How to be less box-shaped

Hi all,

Been a while. I started a new job at Antithesis back in November and it’s been taking up most of my mental energy, and what’s left over has largely been spent on some coding projects, so there’s not been much brain space for writing recently. I’d like to fix that.

But anyway, that’s not what this post is about, this post is about C Thi Nguyen’s new book “The Score”.

First, my review of it: This book is excellent. You should go read it. I think it is very unlikely that anyone who likes this newsletter would not like this book.

If you are already familiar with Nguyen’s body of work, it will probably be about 80% familiar, but even the familiar bits are helpfully clarifying and much of the remaining 20% is genuinely interesting. There are bits of the book I expect to revisit over and over again.

This is a book about scoring systems. A scoring system is a way of producing a number which tells you which of two things is better.¹ It tells you what, in this particular situation, you are supposed to care about.

The basic question of this book is as follows: There are two common ways we use scoring systems: The first is in games. The second is in metrics (e.g. performance metrics at your job). In games, scoring systems are fun. In performance metrics, they are soul crushing. Why is that?

I must admit, I got to the end of the book, and I still don’t feel like I 100% understand the answer to this question, but I am definitely more productively confused about it.

Here is one part of Nguyen’s answer that stands out to me the most: It’s about convergence. Through their widespread and permanent deployment, metrics have the property of making everything the same. If everyone is trying to produce the perfect result across some metric, you end up with a sort of bland sameness of every result being close to identical. Games, in contrast, by being things that you can take up, put down, and shift between, instead create a world in which everything is different, because you can always shift between different scores.

I think this is not always the case. In many professional games and sports, you in fact see exactly this sort of convergence. It’s also telling that that often produces very boring play, much like the theory would predict.

This is not Nguyen’s only conclusion though, and I intend to reread bits of it in a more targeted manner to understand them better.

For now though, I shall present you with a grab bag of thoughts in which I randomly talk about things more or less about or inspired by the book. It’s somewhere between a summary of key bits of it and my own riffs on some of the ideas.

Reading books

Funnily, reading this book comes right off the back of a recent conversation with Lucy. We were talking about the terrible books we’d been reading recently, and at some point in the conversation I said “You know… Maybe we should read… good books?”

Anyway apparently manifesting is real now², because without making any particularly deliberate change of behaviour other than declaring my intention, the next two books I read were good. This is the second of those and it is, as mentioned, very good.³

Prior to this conversation, I’d been in a bit of a reading slump. I’d been reading a lot, don’t get me wrong, but it was mostly books with titles like “The Shadow of Mars” or “Undying Immortal System” or “Chaotic Craftsman Worships the Cube”.⁴

This might come as some surprise to you, as everyone seems to think I’m absurdly well read, but this happens to me pretty regularly. I go through periods of months or even years where my reading drops off almost entirely. This is… not fine exactly, but it’s just a problem to be solved, not a character flaw, and I know of a couple of ways to solve it.

The first is to do what I’m doing now: Read good books. Except… “good” isn’t quite right. It is often the case that I have many good books on my shelves, and absolutely none of them appeal. This is because what’s needed is not just for the book to be good, but also for the book to be good in a way that I actually want right now. This is often quite eclectic, and prone to changing at the drop of a hat.⁵

This is fine, as long as I know what I actually want right now, but I often don’t. Sometimes that’s depression, sometimes the rats in my brain are just yelling YEARNING but can’t tell me for what.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution to this: Read more until I find out what it is I want. But, given that I don’t currently want to read, how do I do that?

Well, it’s easy: First I make up a number, and then I set myself a goal of making that number go up. I create a score.

That number can be anything, but the two obvious choices are number of books read and time spent reading.⁶ Making those numbers go up requires me to read more books, so I do.

This is an example of what Nguyen calls a Suitsian Game, or what Bernard Suits just calls a game: A voluntary attempt to overcome an imaginary obstacle.⁷ There is no particular extrinsic reason to want that number to go up. It’s just a number. But by taking it on as a temporary goal, I have chosen to play a game with myself.

Crucially, by making it into a game, I have separated my goal (make the number go up), from my purpose - read more books.

