{"text":[[{"start":4.73,"text":"I recently described the contradictions inherent in my fitness-tracking watch. On the one hand, it had unlocked the joy of running for me, encouraging me to run further and faster and set goals I’d never dreamt of achieving. On the other, the watch could also push me into counter-productive behaviour, such as running through injury — and had a tendency to turn a pleasant run into a quantified grind."}],[{"start":32.519999999999996,"text":"What an eye-opening delight, then, to pick up C Thi Nguyen’s book The Score. Nguyen is a philosopher and, more importantly, an enthusiast for all sorts of playful activity from rock-climbing to yo-yo tricks to role-playing games. He argues that the contradiction I found in my fitness watch is part of a much bigger story about the way we have allowed quantified metrics to seep into so many parts of life."}],[{"start":60.47,"text":"The tyranny of targets is familiar stuff to social scientists, even if it seems to be a source of endless unpleasant surprises for policymakers and corporate executives. Charles Goodhart, an economist, and Donald Campbell, a psychologist, each famously explained that perfectly decent quantitative metrics become corrupted once they’re pressed into service as targets."}],[{"start":86.8,"text":"Nguyen agrees, but wants to go further. The problem is not just that we contort our behaviour to hit the target in the service of some bureaucratic incentive; it’s that we cease to realise that we are contorting our behaviour at all. The metrics, which are inevitably reductive, begin to seep into our own judgment of what matters. Nguyen calls this value capture: we abandon our rich and subtle personal values in favour of the simplified, quantified values we are being so conveniently offered."}],[{"start":120.13,"text":"Why does this happen? A simple answer is “because of computers”, but there is more to it than that. The rise of quantification isn’t the result of some tech-bro conspiracy. It’s been happening for a long time and for some good reasons."}],[{"start":136.45999999999998,"text":"First, quantified evaluations — of a student essay, a surgeon’s safety record or a bottle of wine — can be added up, averaged, analysed and compared across contexts. They become portable: you can compare one school class to another, one hospital to another, one wine producer to another. Everything can be analysed from a distance."}],[{"start":161.79999999999998,"text":"Second, quantification is often the result of algorithmic rules. Take the inputs, crank the algorithmic handle and out come the outputs. If you’re a university president wanting your institution to rise up the rankings, there are levers to pull: persuade more candidates to apply so that you can be more selective, spend money on the library and help your graduates find jobs. These rules are accessible: you don’t need deep expertise to apply them or to interpret them."}],[{"start":195.98999999999998,"text":"Third, these algorithmic procedures tend to make people interchangeable. Rather than relying on the ineffable intuitions of a teacher or a doctor or a coach, you have an objective, consistent process: any qualified person can follow the quantified process and so all qualified people are substitutes for each other."}],[{"start":219.42,"text":"Fourth, all these quantified metrics allow a centralised authority to co-ordinate and control what would otherwise be a mess of idiosyncratic decisions."}],[{"start":230.97,"text":"Portability, accessibility, interchangeability and co-ordination are often huge advantages. It is no exaggeration to suggest that modern life, including modern science, modern technology, modern politics and the modern economy, depends on these four key features of quantification."}],[{"start":253.8,"text":"But each of the four has a downside. While quantification allows us to make comparisons across different contexts, it also strips away those contexts. Rules-based decisions are intelligible and accessible to non-experts, but they are also rigid, failing to adapt to the subtleties of circumstance. Making people interchangeable does away with unwelcome inconsistencies, but also robs decision-making of individual judgment and sensitivity. And the downside of co-ordination is the loss of autonomy."}],[{"start":288.18,"text":"There are good metrics and bad ones, of course. Some are corrupt, counter-productive and riddled with perverse incentives. Others impose method on madness, identifying more effective medicines, more productive manufacturing techniques or more profitable trades. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"
"}],[{"start":308.22,"text":"Still, even the best metrics are inevitably reductive, stripping away context, discretion and judgment. These metrics also strip away diversity, forcing everyone to agree on what is best, even when we should let a thousand flowers bloom. In the pre-metric era, a university might have had a distinctive outlook, aiming to serve a particular kind of student in a particular way. Once each university wants to rise up the rankings they will need to embrace whatever values the rankings enshrine. If the metrics are good ones, then quality might rise, but the range of offerings will shrink. If the metrics are bad ones, then both quality and diversity will suffer."}],[{"start":354.67,"text":"There may be little point in trying to turn the tide of quantification in business and policy, but we can at least try to prevent it seeping into our souls. Yet why is it so easy to let the data rule the way we sleep, the way we move, the way we eat and even the way we interact our friends? Yes, digital devices have been designed to twiddle our dials. But the world is also a confusing place and we are hungry for simple, accessible guidance. Rely too much on the metrics, however, and we risk outsourcing our judgment and replacing it with thin, globalised values that do not really reflect who we are."}],[{"start":395.71000000000004,"text":"Like Nguyen, I love games, and games have rules and a score. Why do they feel so different from the gamified world in which we chase streaks on our language-learning apps, try to move the VO2 needle on our fitness watches and, at work, crank away at some corporate performance metric with one eye on promotion?"}],[{"start":416.50000000000006,"text":"Perhaps the secret to a good game or sport is that the goals are both tantalisingly challenging and utterly unimportant: that’s true of my marathon, Nguyen’s rock-climbing, a game of football or a game of chess. What makes the game fun is that it’s so hard to succeed — and that whether you succeed or fail, you can always play another game."}],[{"start":441.84000000000003,"text":"In a fun game, the rules are a scaffolding for playful mastery. And in a gamified life? The rules may be a scaffolding for productivity — but all too often, they are a cage for us poor players."}],[{"start":457.07000000000005,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":472.6700000000001,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1770962957_3683.mp3"}