Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Games are everywhere, but why exactly do we play them? It seems counterintuitive, to artificially invent goals and obstacles just so we can struggle to achieve them. (And in some games, like Twister, the fun is in losing, even though you're supposed to try to win.) C. Thi Nguyen is a philosopher who has developed a theory of games as an art form whose medium is agency. Within each game, we have defined goals, powers, and choices, and by playing different games we can experiment with different forms of agency. A dark side of this idea is to be found in "gamification" — turning ordinary-life activities into a game. Games give us clarity of values, and that clarity can be seductive but misleading, leading people to turn to conspiracy theories about the real world. Support Mindscape on Patreon. C. Thi Nguyen received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He has written public philosophy for venues such as Aeon and The New York Times, and is an editor of the aesthetics blog Aesthetics for Birds. He was the recipient of the 2020 Article Prize from the American Philosophical Association. His recent book is Games: Agency as Art. Web site PhilPeople profile Google Scholar publications Twitter

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What could be a more mindscapey topic than that? Because games are an interesting thing when you think about it. I mean, we set up these struggles for ourselves, right? These goals that it takes effort to reach. And we do this intentionally. Why in the world do we do that? Whether it's playing solitaire or playing basketball or whatever, sometimes we play games against other people, but often we just do it against ourselves to sort of reach a kind of goal. So today's guest is T. Nguyen, who is a philosopher at the University of Utah, who's thought a lot about games. And he has a theory of what games are, a philosophy, one might even say, of what games are. And the theory is that games are a form of art, which many people have said, but the form of art isn't just, you know, visuals or even stories,

it's agency in his point of view. So by playing different games, what we're doing is giving ourselves different capacities, right, in different kinds of games we're allowed to do different things. And those capacities are fairly well-defined, usually. And then we have fairly well-defined goals about winning the game. And by doing different games, we're taking on different kinds of agency, different choices we can make, different strategies we can deploy, et cetera. So games are agency as art in T's formulation. And there's a lot about that that sort of extends a little bit. So one of the great things about this podcast episode is it will be one of those that escalated quickly kinds of episodes. So we talk about what a game is, the importance of points, and

and clarity of criteria for success in the game, right? That's one of the good things about the artificiality of games. You know when you've won or lost, unlike life. But the point is that that knowledge, that clarity of knowing when you've won or lost, is very seductive outside the context of a formal game. It's very seductive in life. So T has developed this understanding

to study things like echo chambers and cult leaders. A cult is in many ways like an echo chamber. In both cases, it's not just a filter bubble where you prevent information you don't want from getting in, but it's like a strategy for preemptively undermining claims from outsiders that the cult leader or the echo chamber doesn't want you to believe in, right? You give people ways to discount outside information. And one of the reasons why cults and echo chambers are so seductive is that they bring, clarity to values and moral reasoning. Maybe a little bit too much clarity. They make it too easy.

They make things cut and dried in a way that the world itself is often not so cut and dried. So he has a whole understanding of why we're so seduced by conspiracy theories, by cult leaders, by echo chambers, and how it relates to this seductiveness of clarity that we get from thinking about games and points, right? We get points, we get likes on our tweets, we get steps on our Fitbit. This engages our brains for interesting evolutionary reasons, and that feature of human psychology can be gamed, if you like, by the leaders of cults or echo chambers or whatever. So it's a fascinating conversation that goes all sorts of places.

Let me take this opportunity to give you the occasional reminder. We have a web page for Minescape, preposterous universe.com. slash podcast, where you get not only show notes and links for all the shows we do, but there's also complete transcripts of all the shows. And those transcripts are paid for by supporters on Patreon. And you can become a supporter on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Sean M. Carroll. Join up for a tiny fee. You will get not only the warm feeling that it comes from supporting the podcast, but also access to ad-free versions of the show. And of course, the ability to ask. questions for the monthly Ask Me Anything episodes. So it's a great community. We'd love to see you there if that's your thing. If you're not, that is also fine. We love that you're just listening to the podcast from whatever modality you choose to do that. So with that, let's go. when welcome to the mindscape podcast thank you uh i am slowly caffeinating good as i get over the there's a there's a there's a morning experience especially the zoom era i realize now like there aren't these transitional moments we used to have these transitional moments in private but right now like this this era is more like get the kid get the kid get the lunch go in the car run downstairs make coffee now you're on a podcast so we'll expect that you

we become more more clear and insightful as the podcast goes on That's, yeah, that's very common. Hopefully. Or I'll just get worse. Right. And I guess actually, I wasn't even going to mention this, but, you know, since, you know, you mentioned the whole caffeination thing, before you were a philosophy professor, you were a food writer. And, you know, maybe you must have some potted explanation of how that phase transition came about, because that's not very common. Oh, yeah. No, so interestingly, I got the jobs as a food writer while I was a graduate student. I got it because I was obsessed with food.

