Instant Genius - The hidden scoring systems running our lives

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

In the world of games, scoring systems establish a framework that provides us with clear challenges, motivation, and ultimately delivers a huge amount of fun and pleasure. However, on the flip side, the increasing tendency to apply rankings and metrics to almost every area of our personal and professional lives can have a dehumanising effect, reducing our actions, performance, and even ourselves to a simple string of numbers. In today’s episode, we’re joined by C Thi Nguyen, a games researcher and associate professor of philosophy based at the University of Utah, to talk about his latest book, The Score – How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game. He explains how, in the real world, scoring systems typically fail to provide meaning by focusing on the simplest to measure outcomes, how purely numerical data is, by definition, lacking in nuance, and how, by concentrating on what we truly value, we can all break free from the tyranny of rankings and metrics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Incident Genius, a bite-size masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. In the world of games, scoring systems establish a framework that provides us with clear challenges, motivation, and ultimately delivers a huge amount of fun and pleasure.

However, on the flip side, the increasing tendency to apply rankings and metrics to almost every area of our personal and professional lives can have a dehumanizing effect, reducing our actions, performance and even ourselves, to a simple string of numbers. In today's episode, we're joined by C.T. Newn, a games researcher and associate professor of philosophy based at the University of Utah, to talk about his latest book, The Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game. He explains how in the real world, scoring systems typically fail to provide meaning by focusing on the simplest to measure outcomes, how purely numerical data is, by definition, lacking in nuance,

and how, by concentrating on what we truly value, we can all break free from the tyranny of rankings and metrics. So, T, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. I am happy to be here. So today we're talking about your latest book, The Score, how to you. to stop playing someone else's game.

So that's quite a provocative title, I'd say. So it's all about the notion of games and gamification. So first off, to get us all on the same page, you hear the term bandied around a lot. But what exactly do we mean by gamification? I started writing this book because I became obsessed with, like, a question that came up from two different streams of what I was thinking about. One stream was about how games and scoring systems often lead to such delightful play.

And the other half was about how gamifications, rankings, and metrics. My experience of them in education, institution, online, on social media, seemed to like drain the life out of everything and ruin my experience of communication, of being a researcher, of being a person. So I wanted to understand that. So I think the first thing, gamification is a really complicated term. The first thing to say about gamification is that gamification is taking the kind of superficial trappings of a game, the leveling experience, the scoring experience, the fact that you're

getting points, and applying it to a non-game context, applying it to work, applying it to education. Underneath and more deep down, I think one way to put it, and this is maybe my own core usage is that games are things, they're kind of artificial activities that you create and invent, and to do that, you use a scoring system. And gamifications are taking something that we're actually already doing with an actually extant goal, right? We're already trying to learn things. We're already trying to get healthier. We're already trying to like increase our scientific product. And then applying the appearance and mechanics of a scoring system and slapping that onto a

real life activity and I think substantially transforming it. Yeah, so let's start with scoring systems. And I think, you know, while it might not necessarily always be in the forefront of our minds, if we stop and think for just a few seconds, you know, scoring systems or ranking systems are everywhere. You know, grades at school, sports leagues, movie reviews, and even in things like artistic pursuits, so I play classical guitar, and I've forgotten the amount of times I've played the piece for somebody, and the first thing they say is, oh, that looks tricky, what grade is it? You know, they want to know, or level it's that.

It's really, really interesting, is it, like psychologically? So first of all, is there a sort of quick and dirty definition of what a scoring system is? You know, how can we define it? A scoring system, I think it's a particular kind of social technology. It's a way of doing things. I work some in the philosophy of technology and have a really broad definition of a technology. A technology is a way of doing things. Sometimes it's material, but sometimes it's like an idea or a way of organizing an institution.

Like, for a lot of people in the space, like the idea of a factory, the idea of an assembly line is a kind of technology. It's a new way of doing things that changes the world. I think the scoring system is something similar. A scoring system is a social technology. It's a method for guaranteeing a convergence of judgment. It's some way of specifying in an official way how we're going to judge things. So we all get on board.

