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

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Jan 13, 2026

C. Thi Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, delves into the intersections of values, agency, and playfulness. He explores how game mechanics sculpt our understanding of agency and warns against value capture, where complex human values are distilled into simplistic metrics. Thi also emphasizes the importance of perception over recognition, linking aesthetics to our experiences of action. With insights on balancing play and professional grind, he advocates for humility and creativity as ways to reclaim deeper meanings in our lives.

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INSIGHT

Aesthetics Need Slow Perception

Aesthetic value is often the value of perception: it demands slow, context-rich attention rather than fast recognition.
Modern systems undercount aesthetics because they lack scalable metrics for subtle, variable qualities.

INSIGHT

Portability Costs Nuance

Institutional metrics standardize attention by stripping context to create portable, aggregable measures.
That portability is powerful but systematically removes nuance, expertise, and the hard-to-count values.

INSIGHT

Why Institutional Data Travels

Institutional quantification deliberately removes high-context detail to make data travel and aggregate.
That design feature makes metrics socially powerful but blinds them to context-dependent value.

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Full episode transcript and all linked references available at https://dialectic.fm/c-thi-nguyen.

C. Thi Nguyen (Website, Philpeople.org, X) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah focused on values, games, agency, art, aesthetics, and data. His new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game is out now.

Thi is also the author of Games: Agency as Art, in which he explores how game designers work in the medium of agency, but sculpting a players abilities, goals, and obstacles to create "harmonious action." I first learned about Thi's work via his interview with Ezra Klein in 2022, which is one of my all-time favorite podcast episodes. In it, he discusses Agency as Art, How Twitter Gamifies Communication, Why Q-Anon is game-like, and more.

The Score is a marriage of his work on games and on data and metrics. He explores how scoring systems in games allow for playfulness and agentic exploration of our values, while scoring systems in real life produce what he calls value capture. In an effort to make the world more quantified, comprehensible, and trustless, metrics are flattening our values and sapping the meaning out of our lives. One way he describes his work is that James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State also applies to the human soul.

In this conversation, I aimed to cover the most compelling ideas in the book in two parts. First, we explore the local side: personal agency and values, attention and the difference between recognition and perception, process vs. outcome, and why playfulness and openness allow us to have richer lives. He also shares how games are a compelling template for this kind of exploration.

Second, we talk about the societal level: what we miss in a world of values dominated by what is easily measurable, how we can scale trust and enjoy the benefits of collaboration, science, and technology while not delegating our understanding to the wrong people, and why objectivity and truth are not always the same thing. Thi makes the case that technology is value-laden, not value-neutral, and that we must be more vigilant and nuanced in our approach to the ethical decisions that exist everywhere.

I hope this conversation is a prompt for you and I to think more deeply about what we truly care about, to "move lightly" between agentic and value-laden worlds, and bring a perceptive playfulness to our lives. Remember, we are all grasshoppers in disguise. If you enjoy the episode, please support Thi's work and check out The Score.

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