The Score: Why Metrics Shape Our Values and What They Miss

In this Science Friday episode Flora Lichtman interviews philosopher CT Nguyen about the ubiquity of scoring systems—from social media likes to KPI dashboards—and the tension between quantification and meaning. Nguyen argues that metrics are powerful because they provide stable, cross-context counts, but their simplifications can drift our values away from what actually matters. The show uses stories from games and everyday life to explore how scoring can guide behavior, shape desires, and reveal what we prize. The discussion traverses value capture, the limits of measurement, and how games can both liberate and constrain us depending on design and intention. Listener contributions—ranging from hiking logs to Yahtzee odds and Dungeons & Dragons—illustrate how scoring can deepen engagement or reveal deeper questions about what makes life meaningful.

The conversation culminates in a provocative reframing: games may illuminate life’s meaning by focusing on process and inquiry rather than purely on outcomes, echoing Aristotle and Bernard Suits while challenging modern score-driven institutions.

Overview: Metrics, Value, and Meaning

The episode opens with Flora Lichtman introducing a central paradox: scoring systems are everywhere, yet their power to shape behavior and perception is often misunderstood. The guest, Doctor CT Nguyen, a philosopher at the University of Utah, recently published The Score, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. The titular tension—love for games and suspicion of metrics—frames the discussion: how can we use scores without losing sight of what truly matters?

"hate the metric, don't hate the game" - Flora Lichtman

The conversation quickly centers on the phenomenon of value capture, a phenomenon Nguyen identifies when abstract, rich personal values are displaced by simplified, quantified proxies like likes, KPIs, or rankings. He explains that in many institutional settings these quantifications provide a stable, cross-context form of information, but at a price: context, nuance, and discretion are stripped away, potentially reorienting a person’s deepest commitments toward the very metrics designed to measure them.

To illustrate the double-edged sword of metrics, Nguyen points to historians Theodore Porter and Lorraine Daston. Porter argues that administrators crave quantitative justification because numbers travel well, existing as stable chunks across contexts, unlike qualitative judgments that are context-bound and nuanced. This decontextualization is both the design feature and the bug of quantitative data: stability and understandability come at the expense of richness and sensitivity. In education, for example, letter grades and GPAs become proxies that distill complex learning into a single, portable score. Nguyen’s insight is that the power of metrics lies in their decontextualization, which enables broad sharing and comparison, but simultaneously collapses multi-dimensional values into flat counts.

"metrics are powerful because they're designed to be stable across context" - CT Nguyen

Nguyen also discusses the difficulty—or perhaps impossibility—of fully metricizing certain domains, such as art or the quality of human connection. He recalls a conference with machine-learning researchers who sought a vast database to “operationalize” good art, only to admit there may not be a single universal metric for quality. This leads to an important distinction: metrics that are stable and comparable across contexts are valuable for coordination, but they inevitably omit subtleties that require human discretion and value-laden judgments.

Porter’s framework helps explain why qualitative knowledge is rich but travels badly between contexts, while quantitative data travels well and travels far. The result is a paradox: the very feature that makes metrics so powerful—their cross-context clarity—also makes them limited and potentially harmful when used as the sole standard of evaluation. The discussion then pivots to practical questions: can metrics be designed to reduce bias and improve objectivity, or are there limits to what scoring can and should accomplish?

Throughout, the show uses listeners’ experiences with games and everyday scoring to probe deeper questions about meaning, motivation, and human flourishing. Connor’s Appalachian Trail spreadsheet, Elizabeth’s Yahtzee odds, and Fred’s Dungeons & Dragons experiences reveal how scoring can hyper-motivate in ways that feel purposeful and alive, or, conversely, can compress life into a narrow set of measurable outcomes.

The segment culminates in a reframing: while metrics can help us compare and decide, life’s meaning is tied to the process of inquiry, the struggle, and the growth that occur while pursuing understood goals. This echoes Bernard Suits’ notion of playing as voluntary obstacle making a distinctive kind of experience possible, which in turn ties back to Aristotle’s claim that meaning lies in our activities and capacities, not merely in outcomes.

"the meaning of life is in the actions we do, the exercise of our capacities, not our outcomes" - Aristotle