And I think one thing, so the book we're talking about, it's my first popular book, but it's my second book. My first book was an academic book about games. And that first book, one of the things I really wanted to talk about was the beauty of games as this designed art form that weren't just stories or narratives or worlds, but were specifying alternate selves. So I was really inspired while I was reading this stuff by a lecture at the game developers conference by Reiner Kinitia, who's my favorite board game designer. He's a German genius of board game design. And he says in this moment that the scoring system is the most important. design tool in his toolbox because it tells the players what to care about. It sets their

motivations in the game. You open up a game. You open up a board game and you find out what you're trying to do. You find out whether your cares are going to be aligned with other people or aligned with team or whether you're completely individualistic. You find out whether you're getting points for killing people or collecting resources, right? They tell you what to do. But one thing I missed and I kind of can't believe I missed it. I think it's because I was obsessed with board games when I was writing the first book. I thought that every game had to have a scoring system.

And now I realized that they don't. And it's actually really valuable to look at the difference between unscored and scored games. So there are a lot of games and a lot of even competitive games that don't have a scoring system. And a lot of these look like aesthetic games. So my favorite example is like skateboarding.

When people go to the skate park, I'm not a skateboarder. I'm a rock climber, I'm a fisher, but I'm not a skateboarder. So all of this is a secondhand knowledge. They're often, they're competing. And they're competing for cool. By the way, I should confess, in my first draft of this book, I said that skateboarders were competing for the coolest trick.

And a 20-something-year-old editor at Penguin, who's a skateboarder. She wrote me a note and said, you sound old and out of touch, which are mysties. It turned out to mean stylish ease, which I love. I didn't know. I feel like a poser is saying this. but like, so there's often an aesthetic competition, and you don't have a pre-established way of figuring out who won. And in fact, you can go and come out with a different, a, you don't need to have a single conclusion. You can be like, oh, I wanted this gate parking.

This person did the most explosive trick, and this person did the most beautiful drink. That's fine. You don't need a single conclusion, and you also don't need a bunch of people to come to the same conclusion, right? You can have the competition, right? I mean, I think, in a very casual sense, if you're sticking around your friends and, like, casually competing to tell the funniest joke, it's clear that it's a competition and it's clear that it's a game, but you don't need a method to settle who won officially. And you see these transitions. There's a transition in skateboarding when skateboarding went official, when it went to ESPNX games and the Olympics. They needed a clearer way to produce something that looked like

an objective score. And so the practice shifted from a kind of more aesthetic stuff. dialish practice to one centered on more mechanistic, easier to measure, easier to publicly validate goals, height, and number of flips. The entire practice shifted in order to make it easy for everyone to agree on the same judgment. And I think, in some sense, what this book is about is worrying on the smaller scale. Maybe this kind of scoring system change robs us of something in skateboarding, maybe. But I'm worried about this in the large scale, that this is happening everywhere, globally,

that we are shifting consistently from subtler, richer, but still real targets to easier to measure, easier to count, easier to agree on targets, and that this is shifting what we care about. Part of what I put, say, in the book, is the thing that I'm really worried about is what I'm calling the gap,

and the gap is the distance between what actually matters and what's easy to measure and easy to count in a public manner. And those aren't the same. And I think it's really easy to think, I mean, I don't know how technically you want to get, but one way for me to put it is it's really easy for us to make this slide into thinking that what's easy to count together is all that's real. It's all that's objective. I think actually, no, there are plenty of things that are real and really important that are very subtle

and require a lot of experience to understand. But the demand of scoring systems that we count in unison easily, that the counting rules be accessible to everyone and that everyone can count in the same way, they shift what we target in a profound and systematic way. Yeah, so in the book, you write something that I thought was really fascinating, something that I've actually thought myself.

And that's fly fishing. I've never actually been fly fishing myself, but when I was young, I was a keen course, You know, I often go with my dad and my twin. And of course, you sort of naturally enter into a sort of competition without even trying to, you know, who can catch the biggest fish, you can catch the most different species or whatever. But if you were to ask me now, you know, 20, well, blimey, 30 odd years later, you know, what do I remember from that? I don't remember the day that I caught the most fish. I don't remember the biggest fish that I caught.

