Hey, it's Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the show, are you being played?

Point systems are everywhere.

Ready for movie night?

Consult rotten tomatoes.

Veting a new pediatrician?

How many stars do they have?

And at work, it's even more pervasive.

There's KPI's ROIs. Success has to be

measurable. And you may ask, well, what's wrong with that? How else do you figure out if something is good

or not, if something is working or not, if you don't score it? Plus, is all scoring created equal?

Like, scoring helps make games great. So what's that about?

These are some of the big, messy questions that Dr. C. T. Nguyen has been wrestling with. He's a

philosopher at the University of Utah, and he just published his second book, The Score, How to Stop Playing, Somebody

Somebody Else's Game. T you welcome to Science Friday.

Hello, hello.

I loved your book.

I stayed up late in the night reading it, which is a big compliment because I get very

sleepy and I had millions of thoughts and I know that philosophers love one sentence

oversimplifications.

So if I had to boil the book down, I would call it,

hate the metric, don't hate the game. What do you think? That's better than anything I came up with.

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