We’re All Being Played By Metrics

I loved your book.

I stayed up late in the night reading it, which is a big compliment, 'cause I get very sleepy, and I had millions of thoughts.

And I know that philosophers love one sentence over simplifications.

[laughing]

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?

[laughing] That's, that's better than anything I came up with.

[laughing] I, I feel like you're buttering me up, but thank you.

Okay, so I think it's gonna be music to people's ears to hear you rail against metrics.

But I think the thing that's really interesting, and that I wanna talk about right off the bat, is that you say that they're not just irritating, that they're actually powerful and that they can change us.

Will you walk th- walk us through that idea?

Yeah.

One of the core experiences I had in my life was this kind of drift in my values, uh, where I started doing things like starting to diet, trying to get better at rock climbing, trying to get better at philosophy.

And at first, there was a scoring system nearby, and I could mostly ignore it and be like, what I cared about is the interesting questions, is feeling better in my body.

And over time, there's this drift.

What happens with the drift is that I started caring deeply and immediately about the metric.

So I've been calling this value capture, and value capture is what happens when your values are rich and subtle, and you get put in a setting, typically an institutional setting, that presents you with some simplified and quantified version of your values, and then that starts to take over.

You start caring immediately about getting more likes or getting more KPIs or getting higher in those rankings.

And I think there's a-

Right, so instead of, like, making a great podcast, you try to optimize to get the most downloads as possible.

Yeah, yeah.

Or, like, instead of actually caring about connecting to people on social media, you care about the number of likes and follows.

Um, the thing that's really worrying about value capture to me is when you get this slide, and kind of like deep inside your soul, the thing that you think is important changes, and your core expression of your value becomes likes, tweets, KPIs, page views, the status ranking of my university.

Um, another one of my favorite example, I, I was talking about this stuff, and a pastor said that, uh, inside his church, they've constructed an internal leaderboard keeping track of baptism rates-

[chuckles]

... and that all the pastors were getting super competitive, and that he'd found his own sermons changing, and that he was no longer most attentive to, like, the spiritual growth of his flock.