smugness that captures all of what we're talking about, the moral superiority, the oozing, the contempt, was the 2016 Hillary campaign and all the people who were part of it.

[00:09:54] And, you know, they just loved at that time, you know, those were innocent days. They thought they were going to win. And so they just loved to dunk on how stupid Trump was and MAGA people were. And even if you were staunchly anti-Trump, as I was, you know, still am, it's so off-putting, you know? Yeah. Unearned superiority. Unearned superiority. Unearned moral superiority. Trump does have a smug, like a good smug face, though, too.

[00:10:22] Yeah, he's just... I think there's like a little... Like if you're a little just crazy and unpredictable, then it becomes less smug, I think. Yeah, I'm referring to his face, though. Oh, yeah. Like the look that he gives. Yeah, he can have a very smug face, you know?

[00:10:39] I wonder if, like, where you are, like, do you feel the people who are smug are the people a little closer to you on some, I don't know, spectrum of beliefs or a spectrum of things that you agree on? Yeah, like the narcissism of small differences kind of thing? Yeah, or if not small differences, like, not enormous differences. Yeah.

[00:11:02] I used to, to my everlasting shame, watch Bill Maher, you know, like, 20 years ago or whatever it was and not find it insufferable. So like, you know, maybe that's your it's part of a shame. Maybe. Yeah. And maybe it is that in order to feel directly judged by somebody that kind of have to be like close enough to be judging you. But I don't know. You know, I feel like liberals are accused of smugness by conservatives all the time. Yeah. You know who's a little smug?

[00:11:31] Actually, more than Trump, I would say, is J.D. Vance. Yeah. He's a little proud of himself. All right. Maybe we can come back to this for people. But what about art? Because that's an interesting thing. It's a weird thing as I was thinking about it, like how a work of art can be smug. Because like a film, for instance, can be full of smug characters, but the film itself not be smug. Yeah. And so. But yeah, I want to hear your thoughts. Like what are you thinking as sort of examples of. Yeah.

[00:11:58] So it's weird because it's a similar kind of quality where it's like, you know, if it's a movie, it seems a little too proud of itself as a movie. It insists upon itself. It insists upon itself. But like it's not totally clear what that means. And so like, for example, like I think the Royal Tenenbaums and other like not all, but some Wes Anderson films are smug. But I think that nothing that David Lynch or Martin Scorsese has ever done is smug.

[00:12:27] And even though they're all put a lot of attention into their work and a lot of. So I don't know. Maybe it's a kind of fussiness of the art, you know, like Ari Aster, his movies, Robert Eggers. Again, I like these movies a lot. Yeah. But they're a little smug, you know. That's interesting.

[00:12:46] The attention to detail that say somebody like Eggers who would probably, I barely know anything about the guy, but who would probably go to great lengths to make sure that a costume was made with a period appropriate material. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Like for The Witch, for all of his movies, I think like nothing. You have to only use the material that was available. Right. And, you know, there's people who feel this way about typefaces. Like if they see like that font wasn't around in 1943 or whatever.

[00:13:15] But that alone isn't enough. There is with Wes Anderson, because that's the I think we've talked about it before, but that is the example that comes to mind, too. And without too much shade on Wes Anderson, because I like a lot of Wes Anderson movies. But there is what you were saying. Oozing-ness of the smile. And it's like, I was thinking, I was like, how? What am I getting from a Wes Anderson shot that's perfectly centered? And you could just tell the set has been designed. All the color palette.

[00:13:41] It's all like you just know he's so proud of it that he's just kind of like, it's oozing. Yeah. And maybe not. Like maybe it's like driving him crazy certain like things about it. And it's not like, you know, David Lynch or Scorsese doesn't put like a lot of care into whatever's in the frame at a specific time. Even Kubrick, I don't think of. I mean, that's actually an interesting one. Maybe if you're at a certain level of genius, you can't be smug anymore. You can't be smug.

[00:14:10] Because you're just a genius. So whatever, however you feel about yourself is justified. I don't know. And that goes right to the like unearned, right? If your superiority is earned. Yeah. But I feel like Wes Anderson has earned a lot of. Yeah. And same with Ari Aster and Robert Eggers. I mean, those are really good movies at a time where it's hard to make movies with any kind of budget. It's like they're all good.

[00:14:35] Like Jordan Peele, less smug than them, but possibly a little smug now that he's entered the film career. Yeah. So then I was thinking, is it millennials? Like are millennials smug? Like, you know, Stephen A. Smith, not smug somehow, I think. Yeah. Arrogant as fuck. Arrogant as fuck, but not smug. John Mulaney, a little smug, you know? A little smug. A little smug. Bill Burr, not at all smug. I watched both of those guys today as a complete aside. You did? Yeah.

[00:15:04] Okay, here is one pass at what might capture some of my intuition about this. The reason that a perfectly manicured Wes Anderson shot, like a perfectly staged shot, might bother me. There is, I think Wes Anderson's character's emotional tone plays into this whole thing, but it doesn't allow itself to be vulnerable.

[00:15:27] So I'm thinking like one quick way to not be as smug is to give people a little bit of imperfection, show that you're a little vulnerable and that you're willing to be vulnerable. And not having everything be perfect is potentially a good way to do that. And so on my account, Kubrick would have been smug until everybody just decided that he was a genius. Right. I think that might be right. Yeah.

[00:15:49] The Kubrick before he became Kubrick and like, you know, one of the five most significant filmmakers who ever lived, like, might have been a little smug for that exact reason. You know, but having said that, like, and, you know, like here's another one and I love them, but the Coen brothers might be a tiny bit smug for the same reason that you say. It's like they are not opening themselves up to everything has to be fully controlled, fully laid out.

[00:16:18] They see it in their head. And maybe the reason Lynch and Scorsese and some of these other people is at the very, at least they seem like open to, in fact, I think this is actually true. Scorsese does a lot of improv and Lynch just has like intuits things and makes changes right on the set. And you just feel like that would never happen with like a Wes Anderson. That's a good one. That's a good one.