I just remember spending time with my family, you know, outdoors, having a really good time. So in the book you have a sentence that while catching fish may be the goal of fishing, it's not the purpose. And I think that's a really key point. So can you unpack that idea for us, please? Yeah, this is one of the central ideas, I think, and one of the things why, I know, some people think it's weird that I'm a philosopher, and I think a lot about games. I think games teach us something really important about, I mean, maybe this sounds pretentious,

but the meaning of life. And it's there in what you just said. I started thinking about this because I think a moment, I was in graduate school and my mentor, Barbara Herman, the esteemed Kantian ethicist who terrified everyone. She was saying something. And, you know, all the graduates students are always trying to catch out the professors.

And we were like, oh, that doesn't make sense. And we tried to, I can't even remember what the point was. And she was like, oh, you're all making a mistake. You're just failing to distinguish between a goal and a purpose. And all those were like, there's no such thing as a difference. Those are the same thing. And she said, no, when you invite your friends over for a night of cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun.

And these are really different, right? I think one way to put it is that the goal of a game is what you formally pursue in the game. It's the stated goal of the game. It's the victory condition. And the purpose is why you play. And there are different reasons to play. For some people, I call them achievement players. Some people play the game in order to win.

that's the value for them, right? Either because it gets them something they want, like status or money, or because they just want to win. That's achievement play. Another kind of player, it's a striving player. And a striving player is somebody who tries to win in order to have a process of interesting or beautiful

or satisfying struggle. What they care about is the struggle. And the interesting thing for me about games is that in the posture of stress, driving play. What you care about is the process, but you can't get that process without trying to win. One of the interesting things for me about fly fishing is I find it very meditative. I'm out in Utah and I know a lot of dudes that have this very intense relationship to fly fishing. And my theory is that what they actually need is meditation, but they're too doodly to actually

do that explicitly. But like fly fishing is like cover, right? You're like, oh, I'm fly fishing. but it can't just be like a superficial cover. You just can't go pretend to yourself and then go out there and try to meditate. The whole point is that meditation doesn't happen when you aim at meditating. Meditating happens for me on the river when I'm trying to catch fish,

which means I'm trying to look at my surroundings to find signs of fish. And so that goal forces me to pay much more attention than I would ever pay to the fine details of the surface of the water. And then I achieve meditation. accidentally. There's a philosophy term for this. A self-effacing end. A self-facing end is an end you can't aim at directly. My favorite version of this is like relaxation. You can't relax just by

being like, grr, I'm going to relax. You can't relax by trying harder to relax. I relax by trying to climb rocks. So there's a place where the goal is to go up, but the purpose is to cleanse my mind and relax. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room.

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So sort of running through the book as well, that's sort of veering over the whole thing is perhaps the, the evil sibling of the story, if I can call it that. And that's metrics. So what do we mean by metric? What is a metric? A metric, one way to put it is a metric is a scoring system for reality, right?

A game is a scoring system imposed on an artificial, separate universe. There's this old idea that games happen in a magic circle, and you go in and you try to, you know, destroy your spouse, and then you step back and you're like, ah, everything's fine again. metrics are what happens when you use quantitative data about the real world, and you transform that into a target or a scoring system. It's when you target something that can be easily measured. In the games half of the book, the core concept is Striving Play, which we've talked about. On the metric side, the core concept for me is the idea of value capture.

Value capture is what happens when your values are kind of rich and subtle. And then you enter an institution or a social setting that feeds you simplified, typically quantified renditions of those values, and the simplified ones take over. So for me, it was going to philosophy graduate school out of a love of philosophy and then coming out obsessed with citation rates in highly ranked journals. For a lot of scientists, I know, they go in for the love of wisdom and they come out obsessed with like grant numbers and how big your grants are. For journalists, it becomes page views. For a lot of us on social media, you start wanting communication and you start ending up wanting likes.