Except of course, “read more books” isn’t quite right. As we’ve established, I’m reading plenty during my off periods, just not the sorts of books that I actually want. If I just wanted to read more, I’d just trawl through Royal Road some more and read things like An Infinite Recursion of Time⁸. What I want isn’t exactly to read more, but to have my life enriched by reading. And no number can easily capture that.

This isn’t necessarily a problem, as long as I relate to the number the right way.

The problem is there are two ways I can relate to the number.

The first is that I can treat it as what Agnes Callard calls a proleptic reason to do things.⁹ I am not making the number go up because I care deeply about the number, it is serving as a stand-in for my true harder to grasp goal. At some point I get to let go of the number and let me newly acquired (or, in this case, reawakened) value drive me to do the thing that the number was merely a stepping stone towards. At some point the score becomes unnecessary and I can let go of it because I’m reading on my own.

To use, instead, Nguyen’s distinction, there is a separation between my goal (make number go up) and my purpose (have my life enriched by reading). The advantage of treating this score as a game is that the goal is disposable, and I can easily stop playing the game when it no longer service my purpose.

The other way I can treat these numbers is less good for me. Instead of a game, I can treat the numbers as a measure of how well I am doing. A metric. If I do this, I risk falling afoul of what he calls value capture: The complex value I started with (have my life enriched by reading) gets degraded into following the simple measure (e.g. number of books read, amount of time reading) that I used to track it. I change my behaviour to match the goal, even when it doesn’t serve the purpose.

This isn’t a hypothetical risk. I’ve done the “number of books read” metric a number of times in the past. It’s worked very well for getting me out of reading slumps. I strongly recommend it as a method. But at some point the process I always start to notice that I’m deliberately picking shorter, easier, books to read because if I pick a long and difficult book then I will make it much harder to keep the number going up at the rate I want it to. Usually that’s a sign that it’s time to stop tracking the number.¹⁰ I’ve not actually tried the reading time one, but there the failure mode would be spending all my time reading trash, which is if anything even worse.

A healthy relationship to scores requires this willingness to understand the difference between your purpose and your goal, to playfully pick up and put down goals as they are and aren’t working for you, and to hold these goals lightly.

This is easy when those scores are created by you - as long as you are capable of noticing that this is happening, which is a lot of what this book exists to help you do. It’s significantly harder when those scores are imposed on you by other people.

A short history of the legibility war

There’s a section of the book where I kept thinking “Hmm the logical person to bring in here would be…” and then the next chapter he brings them in. My initial reaction to this section was “Fuck, I wish I’d written this”. On further reflection, I don’t think that’s right. I’m glad he wrote it and I didn’t, because it’s also not the thing I would have written linking this work, even if I had ever got around to it because I last wrote notes on this subject a good seven years ago and never revisited it properly. If I ever do get around to revisiting this topic properly, I’ll get to draw on Nguyen’s work on this as well.

The works in question are “Seeing Like a State” by James C. Scott, “Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences” by Bowker and Star, and “Epistemic Injustice” by Miranda Fricker,¹¹ and the broad theme here is something like… the way that we simplify the world in a way that erases individual and between-group variations, and who this affects and who it doesn’t.

I got extremely into this as an issue a while back. I still think it’s important but it’s on my long list of things that I never quite manage to articulate well enough to write about and never quite treat as important to prioritise figuring out how to do that.

If I try now I will probably fail, so I’m going to stop this section here. This is just a placeholder to note that there is something important here, and I’d like to owe you an essay about it, but my track record does not suggest I will ever write that essay. I might write you some more targeted ones though.

The four bargains

A recurring theme throughout the book is that there are four bargains that you can make with the world, in which you sacrifice something that matters to you for power.

Each of these bargains offers you something and takes something from you in exchange. Together they offer you great power, as well as great cost.

Nguyen does not call them the four great bargains. He calls them something else. More on that in a moment, but first, I intend to tell you what these bargains are. I’ll try to follow Nguyen’s framing as much as possible, but these are all in my own words, and any errors introduced are mine and not intended.

The first bargain is Mechanical Rules (Rules for short).

Mechanical Rules gives us clear procedures that everybody can follow in the same way. This make policies consistent and universal. It lets us replicate the way we make decisions from one location to another. This forms the basis of being able to conduct large scale civilisation, because it allows you to make things that work in a context free way. If everything has to be handled differently and by an expert, you will struggle to ever have enough of it.