[00:16:44] Because what you said, Scorsese, one of the things that he obviously kind of famously does is allows his actors to do what they want. Well, you know, to a certain extent, he lets them improvise. And the Coens, you can't change a, like a word of the dialogue. Yeah. That's what, you know, the, which was the, which is the Coen brother who directed the Shakespeare, the. The Tragedy of Macbeth. That was Joel Cohen. Possibly the one, like the Coen that was responsible for a lot of their success.

[00:17:13] For the sluminess. So Ethan's hilarious review of that movie did something to me to humanize them and make them feel a little less smug. Yeah. Where he's just like jokingly shitting on his book. Well, I think he might not be, he might be less smug, but also less responsible for how great they are. Like, I don't think like Wes Anderson should be less smug. Like whatever he's doing, I think is working for the kind of art that he's pursuing. So it's not even like a bad thing, like necessarily.

[00:17:40] Like I find that, I find some of those movies annoying, but it's clearly like that's who he is and he should do that. I think that if you're good, you get a lot of leeway here. Yeah. Like an artist who's smug and just isn't good. Like Jared Leto for most of his roles. Yeah. Like some smugness there that's kind of unearned. Yeah. No, then that's, it's terrible. Like, yeah. Like a smirking actor that's doing something that.

[00:18:10] James Franco, a little smug. A little smug. Sometimes. Yeah. You know, like it really is off putting when the product isn't what the person really thinks it is or the work itself really thinks it is. That's what will make you hate a movie instead of just think it doesn't work is if it seems too proud of itself for what it is. And then there's movies like really good Coen Brothers movies.

[00:18:35] If they're smug, like if A Serious Man or Fargo is a little smug, it's like, okay, but it's awesome. And, you know, it's, it's a five star movie. So like. No, right. Totally. Tarantino, arrogant, but not smug for me. I think that's right. You know what, what buys him goodwill for me is how much he lauds other artists.

[00:18:59] He's like constantly talking about how wonderful other directors are and how he, you know, he loves their work. Yeah. Like I wouldn't call his movies smug, but he can be a little smug in interviews, but you're right. He does tend to give a lot of credit to others and especially people you've never heard of. Which is a little smug. Which is a little smug. Like, uh, and, and also shit on people like Truffaut or somebody that you love.

[00:19:25] And then that's a, that's a smug calling card is to not like somebody that, you know, like it's widely respected in, in other areas. But I think for him, it's just like, that's how he feels. And Paul Thomas Anderson, maybe a little smug. So maybe it's not millennials, but, uh, not his, not himself. Actually, I don't think him as a person is smug, but the movies can be a little bit like the master is a bit of a smug movie. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Is, is, is Malick smug to you?

[00:19:54] Or Malick films are, can be a little smug. Maybe the tree of life. I don't find like Badlands or Days of Heaven smug. Thin Red Line a little. I don't think I've seen that if, if, or if I have not for 30 years. That's a big blind spot. We should do, uh, Terrence Malick. We should. Cause I don't know. Like he's a little, it's almost a little too obscure at this point, you know, especially the last two decades of him.

[00:20:20] It's hard to be smug when, you know, you put out movies and you hear about it like a year later. Yeah. Okay. I have a question building on something you said. Both of us seem to have a kind of tolerance for smugness. If the product, if the art is, is good. Yeah. It doesn't bother us. I think we've both expressed that we have a similar tolerance for arrogant athletes who can back it up. Yes. Love that actually. Do you think a dog can be smug? Do you think just, you ever see a dog just walking around and you're like fucking smug dog?

[00:20:50] I think it's rare, but I don't think it's, it's impossible. It's not like cats where most of them are smug. They're all smug. Do you think we're smug? I, I, that's a great question. Um, I hope not, but I like listeners, you can weigh in here. I bet if, if one of us is going to be called smug, it'll be me before it's you. It's my guess. Yeah, but I think that's just because of your hipster artsy-ness, not because of, I don't

[00:21:19] think you're truly, I think in many ways I might come across as more smug when I argue. Maybe. I don't know. Like, I feel like I got shit for being smug about dismissing the panic about wokeness and stuff like that. Hey man, you, you, you won. And you're, the anti-woke won, so. That's not me winning. That's the, I never thought it was a fucking problem in the first place. All right. Well, that, that did it.

[00:21:48] We're, we're well into the S's now. We have, we handled it. Bang, bang. Uh, that's how good we are. And that's how much, uh, everyone else is stupid and they suck. Seriously. Bring us any concept. We'll, we'll get it done. Yeah. No problem. All right. We'll be right back to talk about value capture.

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[00:26:50] Okay, we are going to talk about a really good essay that I assume has appeared in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, although... 2024. 2024, okay, yeah. We were both looking at a preprint of it. So this is by C.T. Nguyen, a really interesting philosopher. He wrote a very well-received... I haven't read it, but it's a book on games.

[00:27:18] And I know one of my colleagues taught that in a seminar. A good example of someone who still does philosophy, philosophy, but is always covering interesting subjects. And in... I think this paper really gets at something hugely important. And, you know, I first came across this paper maybe six months ago as I was getting... I was leading into my leave

[00:27:46] and working on trying to get this project off the ground. And this paper is right in that wheelhouse. It's about how our metrics or quantified forms of evaluation can come to dominate our practical reasoning, our deliberation, and in that way shape or hijack our values, right? It's called value captures.

[00:28:14] So the way in which metrics work is at first maybe we use them as a source of information or something like that. But soon, if we're not careful or under certain kinds of circumstance, it will actually determine or heavily influence what we care about. And sometimes that's for better, but often that's for worse. So this is like straight up just like you said.

[00:28:43] I think you said that I must have been aroused several times in this paper. I'm surprised you got through it, you know? I like it. There's a few books that he refers to, one called Trust in Numbers by, I think, Theodore Porter, and one called The Seduction of Quantification, both of which I really love and, you know, read. And that's by S.E. Mary. And they're both really good.