And so the important thing for me about a metric is a metric presents you a target and a target that's limited in the way we talked about before. It's limited because of the need for everyone to count together. So it's limited to touching on the kinds of features that everyone can count easily. High number of flips. And then if what's actually valuable

is not what's easily counted, then value capture will tend to push your values away from what actually matters. By the way, I have, I have, I have, I have, I have, I still entertain you. I have a favorite example of this in normal life that got cut from the book because it made, it seemed gross, but I, I think you'll find it interesting. So while I was reading this, I started researching pickup artist culture. And interestingly, pickup artists are, have been really well studied by sociologists and

anthropologists. There's a sociologist Eric Hendricks, who embedded was Pickett. up artists for a while. So pick up artist culture is people, mostly but not always men, who compete for sexual success. And one of the interesting things that he discovered was that pickup artists are uninterested in happiness. In fact, one of the standard motto is you have to sacrifice any interest in happiness or pleasure in order to win. So what pickup artists typically compete for, and I think this is like one of my favorite examples, is number of phone numbers you get in the night, number of sexual acts you get in a month, speed from

meeting someone to some kind of sexual interaction, here's what they don't compete for. Romance, quality relationships, or even pleasure, right? This is one of the things that blew my mind. I thought pickup artists would be evil, but at least enjoys themselves. I think something else has happened that's even worse. And hopefully it's clear. The whole point is that pickup artistry has shifted the need for competition. and accountability about your competition

and transparency about your wins has led to a shift of the behavior towards targeting things that are so far, at least for me, from what most of us would think is valuable in a romantic relationship, even a short-term one. And that's an example of value capture,

where they've sacrificed any amount of pleasure or happiness purely just for essentially for a number. Bragging rights, I suppose, they can say, well, you know, you're 10, 9, 12, I'm better than you, sort of thing. Exactly. But this is a point where I want to caution,

and I want to be like, it's really easy to, like, point at other people and laugh, but I think it's very easy to find value capture cases in your own life. I've been value captured by the quest for lower weight, the quest for optimizing my macronutrients, the quest to get higher on the philosophy rankings. Each of these things has, for some period of time, consumed me,

and it's really wild. because it's so miserable a lot of the times. And it's easy to lose, it's the thing that I find really fascinating is how easy it is to lose your grip on what really matters when you're presented with a simple, clear number, both institutionally. Like in my academic life,

I'm in large-scale institutions that have, to my mind, stopped targeting things like teaching curiosity, teaching reflection, teaching any kind of intellectual virtue, and started targeting things like graduation rate and graduation speed. again, easy measurables that capture people's attention because they are easy to express. Yeah, so I think, you know, you mentioned there one, as you say, slightly gross example, and then a more serious one.

But, you know, the first thing that perhaps came to my mind when I was thinking about this is, you know, where the emphasis is placed on the incorrect metric would be something like GP appointments. Like there's a lot of talk about this at the moment over here in the UK. And you can reach a point where sort of GP practices, let's say hypothetically, we're rating these practices on the number of patients that they're seeing. So if we're concentrating on that, obviously what we're going to do is reduce the appointment time so we can fit in more appointments per day. And the only logical conclusion to that, to me, seems that the quality of care is going to go down.

but if we're using this metric to rate them on, it will, you know, go up while the quality that sort of rating goes up, while the quality of care goes down. So is that the kind of example that you're talking about? Right. That's exactly the kind of example I'm talking about. Actually, that example is a great, what I think, whenever I talk about this stuff, everyone wants to tell me about the terrible metric in their life, but I think it's actually more unnerving for me to think about subtler examples. It seems to be really obvious. I mean, So I'm a professor. I'm related on student evaluations.

We all know the way to get high student evaluations is to make an easy class. Students don't learn as much, but you get higher evaluations. Lousy metrics are really, really obvious. I think some of the most nauseating cases for me are cases where the metrics are pretty good, but imperfect.

And the one that this is perhaps a politically dangerous view, but a worrisome one for me that I've been obsessed with since the COVID pandemic, is the degree to which easy public health metrics, like lives saves and life expectancy, tend to trump other considerations like life quality, cultural quality, community, mental health. And I'm not saying that it's not important to save lives. But maybe a less controversial example for me is like saturated fats, like cheese, right? It's very easy to track heart attack rates, longer lifespans.

