In an age where everything from language learning to national success is reduced to a simple score, a new philosophical work sounds a vital alarm. C Thi Nguyen's book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game, explores the dangerous phenomenon of 'value capture', where the metrics we use to measure progress end up replacing our original, more meaningful goals.
From Learning to Leaderboards: A Personal Tale of Distortion
The author's own experience with the language app Duolingo perfectly illustrates the book's core concern. What began as a genuine desire to learn Japanese slowly morphed into an obsession with climbing weekly leaderboards and accumulating experience points. The pursuit of the metric overtook the pursuit of knowledge, culminating in a holiday spent mindlessly repeating a single lesson for points, while ignoring family and learning nothing new.
This, Nguyen argues, is 'value capture' in action: the process where a simplified measurement of progress blurs with and eventually supplants the complex value it was meant to track. "You internalise the metric," he writes, until it redefines your core sense of what's important.
When Numbers Corrupt: Law Schools and GDP
Nguyen extends this analysis from personal apps to societal structures with compelling and troubling examples. He details how American law school league tables, introduced to provide objective data, forced institutions to chase a narrow set of metrics. Previously, schools could showcase unique educational philosophies; now, they are judged by a single number.
This has led to perverse outcomes. Since rankings factor in rejection rates, some schools now spend resources soliciting applications from students they have no intention of accepting, simply to appear more selective. Genuine teaching and pedagogical innovation are sidelined in favour of 'gaming' the rankings.
At a national level, the same dynamic applies to metrics like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and exam grades. These offer a "delicious clarity" of a simple score but at the heavy cost of nuance and context. Nguyen calls our uncritical reverence for such data "objectivity laundering," where bureaucrats and officials use "the numbers" to disguise ideological choices as impartial fact.
The Antidote: Wonder, Absorption and Play
Despite the gravity of his subject, Nguyen's writing is lucid, entertaining, and precise. He vividly contrasts the hollow chase of scores with the intrinsic joys of activities like rock climbing or fly-fishing. The point of fly-fishing, he suggests, isn't primarily to catch a fish, but the meditative state and connection to nature experienced while trying.
For Nguyen, wonder, absorption, and play are central to human flourishing. Metrics act as an invasive species, threatening to replace our delicate, complex joys with the dumbed-down fundamentalism of league tables and graphs. His book is a compelling call to recognise when we are optimising for a score—be it salary, YouTube views, or journal rankings—and neglecting the experiences that make life worth living.
The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game by C Thi Nguyen is published by Penguin priced at £25. It is an urgent, enriching read that challenges the very way we measure our lives and our world.