[00:29:13] Her book, S.E. Mary, is about how these like indicators of human rights came to dominate how we, you know, decided to sanction or reward other nations and how those indicators, while sometimes measuring something that seemed like it was reflecting the things that we ought to care about, often just stopped doing that. But the very fact that they were quantified was enough to make us just, you know, that was going to

[00:29:43] determine our decision-making in those areas. Yeah, and Trust in Numbers is written by this historian who just talks about how this works, like all the dynamics of when metrics came to start dominating certain fields in education or medicine or social policy, economic theory, political science, and why it happened and why some professions or fields are able to resist the encroachment of quantification

[00:30:13] and metrics-based evaluation and others just immediately have to surrender. And increasingly, it's like more fall into that latter category. So it's a very cool paper. He also talks about it at the individual level and he leads the paper off with the example of Fitbits. Yeah. And I remember when Fitbits came out and I don't know, did you have one? I got one, I think. Yeah, I did.

[00:30:43] And there was definitely a period where that sort of came to dominate. If not dominate, like I was, I would be conscious of it. Actually, I remember when we were in Vancouver, this was that time, when we were in Vancouver for the APA and we were staying in an Airbnb that was kind of far from the, and I would always walk and I would just like, you know, text people my Fitbits scores or whatever. Well, what he talks about is how that becomes like a point of fixation

[00:31:12] so that instead of doing the thing that we originally wanted to do, which is, you know, improve our health in some way, we just start trying to get the best grade on Fitbit without any real reflection on whether that's actually contributing to our flourishing. Yeah. So what do you think of this paper? I find it more compelling and completely compelling at the communal level, at the group level, and especially at the institutional level.

[00:31:42] Maybe a little less compelling at the individual level, but that's just my first impression. What do you think? That's interesting. I think that's kind of how I feel too. To start off, I just want to give praise to Nguyen here for like, it's a long paper, relatively, I mean, and it was just written so well. Like, it just flowed. It's not stodgy philosophy at all. So even if you don't read philosophy

[00:32:11] and you're interested in this, like, I highly recommend that you read it. I'm glad you brought that up because I totally agree. And it's almost so good that you don't even notice it. And it's only when you think, wait, this was a philosophy paper in a real philosophy journal? Like, how is this possible that it reads this smoothly and easily? It goes down super easy. Yeah. The other thing I just really appreciated was his nuance in sort of not, just not giving short shrift to the clear advantages

[00:32:39] that some of this stuff brings. And pointing out that like, at the institutional level, it's sort of almost inevitable, if not actually inevitable, that this process happens. And it's more of a paper that's arguing, A, this happens. Here's how it happens, how I think it happens. And just be careful. Metrics themselves aren't bad. Metrics can be used as input into, you know, careful deliberation.

[00:33:07] And they can serve to help you achieve goals. But just like, be wary that they might lead you down to this complete capture where you have now a stripped down version of your original values. Kind of at best. At best. And at worst, a non-approximation of anything that used to be your values. And an inflexibility in terms of changing your... Rigidity, that's right. Yeah, the rigidity of it is, you know, I really love that portion of the paper where he talks about

[00:33:37] how so much of figuring out like what your values are and what kinds of activities you should engage in and where you should devote your attention and time is this process of experimentation. You try something for a while, you see how well it works for you, you start tailoring. And metrics are not great for that. They had, yeah. And I agree with you that he's clear-eyed about the benefits of metrics, you know, as commitment devices. You know,

[00:34:07] I like, I do think Fitbit was good in terms of just making people who aren't otherwise inclined to, you know, take long walks, probably got them off their asses. And that's a hard thing to do. Yeah. So, like, that's all very good. But I do think he's more worried maybe than the way you made it sound about the costs of it and the inevitability of it is not necessarily a good thing. No, no, I think the inevitability is, he's definitely worried about it.

[00:34:36] I just appreciated that he talks about all of the good reasons this might happen. And he talks about the instances in which it's not necessarily a bad thing to use these metrics. But yeah, I agree, you know, the thrust of the paper is, this is concerning. And what I really like about it and which I completely agree with and want to develop in my own project is that it's, it's an attack on our agency. It's an attack on our agency as, like, either individuals or groups

[00:35:05] or even institutions. It restricts the domains of your choices and decisions about, like, who you are and what you stand for so much. Like, I think that's a real problem, you know? Like, and he gives this example and this seems like a good example at the individual level of law school rankings, right? Where it used to be there were no law school rankings and so you just chose the law school based on a lot of things. You know, it's kind of,

[00:35:34] your sense of how prestigious it was but also just how much you think that what they do and the people they have reflects the things that you want to pursue. And then, once the rankings come out, everyone just started kind of choosing law schools more or less based on the rankings. Partly because those rankings are not secret. Like, they're out there and so if you're at a better one you think that's going to help you down the line and... Employers are going to

[00:36:04] use the rankings too and it's sort of self-fulfilling. So that's part of it and then this other part of it is just maybe that's an uncomfortable conversation that you want to have with yourself is what do I really want to pursue if I want to go into the law profession? You know, like what is it that I really care about? If you can just, you know, oh well, I don't need to think about that or decide that anymore. I'm just going to go by the ranking. Then you don't get to do that real point of reflection of like, well,

[00:36:34] what do I want? What do I want with this career? And I think like that's a really important thing that if you just outsource it, which is a word he uses a lot, if you outsource that decision to some ranking system that you don't even know like how it's determined, that's an attack on your agency. And he really pounces on that aspect of it and I think that's totally right. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, we, you know, like he's talking primarily about the students who are choosing

[00:37:04] programs and the value capture. Like it's a big problem for the programs themselves. He mentions this too. Yeah. We see it. I'm sure we see it in the way that the future of the university is planned in order to get to the top of the U.S. News and World Report rankings. And that's value capture for the institution as a whole. Yeah. As well. I have a lot to say about that aspect of it. Yeah. The one thing, and I don't know if we want to dive into like there are some things that I, I don't know if I disagree with or maybe I just think

[00:37:33] there wasn't enough emphasis on this. To take the Fitbit example, he does point out like, look, why not just think that this is a motivator to walk more? Like it seems pretty good, right? But then as you, I think nicely already pointed out, it's a stripped down rigid proxy that might rob you of the values that you had about health and fitness, about broadly exploring different forms of exercise. But what he never really talks about is the ability