I was on this old, before Yelp, there. There was this forum called Chowhound where people would post. Yeah. So I survived grad school partially by exploring L.A. and looking for things like fish tacos. And I would drunk post a lot of weird stuff on Chowhound. And apparently my drunk posts were sufficiently good that the L.E. Times Food Editor spontaneously offered me a job.

I just got a call after a drunk post. You were discovered. It's a typical Hollywood story. Yeah, I was discovered. drunk posting on Chowhound about like chicken and waffles. And then I had to make this decision about where what to do. Like at some point you have this food writing career that's taking off and you have this graduate school career. Then you have a job, an academic job.

I had got this academic job in Utah and I couldn't take the food writing job with me. So I had to make a decision. And basically in the end, the decision came down to, for one thing, the LA Times was just firing people left and writing. Because newspapers are dying. And the other thing was, after about five years, food writing, just restaurant reviewing starts to be like a little like, oh my God. I have to say that something is delicious, a new way. So I promised myself, if I went to academia, the academic path, I would still do something about like weird aesthetics. This is actually part of the reason I ended up in the games project.

I was like, for me, writing about games is like writing about food. You're like talking about things that are amazing, that the kind of like overculture hasn't really figured out how to appreciate. Right. And you're, you get, you get, you get,

about these fun things in an academic way and get credit for it. Yeah. Yeah. The, the games project was, I did it in the way I wanted to do it, which was like, with the guardrails off.

And that was something that, like, that's, that's the reason I was okay with leaving food writing behind. That's a remarkably coherent story. guess that's what I should expect from a philosopher. It was not just a random event, so that's good. Okay, so a lot to talk about here, so let's get right into it. I'm going to start with actually a hard question. I usually like to start with some softballs. I guess the food writing was a

softball question. So here's the hard one. I was at a panel discussion many years ago, full of theoretical physicists, and one of them was pushing the line that the universe itself should be thought of as a computer. And one of the other panelists said, what I think is the right thing, which is, well, is there anything that is not a computer? And he's a little stymead. I think he not had that one before. So that's now my question about games and thinking about things about games. Sure, there are certain things that we've readily identify as games, but it seems like the category might almost be too large. How do you think about what is a game and what is not a game? This is a beautiful question. So, you know,

the notion of a game is really disputed in philosophy. Like, it's very storied. Like, I mean, in philosophy, it's a particularly famous concept because when Wittgenstein was like, no, you can't define concepts, his example of an undefinable concept was a game. So what really helps me is this book, this amazing book from Bernert Toot called The Grasshopper, which an attempt to define games, which actually takes itself as a response to Wittgenstein. It's also, like, secretly like, about the meaning of. life and the relationship between games and meaning of life. So he gives a definition of game that I find incredibly useful. There's a short version and a long version, but the short version is, to play a game

is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the experience of struggling against them. So his notion of a game is super specific. It's quite broad, right? So it's any case where you take on the game. on obstacles voluntarily, partially for the sake of the struggle itself. So this will include video games, board games, sports, right? Other activities that other people don't play as games, you could play as a game.

So he talks about how someone could take up a job as a game, right, to do it for the sake of the obstacles. But not everything turns out to be a game. So in his definition, when he expands the definition, part of the idea of the game is, that the goal of the game is partially constituted by obedience to certain restrictions. Yep. So a way to put that is if you simply move a ball through a basket, that doesn't count as making a basket in basketball. Right.

Because, I mean, imagine you do it with a step ladder, right? Or you use some kind of like grappling hooked, right? So it has to be, I mean, in basketball, it doesn't count as making a basket unless you through it from the ground, just using your hands and your feet. And in some context, unless there was opposition. Right.

So what it is to make a basket is to do it under these constraints. What it is to run a marathon is not just to cross the finish line, but to cross it obeying the constraints of not using a taxi or not taking a lift or a scooter, right? And actually, that's a great kind of definition

because it really sort of focuses us right in on the specificity of the constraints, which are going to become important later, right? Like, the constraints are very, very well set out. Right. Yeah, no, it's, and so, I mean, I think this book is one of the best books of philosophy written.