The cost of mechanical rules is that you no longer get to handle each case differently. If the system is to work without expert judgement, you need to remove expert judgement from the system. You can’t make exceptions based on discretion or circumstance. If you do, you lose the power that rules granted to you.

Rules offers us accessibility, and asks us to sacrifice adaptability.

The second bargain is Replaceable Parts (Parts for short).

Replaceable Parts asks us to make everything interchangeable. One screw is much the same as another, one factory worker is much the same as another, one bag of sugar is much the same as another. As long as we do, we will be able to produce consistent results over and over again.

The downside is that we can no longer benefit from individual variation. You will never end up in a situation where what you have determines what you make, because what you have is always the same. That one bag of sugar that was interchangeable? It wasn’t, until you made it so. Brown sugar is highly variable in flavour - even between allegedly the same types¹², and if you are using it then you need to adapt to that variability and get to benefit from its specificity.

Those workers you made interchangeable by giving them assigned roles and Mechanical Rules to follow actually aren’t - they have different strengths and weaknesses, and you can always achieve better results by playing to those strengths and weaknesses, but those results will change as your workers do.

Parts is the bargain that gives us reliability, and asks us to sacrifice specificity.

The third bargain is Centralised Control (Control for short).

Control asks us to make decisions in an organized way, from a central location. This lets us coordinate actions across many contexts. To do this we compress information into legible forms, reducing it to the key features that matter, and then make sensible, rational, decisions, on the basis of that information. This lets us coordinate vast numbers of people and resources into a coherent direction and plan. As long as those people actually follow the plan.

Control offers us coordination, and asks us to sacrifice autonomy.

The fourth bargain is Scale, and it subordinates the other three. It says, if you do these three things, vast powers will be available to you, because what you can do once you can do many times. You can run nations, corporations, and do things far larger than anything you can manage as an individual. All it will cost you is your ability to handle the small things in more suitable ways. One size fits all, and if it doesn’t, that’s too bad for the all that it doesn’t fit.

Scale offers us portability, and asks us to sacrifice context.

Each of these bargains is a foundation of the modern world. We could not have achieved what we have achieved without them. They are the technology upon which our civilisation rests.

Nguyen is fully on board with this, and wants to be clear about that. James C Scott seemed to want to throw it all in and move to small scale anarchy¹³, but Nguyen in contrast is fully on board with the benefits of modern civilisation and has an interesting, nuanced, account of the trade-offs involved with each of them.

Which is why it is so annoying that he actually calls these four bargains “The Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy”.

Contrasting recipes

The following two paragraphs are one of my favourite small bits of the book:

What’s the antidote? I have a book on my shelf that exemplifies the opposite tendency. It is a simple book, called Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. They take you through a lot of basic recipes: how to make a good omelet or sauté some fish. And for every dish, they give you two completely different recipes: Julia Child’s and Jacques Pepin’s. And next to the recipes are sidebars in which they bicker with each other. They explain why their version of the recipe is the way it is, what decision they made to get which effects—and why the other person’s recipe misses the mark. The book is formatted this way because it is the companion piece to an old PBS TV show. It is the record of an argument—a rowdy conversation between friends.

And the effect on me, as I learned to cook from this book, was to undermine the sense that there is a single, correct way to cook. Instead, it revealed every cooking act as a set of decisions through a network of legitimate but different alternatives. You want your scrambled eggs to be fluffier? Use higher heat and faster motion. You want them to be like sweet pudding? Turn the heat down low, add more butter, and stir it for a long, slow time. And once you learn those two endpoints of cooking scrambled eggs, you will know how to improvise in between. The book uses mechanical recipes to communicate—but by pairing different recipes and introducing dissent, it frames them differently. It undermines the monolithic authority of the classic cookbook, offering a landscape of variation, of different choices you can make, guided by different tastes. It is an unsettled cookbook. The paired recipes appear not as the Right and Official way to do things, but as points on a wide spectrum. The book uses mechanical recipes to create space for your culinary agency.

I’ve ordered a copy of the book. I suspect I won’t actually like the recipes very much - My dietary requirements are almost completely incompatible with French cooking - but I love the idea.