[00:38:03] of these things to value capture somebody who never would have wanted to engage in that to begin with. And so like, there are some people who might be like, I really hate exercise, I don't really care about it, but you know, my kids keep getting on my ass to be more fit so they got me this Fitbit. I like games so I'm gonna do this like that, you know. And that seems like the kind of value capture that he would be fine with but that he doesn't really talk about that much. Yeah, I actually 100% agree and I in some ways

[00:38:32] think this Fitbit is a bad example for him because aside from that initial period, you know, when everyone first got their Fitbits and they took it a little too seriously, I think after that, you know, probably six month period or something like that, it just settled into, oh, this is a good thing. You know, you probably should walk 10,000 steps most days at least, right? And so, and it wasn't like crowding out your agency about like,

[00:39:02] what do you really want to do and I think it was just like, it was kind of perfectly coordinated to provide that bit of motivation but without doing the thing that he really worries about which is, because I don't think people were like forming their identity around how many steps they got or making, you know, having that be something that took the highest priority of like any form of physical activity that you would do. I think a lot of these things can be very useful as long as you don't,

[00:39:32] like I don't feel like this is a big problem for me that I'm outsourcing my values to metrics based things as a person, you know, like, and I feel like I'm susceptible to that. Like I will devote hours to the dumbest word games there are. Like I, not me. Yeah, right. Like I have an addictive personality when it comes to a lot of these things but, and I was actually curious because like is that just

[00:40:02] me or is, do you feel like you know people who have these, whether it's like fitness goals or whether it's, you know, some other like citation goals and for your colleagues or something like that, who that just then swamps their ability to decide whether this is actually worth their time and attention? I feel like I know academics like this. There's, at one point he says, look, it might be that when you talk to people they're able

[00:40:31] to communicate this richness of their values but then their actions are driven by the metrics and so if you ask an academic what they're doing, I think he says this of himself, they would say, well, I'm in, you know, into the pursuit of truth and whatever knowledge for its own sake and then those people might be hyper focused on their citation count or their H-index or whatever and so maybe the people that come to my mind are like that or there may be some

[00:41:01] mix of like the values of the metrics have crept in. There are people who care, that seem to care far more about metrics in like their own work and in evaluating candidates' work. Yeah, I'll give you an example. I once had a psychologist, well, super well known psychologist but who told me Steven Pinker who said, you know, people are always saying quality over quantity when it comes to writing but I believe that

[00:41:31] quantity is quality and this is a guy who had memorized the number of papers that he had and we're talking like in the 800, 900 number of papers. Yeah, and they knew exactly and so I said, really, do you know how many papers you have published? And they said, yep, 913 as of this morning or whatever. Well, that just sounds like it is his value. I know, but on the other hand, he really was curious and doing

[00:42:00] the work but yeah, it did seem to encroach upon his values in a way that I'd never. Well, another thing that he doesn't talk about and I'm not sure how I feel about this but I have a colleague who was talking to me about it and it's like, well, you gotta look at this in comparison to how it used to be where it was this old boys network and like it didn't matter how much you'd published if people just cut, you were in the club essentially. So now we have this

[00:42:30] imperfect way of democratizing the process of like who gets to a prestige, who gets the good job and in that sense I think it's good. It's just the problem is democratizing everything is good but if the metric that you're using to democratize doesn't actually measure the quality of that person's work then that's bad and maybe it's like you have one or you have the

[00:42:59] other because how do you get out of an old boys network without having something that just completely that they can't fuck with entirely but but at the same time like if it's not a good way of evaluating things then maybe you just open your mind not use these citation counts or a number of journal articles that you can get published out of sheer just like Adderall induced all nighters. I feel judged. Yeah.

[00:43:29] You have to go there. Sorry. You're not judged by someone who thinks himself superior. Good. No I totally agree and maybe in another paper I don't know if it would be in this paper I would spend more time talking about you know he does set up on the one hand stripped down rigid easily communicable simple metrics and on the other hand this rich in you

[00:44:01] and a big issue is given that we're going to have to use metrics for all the reasons he says working better on metrics that are actually meaningful I think is good work to be done. This is where we so disagree like I think that's a trap what you're talking about but yeah finish what you're saying. Yeah but there are cases in which a metric has ceased to be a proxy for the thing it was supposed to be because it's so easily gamed so citation count is one of those that you

[00:44:30] know it's easy to hop on some famous person's paper maybe and collaborate just so you can get cited hundreds thousands of times and then that's sort of meaningless and so you try to come up with some better metric because you need metrics and there are better metrics and there are worse metrics and so like let's just go to sports for instance there's a reason that advanced metrics have been invented and so when you when you're talking about comparing players sometimes across eras it's fraught but you want to look at

[00:45:00] things that really are decent proxies for how good an athlete was and so whatever you know that metric of the plus minus when they're on the court in basketball that's like what is it what is this 2002 metric metric I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm not as well I mean they still use that right that's still so this is all to say that there are better metrics and there are worse metrics so okay a couple of things about that so I'll tell you why I think this is

[00:45:30] a trap so I think in one sense sports can be a good analogy but in another sense it's misleading and the way it's misleading is that ultimately we have this absolute like independent objective like this is the thing that everyone's shooting for the teams win games and they win a championship right there's a win-lose it's not in dispute whether somebody won a game or not and it's not in dispute

[00:46:00] whether that's the goal or not right and so now this is why I think in baseball and basketball and football it is so effective is because you have this you know these similar experiments being run you all agree on the goal you all agree on

[00:46:38] metric being used well well I don't think though well and maybe you weren't suggesting this but we were talking about this I thought in other kinds of environments where there aren't clear win losses like being a good scientist or being a good researcher where we don't have that okay this metric actually worked and this metric actually didn't and so because we don't agree on the normative standards because we don't agree on the normative standards and there isn't

[00:47:07] even something kind of obvious about when these normative standards are met so that's what I meant and it's misleading the way it's a bit of a trap is what the promise of improving your metrics does is stop you from actually thinking whether metrics and quantification is the right way of going about this in the first place if you always think well yes this is kind of a disaster and it's making us deliberate badly and

[00:47:37] it's kind of influencing all these decisions in ways that we haven't really thought about but if we you are not actually taking the possibility of not doing that into account and I think that's the way in which these things can be a trap it's like the never ending promise of having this be an effective way to improve your institution yeah so I think what you say

