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Feature Interview: Is your life dictated by numbers? Afternoons
But none of the metrics available to him capture any nuanced information, he says, such as student improvements in critical reasoning or reflectiveness.
This is a design feature, he says.
“Metrics are powerful, and they’re powerful because they’re thin. It’s not an accident.”
Nguyen is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and his latest book is The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game.
Something historian and scientist Theodore Porter wrote in his book Trust in Numbers about metrics “blew his mind”, he says.
“He said that there’s a systematic blind spot inside institutional metrics that’s essential to the way that they function.”
Porter points out there’s a difference between quantitative and qualitative reasoning. Qualitative reasoning, explaining with words, is “open-ended dynamic and sensitive”, he says.
“But it typically travels badly between contexts because it requires a lot of shared background knowledge to understand.”
Quantitative knowledge in institutions has been designed to get around that, he says, using a “context invariant kernel”.
This is something everyone understands in the same way, he says, such as a grading systems in education.
“In the US, we use the four-point scale. We all agree that A means excellent, B means pretty good, and C means mediocre. And given that we’ve standardised those meanings, now we can communicate, now we can collect data at mass scale, now we can aggregate, now the information can travel.
“But the way it’s been made to travel, and aggregate is precisely because we’ve stripped out every bit of nuance.”
Metrics are effective up to a point, he says.
“I’m not arguing that metrics don’t actually capture something real. It’s that often they fixate our attention on something that’s easier to measure.
“And often that easier to measure thing is a decent proxy.”
For example, counting steps is a “middling proxy for activity”, Nguyen says.
“But here’s some things it doesn’t capture. It doesn’t capture the complexity of the skill. It doesn’t capture an experience and absorption.”
For example, a more complex and immersive activity like rock climbing would register fewer steps on a wearable device than normal daily activities, he says.
The things that are easy to count are the things that everyone can count together, he says.
“Steps are things that everyone counts in pretty much the same way. Friendship quality, skill growth, like the joy of absorption in movement. These are not things that everyone counts on the same way.”
Invisible scoring systems shape our lives without us realising, he says, university rankings are an example of this.
“A lot of my students don’t think of them as a scoring system because they just think of them as objective representations of real-world value.
“They’re like, this is the way it is, but someone made a choice about what counted and what didn’t.”
And something similar is going on with intelligence testing.
“Our current intelligence tests highly weight logical and mathematical ability, but they don’t rate empathy or emotional sensitivity or artistic creativity.
“That’s a system that someone made a decision about what was more valuable or not and then fed it into the background structure of a numerical system.”
Much of Nguyen’s work has been on games and gaming and he believes they can teach us much.
“Sometimes I think playing real games might help because they teach us that we have choice, right?”
Thinking of external ranking systems as game-like gives us more perspective, he says.
“Scoring systems that you have some degree of choice over as opposed to just objective givens about what you’re supposed to do, I think is by itself really powerful.”
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