Odds & Ends: March 27, 2026

The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game by C. Thi Nguyen. C. Thi Nguyen is a philosophy professor who used to write food criticism for the LA Times. He’s also an avid rock climber and tabletop game player. He uses these interests to explore the philosophy of games and how the scoring systems we use in our daily lives can subtly take over our values. For example, law school rankings were designed to help students assess what a law school has to offer, but then law schools started making institutional decisions so they could rank better, even though those changes didn’t actually improve the student experience. Or we buy a sleep tracker to see how we’re sleeping, but then become obsessed with our sleep score, which in turn makes us anxious about sleep, which makes our sleep worse. Nguyen calls it “value capture.” The number that was supposed to represent what you care about ends up replacing it. One insight that he made in the book that has stuck with me is the distinction between an achievement attitude and a striving attitude. Achievement players play to win; striving players play because they love playing. It’s made me think about the metrics I’m tracking and whether they’re actually helping me live a flourishing life. 

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