[00:48:07] is right there are some goals that you might have that are be a good professor what does that mean well I don't know it might mean 20 things plus or minus five and depending on the institution this is something Nguyen points out that in the desire to standardize you lose important features of a value say a goal across contexts where it might matter more here this might matter more here right exactly like particular to a

[00:48:45] sports that have a clearly defined and even then I think you're overstating how clear the definition is you know like just think about the discussion of what an MVP should be like is it raw performance or is it you know so it's like how many triple doubles you had is should it be how much more you your team scores when you're on the court should it be how many games you won there's a lot of vagaries so all I'm saying is that there is a spectrum of this and some things like health markers they

[00:49:14] might actually be such a good overlap between the goal that you have and say the marker that you're looking at whatever it might be hrv heart rate that I

[00:49:47] would be kind of useless or mostly useless I guess I mean I agree with that I think the problem is once these metrics become established however they got established it's like they take on some intrinsic importance in and of themselves and that's just false they have no intrinsic importance say like test scores or something like that those are not they have no intrinsic value except as they're indicative of the quality of the

[00:50:17] education in the subject of the test or like if it's a ranking the quality of the education at that university right and so I think we know that but we don't think enough about whether that's the case that these rankings actually are indicative of that and even when people are publishing mounds of literature giving you compelling reasons to think that's not the case that we're putting too much emphasis on it that the

[00:50:47] tests were not intended to measure what these people say they measure it just gets ignored right and so like you know like we have this guy who just came to the Houston school district HISD Mike Miles and he was obsessed with raising test scores to the exclusion of everything else right and so he did it you can raise test scores if that's your exclusive focus but that doesn't mean anything except that you actually hit

[00:51:17] the marker you know you actually harmed the quality of education but increasingly people don't they just forget that those metrics like the whole point of them is that they're supposed they were a proxy they were like an imperfect proxy about a very specific part of the education too and so things that you can't easily measure then just get completely they're irrelevant at that point so that just gets ignored by the people in power I totally

[00:51:46] agree with you just really quickly the danger of failing to reflect on what it is you're doing is a huge one and when these metrics become sort of functionally autonomous of their original intended purpose then you're up shits creek kind of well it's just and the question is whether that is inevitable so to give a more complicated example I came to U of H in 2008 and at the same time our president

[00:52:16] still president today Renew Couture started and it's absolutely undeniable that the university which at the time was respected but also thought of as kind of a commuter school now is way more prestigious than it was when I and Couture arrived I don't want to get into who's more responsible for that but arguably it's her but whatever

[00:52:46] that's not the point of this so she immediately set these goals these targets tier one designation right and then like okay we need a phi beta kappa and now we need you know to be top 50 state universities in the US News world report rankings right yeah and she for the most part like anytime she set one of these like goals these quantified goals or these rankings goals or these designation goals she pretty much achieved them and yeah we got

[00:53:16] more money and also this is why I think this is a complex case gun to my head the university has improved probably because of all this but I also don't know like I don't know how it was before but here's the problem if you wanted to make the case for the other side like how would you do that right you would probably have to try to do it

[00:53:49] if you let it in this like you know metrics you know data based decision making and all of that it's like it'll just explode and you almost have to go all or nothing or at least all or a little and you need like huge institutional will and people with power who are on board to resist it without that it's just going to go that direction regardless I totally agree I mean you did point to though the increase

[00:54:18] in equity and fairness though when you go to metrics that are more objective like the problem with too much flexibility is that you can be pretty biased so let's get to the use an example of tenure decisions I think every institution I've been at prides itself in saying we're not being counters when we make tenure decisions we look at the whole package right we and if you as a junior professor are trying to look for the raw metrics that will

[00:54:48] guarantee you tenure you won't find them at least at most universities because nobody wants to publish such things right because if you're making a decision about whether you want a colleague for the next whatever 30 40 years you kind of want to reserve the right to say like yeah they have 100 publications but they're kind of a dick and you kind of want the flexibility to say that there is something that you don't like about this person's work I think you're being a little elitist here like I think at like

[00:55:18] not the Cornell's and Yale's of the world like it's much harder to do that yeah but so that's just to say that the flexibility that Nguyen points to is part of our deep rich values that's true you want to be able to say this person's doing good work I know they haven't published a lot and compared to other people who got tenure they haven't published a lot but they're doing great work on the other hand you can use that flexibility to keep someone out for other reasons and so having like if you get 10 publications in

[00:56:04] mostly whitefield or because they just don't come from the kind of background pedigree so like just having it you clear this goal and they can't say shit anymore there is something good about that I agree I really think it's like the problem is that it just you can't stop it there I know that's why I kind of think it's inevitable like and I almost say like we

[00:56:34] the inevitability not as like really a way to champion this stuff because you know I think one of my favorite parts of the article is when Nguyen talks about the way that land used to be measured it was in terms of its viability to produce how fruitful land was so a unit was it could feed a family and so how much land it takes to feed a family might be one acre it might be 10 acres depending on the quality of the soil and the natural resource on the land all that stuff but then when you get big enough you get a government or

[00:57:03] state or whatever that's big enough like it takes way too much to do such fine grained analyses of all of the plots of land so you need to just divide this shit up into like an acre and so you

[00:57:39] part of me thinks look like University of Houston was always big we didn't used to get run by metrics like we do now so clearly it's possible to run an institution of this size and not have metrics based evaluation dominate but I do think that there are pressures that make it more likely that it'll happen but let me give an example so here's a good like just the lowest level of

[00:58:08] institution is like our podcast right yeah yeah I was thinking this too you were thinking this like yeah one of the reasons aside from like our moral purity that we decided to just not do ads anymore is that we didn't want to

[00:58:42] it would get more sponsors interested in us and so when we decided not to do that it was the easiest thing in the world you and I just had to agree that we're not doing it and we had to take whatever loss of income would come with that but it wasn't the forces of data we didn't need to send a when to meet link to get 24 members of the board of the podcast to decide but that was it's just the two of us we have all the power