In Learning to walk through walls, which is one of the big places I’ve previously drawn on Nguyen’s work, I talked about two competing moves:

1. Noticing you’re playing a game that you don’t need to be, and stepping out of the rule set.

2. Building restricted games to help you navigate a more complex skill by turning it into a serious of discrete moves.

Recipes serve a similar function. Cooking is a running theme throughout this book - which I of course really appreciated - and one of the points that he makes several times is how these mechanical recipes act as a great starting point for cooking, but you do need to be able to break out of them, and many people don’t even start from them, in contrast to a more traditional approach to cooking:

I asked my mom to teach me my very favorite Vietnamese dish: hot and sour catfish soup. So she did—or she tried to. What she gave me wasn’t anything I could follow; it was nothing like a recipe at all. It seemed to me, at the time, like this vast and disorganized ramble, a weird organic messy flowchart of possibilities and decisions and judgment calls. I was supposed to add tomato and pineapple but I was supposed to taste the ingredients first. If one was sweet and the other sour, I was probably fine. But if they were both particularly sweet, I would need to balance them with some extra vinegar. Or if they were both sour, I might need to add a little brown sugar. My mom wouldn’t ever tell me how much; it all depended on how things were tasting that day.

This is a level and type of cooking skill that I envy, truth be told. It’s not mine though, and I’m not going to try to acquire it. As with many things one envy’s, what I want is the upsides without the cost.

I am an improvisational cook, for sure, and can adapt a recipe on the fly, but what I cannot do that is adapt a recipe to achieve a consistent result like this. It’s an impressive level of dedication to a single dish, and one that comes from a lifetime of skilled practice and you cannot, I think, easily shortcut that practice, and while the skill implied is fascinating to me it’s also not one where I’m prepared to do the legwork.

The reason we start with recipes is that they are easy. Mechanical Rules grants us the promise that anyone with the basic prerequisite skills can follow the instructions and get the desired result. When you’re a manager, you want that because you want your workers to be fungible. But when you’re an anyone, you want that because you want to be able to follow the rules and get the desired result, and it’s pretty great that you can do that.

The Julia and Jacques approach that Nguyen is pointing to here is that two recipes is a lot better than one, because it’s also the entire continuous spectrum of recipes in between those two, and this helps you notice that in fact there are no barriers around you that you cannot walk through. It won’t teach you to the depth of experience found in his mother’s approach to hot and sour catfish soup, but it will give you the foundation you need to move as far in that direction as you are prepared

Philosophy and self-help

When I first found about this book, my initial reaction was to go ugh. I hate the title, the subtitle, and the cover. It looks like the worst sort of airport book self-help trash. If I did not already have an extreme amount of faith in the author and his abilities as a thinker and a writer, I would not have bought this book without a resounding endorsement from someone I trusted.

Fortunately I did have that faith, and took the corresponding leap and the book is, as I mentioned, excellent.

But… the impression of the book as a self-help book isn’t entirely wrong. This is not a book about how to fix the world. This is a book about how to navigate a world that is trying to squeeze you into a tidy set of boxes where you can be one among a set of Replaceable Parts following Mechanical Rules under Central Control to produce a society that works at Scale. This is good for you only to the degree that you are box-shaped, and the book is trying to help you push back against that tendency.

And… it’s only OK at that, because although it is written as if it were a self help book, it is really a philosophy book, albeit one written in an engaging and accessible manner for a general audience, and philosophy is much better at helping you understand the problem than it is at providing you a solution.

Nguyen’s proposed solution is games: By learning to play with rules, we can start to add play and flexibility and personal meaning back into a world that has tried to force us into simple and easy to understand shapes.

To which I say… well, maybe.

I think this is a better solution for Nguyen than it is for me, because Nguyen is delighted by games in a way that I simply am not. I like games, don’t get me wrong. I think they’re fun, they offer an interesting lens on the world, and they are provide a great way to engage with and socialise with others.

A lot of Nguyen’s work starts with Bernard Suits’s ideas around games, which are roughly:

1. A game is a voluntary attempt to overcome an unnecessary obstacle.¹⁴

2. In a sufficiently advanced utopia, there would be no necessary obstacles, therefore everything that we choose to spend our time doing must be a game.