It changed my, I spent like 10 years of my life working out the implications of this book. But it's, I mean, and yet he has this lovely, he's like, look, if you're trying to get to the top of a mountain to get some rare drug that's only there, you're not playing a game, you're just trying to get to the top of the mountain. Yeah. If you're trying to climb the mountain as a mountain climber, then certain restrictions are part of what you're doing. So, like, the medical seeker is not a game player.

Yeah. And the mountain climber is. And this is, in one way you can tell is if someone goes by in a helicopter and says, hey, want to ride? Right. Medical climbers are, of course, get me the cancer drug. And the other person's like, of course not. What do you think I'm doing? So this is probably...

Yeah, that's exactly it. Probably not... The constraints become central. Yeah. So this is probably not your central focus, but... saying that also immediately raises the question of why in the world would anyone ever play games? Like, you're saying that we invent struggles and then subject ourselves to them. Isn't like struggle enough?

I know. So, Suit has this. This is actually part of the story. I feel like I'm filling out from Suit to my book. So Suits argues that, so one way to put it is that it must be that, so the philosopher for this is autotelic. Some activities, to be autotelic is to be worth, it's worth engaging the activity for the sake of the engagement and the doing

rather than the product. So part of what you get from suits is this view that some activities, some activities we do because we want the shit that comes out the other end, and some activities we do because it's good to do the activity. And so the existence of games forces you to accept that certain activities are worth doing for their own sake. And yeah, I guess there's like probably some huge evolutionary slash psychological slash sociological set of reasons why we find that fulfilling personally. But again, that's probably not what your focus is, I guess.

It is what my focus is on. This is the center of what the book is about. Okay, good. Sorry. Well, go ahead. Yeah, elaborate on how that is. So, I mean, so it's not, there are lots of different reasons. So one problem I found with a lot of early accounts of games is a lot of early accounts.

of games try to fix a particular value for all games, like all games are for freedom or all games for education. And suits very cleverly just says, no, no, it has to be whatever the value is, the obstacles have to be part of an essential part of it. And there are lots of things you could do it for. You could do it for exercise. You could do it for all kinds of things. One of my, one of the things that I'm most focused on is the aesthetic experience of struggle, that some struggles are beautiful, some struggles are satisfying. And what games do is, you know, is they let you tweak the activity to maximize that satisfaction. So one way to put it is that, okay, let me put it in the less philosophical

and then the more philosophical way. The less philosophical way is like in doing activities, you get these like regular practical activities, you get these moments of intense, gorgeous epiphany. I mean, you do physics, I do philosophy. You'll do this thing where like you're working at a problem. And there's just one moment. It took you years. You're like, oh my God, I get it.

That's ecstatic. And I feel like things like chess are kind of like tuned to like maximize that moment. You get more and more of those moments. Like in my normal life, moving around the world, I get to feel graceful like once a week. But rock climbing, like it just, it tunes you in to the part of the activity that has that feeling. And when you rock climb, like rock climbing is constantly, it's built to constantly call. out of you, like that incredible experience of, like, delicate, graceful, perfect motion. So that's the more philosophical way to say it is our abilities and the world don't fit very

well in real life. Like most of the challenges are too big or too boring and little for us. And in games, we get to, like, modify the world of the game and the abilities we're allowed in the game until they fit just right. And games are like, games have been carefully manicured. by us so that they are a place for for once in our final lines. We have exactly and just barely the ability to do it, and it's perfect. That makes actually a lot of sense, and I hadn't thought about this, but I just did a podcast

with Nigel Goldenfeld, who was a physicist, and we talked about phase transitions, you know, like liquid ice, liquid water freezing to ice and things like that, and how there are certain critical scale-free phenomena at phase transitions. If you tune yourself to be right there and just stay at the transition, maybe, like, the perfect game is at that precisely tuned critical point, where it's, like, there's little challenges, but you can get them. There's big challenges. You can get them to.

Maybe you're not sure, right? That's exactly. Also, from the other side of the stuff I work on, I think that a lot of conspiracy theories are tuned to give you the exact same pleasure. And I think that I'm not the only one that's noticed that there's something like very game-like about Q and on. So in those cases, I think what you're seeing is another case where someone has, like, changed the nature of the world, apparently, to make it tractable. And I think it's really important that, like, this is, like, we can talk more about this,

but I think it's really important that, like, for those of us who live in the world of science, the world is vastly beyond our understanding, right? Like, you can't, like, scientists are hyper-specialized, no one can understand everything. At some point, you realize that you have to just trust tons of stuff that you have no ability to grapple with. And conspiracy theories are often like, don't be sheep, don't trust other people. Here is a vision of the world where you can contain the world in you. You can explain all of it with this one powerful explanation. And I think, like, it is a game-like pleasure, but exported to a place where it's dangerous.