[00:59:12] we set we create what we think is a quality product and we have certain things that we care about certain values that we care about and fortunately we agreed and so we could do it and the forces of data and numbers in this day and age couldn't stop just the fact that we were both on the same page about that and I

[00:59:49] some kind of metric yeah it's a good example I do think that to get back to your university of Houston example what might be missing from what you were saying when I

[01:00:19] have an in-depth 500 page qualitative report about the quality of the departments you kind of just need like all right what are scholars producing how many grants are they getting how many papers are they publishing and I'll allocate more money to that school because they're excellent you say you can't have an in-depth 500 page like qualitative report but it's not like that's logically impossible right you could have no it's some point the resources are so constrained in terms of attention in terms of calculating things

[01:00:49] and I think the people making the decisions are making lots of decisions they're not really equipped to make a decision based on a 500 page qualitative report and they don't care that much they just know that they have money that they have to spend and they don't want to think about it you know yeah yeah I remember this is sort of a vaguely related but when I have a friend who was managing a rapper who was on a label like a major label that major label got acquired by

[01:01:18] Interscope and a bunch of artists got cut so like from one day to the next he got dropped and when he was told about why you would think that what happened was they listened to the catalog of the artists and whatever but no the way that it was communicated to him was that literally guy's name was Dr. Stank the rapper and Dr. Dre said there can only be one doctor

[01:01:48] on this label and he scratched his name off the list and like that's the kind or at the very least that there's nothing else that they have there's nothing else they can do right but it is like it's a

[01:02:18] thorny problem it's like and one of the things new says is like the standardization is so necessary the more complex society gets the bigger these institutions get you really need to boil down information into a way that lots of people can easily understand it because it's unsustainable to have experts in every decision making all of those decisions I feel like when you say it's unsustainable it's just like that's not what we've devoted our resources

[01:02:48] towards but I mean literally how much would it take to have somebody go and do in-depth interviews and qualitative analyses of every high school in the state to determine how to allocate budget it's like it could be done but at the expense of some other But I bet the the the test and all of that is an expense maybe but then you think about like you would need an expert

[01:03:18] to give them a slice of the state right so they would be in charge of another high schools and they would get an argument about why their schools deserve the funding and how would they resolve that they have to point to something that could be understood by the person making the decision you just have somebody that will make a decision like based on what they're saying like of course it's not going to

[01:04:32] can be bad and we know it's bad, but at least it's a number. Yeah. I guess like I am, I am just more convinced that there is so much information that it can't possibly be processed for all of the decisions. Like, I feel like there is, this might sound insulting, but I don't mean it to be, but I feel like you have a romanticized ideal of like how people could make these decisions. Like, I don't think that they're like, you would have experts weighing in that then experts had to

[01:05:00] like read all of their 500 page reports about those 10 schools and decide between those two experts. Like I legitimately think it's unsustainable to keep making decisions in a large scale. So let me give you an example in a different field. So for a long time, and maybe this is still the case, but you know, Hollywood studio system is kind of shattered in a lot of different ways. But for a long time, you had these big studios that had to decide like what scripts they want to buy,

[01:05:30] what scripts they want to put in production. So they had a ton of assistants that, you know, are going to read and like pass it up the line to decide. And none of this was quantitative and it was probably imperfect. And it was probably depended a lot on the, the guy who was first reading it, whether this was going to get passed up the line. And there was probably a lot of luck and there was probably a lot of bias, but it worked like they, they actually were able to use this purely

[01:05:56] qualitative system for a long time to decide like which scripts to buy, put in production, you know, ask for a treatment, whatever. Make a pilot of if it was a TV show. Like, it's not like this can't happen even when you're talking about a big corporation like a studio. Now, like against

[01:06:19] my point is that it's gone away from that. Uh, but I guess my point is it's not like this can't exist. It just feels like in these times under these circumstances with data achieving some kind of God-like supremacy, we can't imagine a different way, but for a long time in so many fields, there was a different way. Yeah. So I don't know what the right answer is. Like you raise a good point. Like

[01:06:48] there are, there seem to be clear examples. I would guess that this was a process that was sustainable because these studios were kind of monolithic. They had huge budgets. And so you can afford to make mistakes and put out some movies that are, that don't make your money. So that was like the, the record labels in the fat days, you know, the nineties where CDs were $18 and, and you could,

[01:07:12] you could sign a hundred artists based on the judgment of an A and R at your label and 98 of them would fail. Yeah. And two of them would become multi-platinum selling artists and that could feed the rest of them. And I do think it just takes a lot of resources. And if you're strapped for cash and somebody comes to you and says, dude, we can only fund five artists. Our projections show that these five are going to sell way more than these other ones and your corporation. You're

[01:07:40] like, all right, let's go with your projections. Yeah. I mean, that's a good point. I think it's especially good. They were monoliths, but I think even more importantly, a lot of them had very like single powerful people at the top, like a Harvey Weinstein or something aside from everything else just had so much power that he could just be like, it's going to be good. Cause I say it's fucking going to be good. Cause I know this shit and maybe he had other people that he trusted to give him the

[01:08:08] ones that were going to be in that, you know, in, in that ballpark. And I think a lot of these, you know, you, you, you read about these producers, the Robert Evans is, you know, in the seventies, like there was this, all of a sudden these producers had a lot of power and they could employ discretion because they had the power. So I think like in some cases they had a lot of money and could afford to make a lot of mistakes. In other cases they couldn't, it was like a restaurant.