The primary definition has never quite sat right with me. I think it’s an excellent lens on games, but not necessarily a good definition of one. I think, for example, you could regard proving a theorem in pure mathematics as a game under this definition, and while I don’t think it’s exactly wrong to do so (this is, after all, the formalist position in philosophy of mathematics), it feels to me at least like you are missing a lot of the richness of the mathematical experience in reducing it to that.

I think a weaker form of Nguyen’s thesis - that games help us to relearn play in a world so steeped in rules as part of its essential nature - is clearly true, and I am glad of them for that (and for their own sake), but as a solution, or even the starting point of one, it leaves me unsatisfied.

Fortunately, for me, I think the book itself is a better solution than the solution it presents is. Sometimes the thing you need to solve the problem is not a solution, but just to be able to see and describe it clearly. To acquire the tools of interpretation that let you look at the world and say “Ah, I see what is going on”, and know what it is that you want about it to be different.

This book has certainly helped me with that, and I intend to revisit it, probably several times, because my first read I basically wolfed down the contents, and it deserves a more thorough chewing on.

In review

As I said at the beginning, this book is excellent. You should go read it.

Part of why I say that is a sort of altruism. I like Nguyen, and want his work to do well, and while you are, by default, an anonymous reader, I at the very least want the best for you in that you are a person and I wish you well as a result of it, and I think this book would be good for you.

But partly I say this because, for my own sake, I would really like there to be a broader understanding of these sorts of issues. Nguyen talks about one of the costs of Scale being in the form of Fricker’s notion of hermeneutical injustice - people lack the tools to understand and communicate their experience, because they must communicate in the sanitised language of legibility - but another form of hermeneutical injustice is that people lack the tools to understand what is happening in the world, and how it is shaping them. This book is one part of that tool set.

We’ll never have a world where everyone understands this. It is the nature of tools like this that they decay at scale. But if we, as individuals, understand this, then we can build communities that do too, and even if we can’t - and don’t really even want to - push back on the broader legibilising forces of the world, we can at least understand them enough to build shelter from them.

1. “A scoring system is a social process that delivers a quantified evaluation, and so enters a singular verdict into some official record.” according to Nguyen.

2. TBF I already mostly believed this, the article is just timely.

3. The other was “Sanity and Sainthood” by Tucker Peck. Maybe more about that another time, but here’s Sasha’s review if you’re curious.

4. I do actually recommend all of these. Maybe not “The Shadow of Mars”. It’s the latest in a long long series and I like about half the books in it but it’s way too military sci-fi and I’m mostly here for the wizards in space.

5. One problem I often have is that I end up drawing a through-line through a series of books where I’m reading obsessively for a topic for about five or six books in a row and have several more queued up and then suddenly have had enough of the whole thing and don’t want to read any more of it. There’s a lot of debris on my shelves resulting from this process.

6. Number of pages read is also an option, but it’s mostly pretty well correlated with time spent reading, and it’s more annoying to track, so I’ve never tried that.

7. This concept has come up here a number of times in e.g. Learning to walk through walls. I’ve never actually written a really good introduction to the concept, or seen anyone else do so in less than book length, but hopefully you get the idea.

8. This one I don’t recommend.

9. Nguyen doesn’t specifically mention Callard in The Score, but I was introduced to her by his previous book “Games: Agency as Art”.

10. Not always! This is actually a feature, not a bug, early on in the process, because if you’re in a reading slump then reading a bunch of easy to read books is actually a good place to be. It just can’t continue indefinitely.

11. WELL ACTUALLY, the right thing to be reading here is “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression” by Kristie Dotson, who Nguyen doesn’t cite, but the problem that he talks about is much more in line with her concept of “contributory injustice” than Fricker’s “hermeneutical injustice”, because it is about hermeneutical resources that exist in the relevant communities but are not taken up by the majority.

12. Unless, of course, you made that brown sugar by first refining out the white sugar and the molasses, adjusting your molasses until it achieved the desired reliability and consistency, and then added it back in.

13. Especially the sort of small scale anarchy where he got to keep being a professor at Yale.

14. This is the “portable definition”, but the distinction between it and the more formal definition doesn’t matter here.