It's very hard to track culinary joy. The claim here isn't anti-scientific. There is a genuine real correlation between saturated fats and heart attack rates. The claim is certain kinds of things that are easier to measure tend to beat out automatically and unthinkingly other harder to measure values. And trying to understand this. So there's one common response here, which is, oh, that's just a bad metric. We need to find better metrics. And I had this gut, a lot of the time when I was thinking about this, I had this gut response

that you wouldn't be able to find better metrics for certain kinds of things, especially central with human values. And I was trying to understand why. And I found some answers, especially from some philosophers like Elizabeth Barnes, who works on the notion of health, and then a bunch of historians in a field called Science and Technology Studies. So, Theater Porter unlocked a huge amount of this stuff for me. And this is a thing I am literally dying to talk about on the BBC science podcast.

because this, okay, so, Peter Porter was a historian who was inspired by, actually, by a bunch of philosophers, I'd claim, like Ian Hacking and Bruno Latour, and he was really interested in why politicians and administrators tended to unthinking, kind of automatically reach for quantitative justification, even when the metrics were bad. So the theory he developed was that there were two kinds of ways of knowing about the world, qualitative and quantitative. And it's not a Not that quantitative is bad, it's that each of them is a tool designed for a different purpose with different strengths and weaknesses, and the problem is compulsively reaching for the quantitative. So qualitative justification, written words, is open-ended, dynamic, subtle, rich,

but it travels badly between contexts because it requires a huge amount of shared background. So one way for me, my example is as a professor, when I write qualitative evaluations to my students, I can respond along multiple dimensions. I don't have to declare a single overall score. I mean like, well, you're really creative, but it wasn't as rigorous. I don't have to settle that up. And I can also use all the rich language, a philosophy, of my class. But one, those things don't travel well.

Like people from the business school will not understand my comments, and I won't understand their student comments. And two, they do not aggregate well. Like thousands of student evaluations don't aggregate. So what Porter says is quantitative information is, quantitative information is a kind of instrument that's designed to be in get around this problem. When we create quantitative information in an institution, we identify a context invariant kernel. We find something that's stable across all contexts that everyone from different backgrounds can understand. We agree on it,

we rigidify it, and then we can all understand and connect and collect into it. So in the US, this is GPA, grade point average. If you get an A, that's a four. If you get a B, that's a three. Every student work can be pushed into a single spectrum that can be quickly average and get a grade point average. So Porter's insight is that data has been designed to travel. His term is that it's portable. It's been made to be portable. And the way it's made to be portable is it has context and subtly stripped out. It's been designed to be understood across context. So I think the thing that Porter identifies for me is that the kind of what I would call the insensitivity and inhumanity of metrics is an essential design feature. In order to communicate readily at scale, we have to strip off

things that require high context and nuance to understand. So the thing that makes metrics powerful, that is, the quick aggregation, the easy comprehensibility, is achieved precisely at the cost of loss of nuance. And I'm not saying this is bad in every case. Like, this is, is also, this is not just metrics, this is science, right? The reason why it's really easy to optimize for certain things like antibiotics is that having an antibiotic stop your infection is really easy for everyone to see. Having a life-saving measure, save one to someone's life, that's easy to count. So those are the kinds of things that's very easy to collect large-scale data for. Things that are highly variable to require high sensitivity or that are subtle are very hard.

And this is not saying they're not real, right? It's just saying that they're hard. It's just saying that They're hard for everyone to assess quickly and easily. One of my favorite examples of here is like, so there are a lot of legal rights that we connect to age. And we actually don't, we don't actually care about age. What we actually care about is intellectual and emotional maturity. But it would be a disaster if we granted voting rights based on intellectual and emotional maturity, right?

You would need a particular judge. So there's a case where we make a tradeoff and instead of exactly tracking the thing, we find a mechanical line in the U.S. you get to vote if you're 18, right? And that mechanical line is inarguable. Everyone is says it at the same place. And that's a case where I think it's great. It is fantastic that for voting, we have a clear mechanical line that everyone can replicate. But for other things, like, I don't know, choosing your arts grants or choosing your fitness routine or choosing what your career is, these things, it's less important that our decision procedure and our targeting procedure are bound by the standard of absolute context

crossing decontextualization. I mean, the quick way to put it is that for Porter, data, and therefore metrics are a designed engineer technology that gets us fast, portable, aggregability at the cost of context. Yeah, so another thing that you talk about is the appeal of metrics. And I don't think it's just their tidiness. It's kind of the kind of authority that they seem to carry within them. That's the final verdict on this issue. This such and such is five out of ten. That's it. You know, and so we're kind of, do you think we're less likely to challenge that? Because it seems like it is so black and white. Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of, this, this has been this puzzle for me for the longest time of why these things are so seductive. One