[01:08:35] Like if they fucked up, they were out of business and that was that, but they still could do it. And so it's like, I guess the thing that I'm resisting is the idea that it's not a choice at least. And like, I feel like that's true at the smallest levels. Like for us, we could have gone just every 15 minutes. We have some dynamic ad for like a Prius or something. Just wait. Yeah. I mean, we may, you might be listening to this in the year 2030 and the dynamic ad is about

[01:09:05] to roll in. Yeah. Tailored exactly for you. No, you're right. It does take power. It takes somebody who's willing to take the responsibility. It takes resources. And I think oftentimes people are afraid because they need to justify to the higher ups why the things that they did, the things that they invested money in actually made a difference. And those higher ups aren't people who are going to read 500 page reports. So they're afraid, like I saw this working with

[01:09:32] corporations in this consulting group that I worked with where the middle layer of, of people were terrified of making the wrong decision and paying us for instance, to do something that might not work. Yeah. And then when you went to the CEO, they'd be like, yeah, sure. Like, let's try it. Right. Right. Like, I think this is just vast layers of bureaucracy that is deeply in fear of not being able to justify the decisions they made and numbers or metrics or whatever provide this, like,

[01:10:01] even if things didn't go wrong, they can say, but look, we had every reason to believe that it would be, you know, all of our projections said that we would. And so therefore you can't blame me. Yeah. All the polling said Liz Cheney, you know, getting Liz Cheney on board would guarantee us this election. In that Theodore Porter book, he talks a lot about the power dynamics of essentially having

[01:10:24] power allows you to resist the force of quantification metrics based evaluation invading. And he said, teachers didn't have enough power as a group to resist it within public schools for a long time, doctors did. And so like doctors weren't evaluated by kind of like basic metrics in terms of like their productiveness for the hospital or their productiveness for the larger group that they

[01:10:54] were in because they just had more power within that structure. And so I think that's a really key aspect of this. And I guess the question is, can you maintain power if you do resist this or will the people with even more power than you just decide to put someone who's more quantitatively minded in your place? I don't know.

[01:11:21] Okay. So I had one just quick anecdote that's consistent with what we were saying. And then two just general questions for you. And I don't know what Nguyen would say. The speaking of studios and movies, I mean, I do think art suffers most under these kinds of things. As we can see from, from Marvel movies, you start doing metrics and it turns out that the

[01:11:46] quality of your product deteriorates because the metrics aren't a good proxy for, right? You made good movies because someone had a vision. Those movies made a gajillion dollars and then relatively good movies. And then you focus on, on the metric and you start making crap. But I was just reading about a game of Thrones director who wanted to hire an actor to play a role. And he got refused by the

[01:12:14] casting department because that actor didn't have at least a million followers on social media. Oh yeah. And he was like, are you kidding me? Like, and the actor turns out had like 900,000, but they had just instituted this rule that that's what they were going to do. Right. And it's just like, Jesus, talk about fucking perverse incentives and just ruining the art. Yeah. Right. I saw an interview with somebody, I forget who, some actress where she was like,

[01:12:38] you're not going to get cast for certain projects if you don't like maintain a certain number of Instagram followers. That's terrible. That's horrible. And talk about like shitty metrics too. Like somebody who could buy, who buys bots to follow them would be more likely to get cast. And even if somebody who legitimately gets people to follow them, that doesn't mean they're going to be good in the, in the show. No, no, I know. It's so terrible to think that people are thinking

[01:13:05] it's not at all indicative of that. Like maybe it gets a few other people to like take a look at it, but like it's, yeah, that's such a bad metric. But again, it, the fact that it's a metric is like that allows them to just say, no baseline a million followers on Instagram. Yeah. No risk taking, right? Yes. That's a big thing. I mean, all my hobby horses coalesce into this thing. It's, it's like an, a risk aversion, you know, it's like, it's like you have an excuse. You have a built

[01:13:33] in way of deflecting responsibility for what you've done. Yeah. So Nguyen, you know, this is centered around metrics and it seems as if metrics are, are, um, you know, ever encroaching. I think that's true. We have more and more the dominance of numbers and ways of measuring things, but like sales and just, doesn't it seem like money has been

[01:13:56] this forever? Like that capitalism is the ultimate value capture force, right? Like where whatever sells well becomes, you know, that just becomes the standard that becomes the value. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the Marx, like a total Marx critique is that in fact, it starts to shape our values. It starts to shape our way of understanding like who we are as people. And to the extent that we're not

[01:14:24] the people making the decision, it starts to alienate us from ourselves and our humanity. You know, Nguyen talks about the gamification of the metrics and sometimes like metrics give you a goal and it's sort of like this pale substitute for when you used to like make something, you know, you'd make a pair of shoes or something, or you'd create something at work, but it was an actual, like, it wasn't just

[01:14:49] meeting this goal or, you know, hitting this target. It actually was something tangible that, you know, you could imagine we're even evolved to take satisfaction in. And he says, one of the good things about these metrics is it gives you that little ping of satisfaction. It's like, oh, I accomplished something, but like, it's such a copy of copy of copy of copy of copy of actually like

[01:15:14] producing something that, that has you in it. So it's like, it's not even like you're alienated from the product. Like Mark's was saying, you're, you know, at a factory worker is alienated from the thing that he's making because he doesn't even know what he's making. It's he's, all he's doing is turning some screw on an assembly line. It's like severance where you can hit quotas, but you have absolutely no idea what it is that like these quotas mean or what you're doing or what any of it is.

[01:15:43] And you still like, if you're Dylan in severance, right, you still just get that feeling of, all right, I did it. Yeah. Now I get this meaningless achievement prize or whatever this. Yeah. Look at all my Chinese finger traps. Exactly. Like, and so like what it does is give you this, yeah, really pale, I think, uh, substitute from that feeling of satisfaction of having produced something that you could,

[01:16:08] I don't know, like that could be part, a reflection of your identity and who you are in some way. Yeah, no, totally. Those kinds of jobs are scarcer and scarcer. The more capitalist logic starts to dominate our lives. Right. And I guess, you know, it would have made the paper unwieldy, but it would be interesting to see him write more about that. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. The only other thing I was wondering is if praise from peers, I was thinking about the Oscars and, and that being a kind of value

[01:16:37] capture. Oh yeah. Yeah. But I don't know if it is, praise seems a bit more rich maybe. I don't know. It's still at least like other human beings, like that actually value you, you know? So even if that's all you decide to go for, there's still at least some kind of tether to the world of human values that

[01:17:02] that is not there when it's just a number. But, um, but that's a good point. I think a lot of people just try to please their parents a lot of the time and that has nothing to do with numbers. It's like, I have to make my dad who's never proud of me, proud of me or something like that. Right. And like, that can be as destructive to their value system as any, you know, encroachment of numbers or quantification is there are threats at all fronts.