No, I mean, that's a very important point. And in a completely different realm, you know, sometimes I engage in discussions between the theists and naturalists on the naturalist side. And there's a remarkable number of times when a theist will say, like, how can anyone be a naturalist? They're constantly saying that they don't know the answer to this question or that question. And I can give the answer to all these questions. And that, you know, that's clearly compelling, right, to be able to sort of control that potentially vast sphere in a very simple. simple system. Yeah. I mean, there's this, it's funny saying things like this because like a philosopher is supposed to be like the center at the center of the ideal of intellectual autonomy. Like think for yourself. And I think now I find myself in places being like, no, forget that ideal. Like find a more minimal fallback version of that ideal because that's impossible. I mean, a lot of, I got the clearest vision of this from this amazing book, this philosophy, recent philosophy book, one of my favorite. by Elijah Milgram, called The Great Endarkenedment. And it's a book about what knowledge, there's a small part of philosophy that's working on this problem now, of like, what knowledge must be like not as an individual quest, but given the fact that the world is so hyper-specialized that no one can know more than a tiny amount of it. And part of the way he puts it is the ideal of intellectual autonomy was what drove the great enlightenment, and it doomed itself because it created all the amount, all the science that made it impossible. to be intellectually autonomous. And I think if you still hold to the old ideal of intellectual autonomy, if everyone can understand everything,

what you get is being driven to anti-vaxing and various conspiracy theories in which you reject trust in the sciences. What do Best Buy, Wayfair, Marco Polo, and among us have in common? They trust Linode as an alternative to the cost and complete. complexity of the world's largest public cloud providers. Linode makes cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible. Whether you're working on a personal project or looking for someone to manage your company's infrastructure, Linode has the pricing, support, security, and scale you need.

With Linode, you get consistent and predictable pricing across 11 global markets, 24 by 7 by 365 human support, rich documentation, and policies and controls to strengthen your overall security posture, allowing you to grow at your own pace. Users consistently rank Linode as one of the leading public cloud providers on both G2 and trust radius. Find out why. Visit linode.com slash mindscape. That's L-I-N-O-D-E.com slash mindscape and start a free account today. Yeah, no, I mean, I was going to hope to get to this later in the podcast, but we should just get there right now because it's so very, very important. I've said this. and other podcasts I've done, the fact that we're finite, right?

We have bounded computational resources, as my previous guest, Stephen Wolfen put it, is a hugely underappreciated fact about the reality of our existence in the world. And there are some interesting examples that came up recently in mathematics, where people, you know, the professional mathematicians have admitted sheepishly to the world that a proof of a really important mathematical theorem might be understood by 10 people. And the whole rest of the community just has to trust it because you're not going to spend a year learning the proof.

And there was one proof of a really famous theorem that literally only one guy understood and he's getting old. So a whole bunch of people had to have a project to rewrite the proof in a way that other people could understand it. And that whole process of dealing with the fact that you need to trust some things. While you shouldn't trust everything, that's a tricky thing

that is probably under-theorized. Right. I mean, this is, for the part of me that doesn't do philosophy of art, this is the exact thing you described is what I'm spending my life on. I think, like,

so a lot of the work I've done outside of games is on the notion of trust and how we trust and how we manage trust. And I think there's an old, there's an old ideal in philosophy, which I think you still see influencing has its influencing fingers all over the intellectual landscape, and that's the ideal that you should be able to understand

every single thing you believe to some degree. And I think the basic, I mean, the place where we've arrived at is, at best, if you know your entire life to it, you can understand one-one-millionth of the human landscape of knowledge. And this, I mean, so a lot of my work is what other people think it was pessimistic and I think it was just realist. And level one, you can't understand everything

else. Level two, you don't even have the capacity in and of yourself to pick the right experts to trust. Yeah. Right? Like, so I'm a philosopher. I have a PhD in philosophy. I have a lot of education. If you gave me a good, a real statistician

and a fake one, I couldn't, like, and they just like had math on a wall. Yeah. I don't have the mathematical skills to tell the difference between a good statistical paper and one that gives a bad result, right? I don't have that in myself. So what you get is actually this incredibly iterated and very fractal chain of trust, right? And a lot of it runs that, like, I mean, literally, I trust this result because it came from someone who is at Princeton University.

Like, those kind of institutional statuses end up as like the kind of vital proxies and heuristics that we have to use. And I think you're right. People have radically underestimated the place that we've been left in and how much of the modern intellectual shit show comes from different vulnerabilities caused by this position. Because people, I mean, I know plenty of people are like, oh, these fucking anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, think for yourself. Look at the science. evaluate the science. And what you have to say is like, you, like, I can't evaluate that science. Well, but it's, that's a, it's great that you say that because it's so hard for people to admit. I had Julia Gallif on the podcast talking about rationality and trying to be rational.