the early explanations I had was that there's this kind of like existential soothingness, like it's really painful to be exposed to the complexity of real values, and this makes things easy. That's one explanation. Another explanation is that it's just easier to communicate. And Porter tells us why it's been designed to be easier to communicate. Lately I've been thinking, I came up with a term for it literally yesterday in my graduate seminar talking my students about this. A lot of the times, the way we say that something is objective versus subjective is that we get someone else's confirmation. They see it too. Right. That is literally the basic, if you go back to like old Hume classics of empiric's philosophy, you know that the

feeling of warmth is subjective because different people experience it differently in the same place. You know the temperature is objective because different people will come up with the same measurement, right? But I kind of think metrics do a kind of objectivity hacking, right? They create a quick, easy shortcut to agreement and convergence by zeroing in on features that are highly accessible. And so this is, I feel like we're headed into like weirdo technical philosophy, but the thing that's really interesting to me is the difference between what's real and what's important and what's easily observable by anybody,

especially under conditions of quickness and speed. And metrics are designed to create easy convergence at speed among everybody. They're a shortcut to the appearance of objectivity. So we've talked about quite a lot there, a lot of different pitfalls that are in this. So sort of for somebody who's listening, he's thinking, you know, how can they avoid falling foul of these pitfalls? You know, what can we learn from games? And you talk about the notion of play, which is really interesting,

that we can actually apply in our own lives. Because often it can feel like a lot of these things are just completely out of our own control. Yeah, I mean, not only A, a lot of these systems are out of our control. And a lot of the fixes here are structural. I'm not going to sit here and say, like, we can fix this through individual grit. Like a lot of this is because of the way the institutions work. even there you can find different relationships to external scoring systems.

And it's important to remember that we do use them all the time. Even, I think, even the best relationship to scoring systems in the world is going to constantly use them because scoring systems are a response to real needs, to understand other people, to make them transparent to us, to get information quickly. Like, I use rankings.

When I buy household gadgets, I don't have the time to research every dishwasher. I use rankings, right? They're summarized, compressed information. What you want to do is realize that they're highly lossy, highly information-davoid, highly thin packages that are useful maybe a starting point that are not complete. And I think games offer us a really good glimpse of what we can do because I think the life the games, it's not that they automatically give this to you, but the life they encourage is a life in which you enter scoring systems voluntarily and you choose which ones you want to have

and you can modify them, right? Like the difference in games, I mean, this is, and this is a, in many ways, it's a structural difference, right? You can house rule your poker game or your Dungeons and Dragons game. you can't house rule GPA because of the way that metrics function. But the closest you can approximate to that is something like, I think games encourage something that I want to call reflective control. So games encourage trying a scoring system and then not just assuming that we have to play this particular board game forever, but thinking to show afterwards, was it worth it?

Was it fun? And what you're doing is transitioning between being absorbed in a particular game goal and reflecting more deeply on its purpose and whether that purpose was rich or meaningful to you. And you can just decide, now that game sucked, I'm not going to play it again. Or that game was kind of good, but I'm going to modify it. You have some degree of control,

and games make that easy because there are so many and they're so disconnected. I think that's the right attitude. It's much harder to apply in the world because you don't have these isolated easily movable between packages like you do with games. You get these massive world-spanning systems. But still, there's a difference between treating your subscriber account or your likes or your page views as a rough proxy that gives you some information

versus treating it, taking out as your core value, right? And I think one crucial part of that is if you take it out as your core value, you don't have a standpoint from which to reflect on whether it's working out for you. If you think the point of your life is just to make the most money or get the most followers, right? Then that's it. That's just what you're doing. But if you're thinking yourself, I'm trying to get followers in order to communicate

and connect with people, then you have a stance from which you can limit your devotion to that simple metric. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Fakers. That was C.T. Nguyen. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, The Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check it, out our YouTube channel at ScienceFocus. The current issue of BBC ScienceFocus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice.

You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music,

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