[01:17:29] Right. It is pretty clear when a movie is produced and released really just for the Oscar. Yeah. Like, it's like Oscar season. Let's get this hard hitting, uh, you know, heavily acted. Yeah. I mean, I think less and less these days because that is no longer, I think what it was, the, the, the Oscar. I mean, now it's like, they don't even care about meeting any,

[01:17:55] like Netflix will just make some movie that they'll just put on there and like, they're not trying to hit any metric other than we have this other movie on there. Like they don't care if anybody, uh, likes it or, uh, praises it, or it gets this number of down, even this number of views. It's like, I don't even understand. That's interesting that in, in the streaming, it's so true. Like you, Nielsen ratings used to be

[01:18:22] everything. Right. Talk about an imperfect metric. Like what the fuck was that? It was like families journaling boxes, like these weird, like kind of mid-century dystopian boxes on their TV. Right. So aside from just the sheer quantity, like these streaming services hide their metrics. Yeah. They don't ever tell anybody. Right. And so is that been good for, for the art of TV making?

[01:18:47] I don't think it's been good in the sense that better work is getting attention or that they're focusing on it. The only way in which it's good is that they make so much shit that every once in a while you're going to make something really good. You know, as much as we bitch sitcoms that were on prime time when we were kids, we're tailoring to the least common denominator audience, uh, in a way that you don't have to do anything.

[01:19:13] No, that's right. But like, I do think there was this golden period and it's exactly what we've been talking about, like with HBO and that kind of prestige television. And then even at FX, when there was some, it was always this one guy or this few people that just decided to like champion, like, and you know, it wasn't, if metrics was the goal, it wasn't like the primary goal. The primary goal was something else that was better. And now it just feels like flood the zone.

[01:19:41] You know, we're just going to like, uh, seriously. And it's not like they're not using metrics internally at Netflix, right? Obviously they're, they're just throwing everything against a wall. It's very unclear because like you said, they're not transparent about it, like how they are. And, and maybe even if they are, maybe the goal is to just their, their metric is 200 movies, uh, that we're doing this year. And it doesn't matter if anybody watches them. It's just,

[01:20:06] we have to be Netflix, the place where you can find new movies. If you like somehow hear about them, cause we're not going to promote them or really do anything. Yeah. Yeah. Subscribers is their only goal. Yeah. It is so palpably clear that the use of numbers given the internet now for even people like us, right? Like individuals who start a YouTube channel, everybody can see

[01:20:32] how many views they have, right? Like this is, it is just known to the world. Everybody can see how many Instagram followers you have or how many Twitter followers, how many likes your tweet got. All of this stuff is just so much more in our face than it ever was that that is the deep fear, man. Like what is this generation going to value when everything is about some sort of number? It's like what used to be salary, you know, and like parents were trying to match,

[01:20:58] make you in the fifties and they'd be like, he has like, he makes a good $50,000 a year or whatever. Now everybody can see, right? Everything. Yeah. I mean the part where I'm, I have hope, but maybe it's not like a great sample, but I feel like my daughter and her friends aren't overly focused on numbers based things in their pursuit of either finding their own values or like,

[01:21:24] you know, and I don't feel like it's getting in their way yet. You know, if they don't have a lot of Instagram followers or whatever. So, but part of that is probably because they're 20 years old and like the stakes are a lot lower now and wait till they get out into the real world and that stuff is going to start to matter. So I don't know, like same with my students, I think, you know, but they're, but that's not the best sample. These are people who chose to go into philosophy or they chose to take

[01:21:53] a great books course. And so they already kind of believe that these things that aren't necessarily rewarded in some metric are important. So I don't know. Yeah. But it could be bad. Yeah. Well, give us five stars. Yeah. Give us a five star review. Like our tweets. Actually like our tweets though, because nobody ever does anymore.

[01:22:20] Yeah. That's where I feel like I've internalized those values. Oh, that's the thing that I feel like we didn't give like enough emphasis on, but it's a very big emphasis of the paper is how we internalize the values and they all, and they just become the thing that hijack. Yeah. They hijack. We, I mean, we use like, we, we talked about that a little bit, but, but that internalization is, I think the most sinister aspect of this, uh, because then it's like you're being brainwashed

[01:22:50] and, uh, you're like in this data cult, which one of us, I would argue isn't. And one of us might be, but it's, uh, well, I mean, listen, my H index is, uh, needs, needs, needs more love. Uh, not that mine though. You're a philosopher. Yeah. Um, really quick anecdote.

[01:23:19] I remember when we were first starting the very first hosting service that we used was Squarespace. Do you remember? And they would give us download numbers. And I remember at some point you were checking the download numbers like every day. Yeah. Like, do you remember doing this? I do. I remember telling you, cause you'd be like, you would literally text me like, shit, man, we barely got anything today. And I'd be like, man, you can't, every day is not a good indicator. I don't totally remember this actually. Oh man.

[01:23:48] Are you sure? I do. Cause I remember being like, only look once a week. Like, yeah, at least. I mean, I don't like. Did the numbers hurt you, Tamler? Is that why you're so? Yeah. Like I remember the very sad period where Why Honor Matters gets released or, or even worse. Cause that had its little moment. Uh, the, like the second edition of Very Bad Wizards. And I was

[01:24:15] just kind of looking at the Amazon rankings and it's just like, well, okay. But I mean, it is number three in this obscure category, something like that. It was really sad. Uh, yeah, I think that's what it is. Numbers hurt me. And now I'm trying to strike back, but they're

[01:24:35] too powerful. Uh, I'm going to get revenge on numbers. Take that 10 downloads on a Thursday. All right. Well, great paper. Really, uh, recommend it to our listeners. Absolutely. I saw it, you know, I saw a little interview with, um, Nguyen and he seemed like

[01:25:03] a really cool guy. Like, uh, like his demeanor in the interview was exactly what you'd think after reading this. So I was, I was pleased. He didn't seem smug. Yeah. Good. Uh, we've definitely had a lot of requests to have him on as a guest. We hate having guests on, but, uh, I think we, we may do it if he's willing. He's never expressed any particular interest. All right. Uh, join us next time on very bad wizards.

[01:26:15] Just a very bad.