How Metrics Make Us Miserable

Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer

News Commentary, News

4.7 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The modern world swims in numbers: work metrics, fitness metrics, health metrics, social media metrics. Sometimes the quantification of life can make things better. But very often, I think they force us to play the games we can measure rather than the games we value. The quantified life has become a modern religion: a system of values that takes us over and keeps us from living the life we want. Today’s guest is the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. He is the author of the book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. We talk about metrics, the games of life, and how to listen to the parts of ourselves that cannot be reduced to numbers. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: C. Thi Nguyen Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The religion scholar James Kars once wrote that there are two kinds of games in life.
0:12.2	Finite and infinite.
0:14.3	A finite game is played to win.
0:15.9	There are clear victors and losers.
0:18.1	An infinite game is played to keep playing.
0:22.3	The goal is to maximize winning across all participants. Debate is a finite game. Marriage is an infinite game. Midterm
0:29.6	elections are finite games. American democracy is an infinite game. In the last few decades,
0:36.6	I think modern society has become very good at winning
0:39.5	finite games, often at the cost of the infinite ones. The analytics revolution, which caught fire
0:46.5	in baseball under the nickname Moneyball, led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments
0:51.1	that I once called catastrophically successful.
0:55.2	Seeking more strikeouts, managers increase the number of pitchers per game and average velocity
0:59.8	and spin rate per pitch. Hitters answered by increasing the launch angles of their swings,
1:04.8	raising the odds of both a home run and a strikeout. These decisions, I think, were all correct
1:10.6	from a mathematical standpoint.
1:12.6	But they made baseball dull.
1:15.7	Singles plunged to record lows, strikeout, sword, hits per game fell to levels not seen since the 1910s.
1:23.6	Similar analytics revolutions have come for the NBA with its flurry of three-point shots,
1:28.3	or 2010's big-budget Hollywood with its devotion to comic book franchise installments.
1:33.8	In all cases, the math got smarter and the products got worse.
1:39.8	The finite games were won, and the infinite games were lost.
1:46.3	Lately, I've been thinking about how this idea applies to our day-to-day lives, to my own life.
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