And we discussed this issue of, you know, when you're not an expert in a field, how do you separate the experts from the non-experts? And so she went, as Julia does, she went on Twitter and sort of talked about her own thoughts out loud and, you know, talked about these different social cues, right? Like how much of a, you know, where is the person? Who else says they're good and everything? And instantly, like, people flooded with comments saying, but that's not rational. You're just, you know, not actually evaluating the evidence. And she's like, how can I possibly evaluate the evidence as an expert in every field?

I also want to point. What's so important is, so a lot of the times we're doing this, we're saying something like, oh, you should look at the people that are legitimated in a certain institutional structure, which involves a background trust. in those institutions. And I think, like, there's this vision where for a lot of us, like, what, like, when you look at, like, anti-vaxing, anti-masking, anti-whatever, climate change, denialist space, what we want to say is something like, oh, those people are totally irrational.

But I think what you have to think instead is they have an entirely different basic framework of trust for a different set of institutions. And the degree of rationality there depends on the degree to which we can justify our trust in our institutions. And that's a really, really complicated matter. And it's not like the authoritative institutions are always right. We know there are plenty of historical cases where they are corrupted. So that's where the actual intellectual, like, that's where the actual action is happening, right?

Like, how are people picking the right set of institutions to put their trust in because they can't evaluate things for themselves? Well, and it's hard to be, you know, against conspiracy theories as a blanket statement, sometimes there are conspiracies. Right. This is the point that you get, this is one of the mistake that drives me the most wild. Like someone that wants to say like, oh, conspiracy theories are blanket incorrect.

You're like, no, no, there are real conspiracies in the world. And you have to make room for the fact that, and there are, I mean, we have plenty of historical examples where all the institutions in a particular country have become corrupted. I have taken over the news media are issuing false statements. That's a real thing that happens. Right. Yeah.

Well, I kind of want to get back to games, but can we very, very briefly just give the solution to this problem? Fuck no. Basically, so I think that bounded rationality and rational limitations are the primary intellectual fact about our current era, the most important thing is to figure out how to put the structures of trust correctly. A lot of the problems we're seeing right now when you're looking at the alt-right and raised conspiracy theories shouldn't be thought of as problems of like brute irrationality

or just like mania or something. This is, for readers are interested, I have a paper called echo chambers and epistemic bubbles that gives you this argument in more detail. And that actually what's going on is that a large segment of the process, population has had their trust subverted and undermined and directed towards what we think of as like the wrong institutions. So one of the results you're going to get from this is that the way back is to repair trust that's been broken. The way back is not to waive the evidence in people's faces, right? I think people want to be like, oh, look, climate change analysts, just look at the evidence. Here's the evidence.

But of course, they're not showing the evidence. They're showing scientists that they trust who process the evidence because not even a climate change scientist, a particular climate change scientist has looked at all of the evidence for climate. It's all processed, right? And so if you just wave like, look, here's the publication result, or here's what the statistical model says. And someone whose trust has been systematically undermined in that set of institutions, it's going to say, no, like, I don't accept that. And it is, I just want to point out rational not to trust evidence from sources that you distrust.

Sure. Right. So the way back is for a pair trust that's been undermined on a large scale in a mass. massive public. How you do that? That sounds hard. Yeah. But I mean, I think people have, I mean, at least what I can say now is I think people have need to get fixed on the right story. The wrong story is people, we're not hearing the other side. The right story is, oh no, trust has been systematically undermined. Yeah. And just to be, you know, clear that it's not just sort of cartoonish conspiracy theories or climate denial or whatever. Like, as you mentioned before,

fractal, you know, this sort of dilemma happens at all levels. Like when you're, I don't know, when you're in a physics department and they want to hire someone who's outside your subfield and they say, no, this person's work is really good. And someone else says, no, it's not. It can be very hard to adjudicate that. You know, it's interesting because in Elijah Milgram's great in darkenment, the example he gives is an academic job search. Exactly. reruns it exactly like it's like I mean you don't he's like you don't need to go to the world of like non-expert experts in some like dramatic way you seem to think about a dean who's you know a neurobiologist trying to adjudicate a hiring decision between a business school and like a complet department like good luck with that yeah they're supposed to do that right um um right uh but oh wait you said something super interesting that I wanted to talk about and then I it totally slipped my mind.

Deciding between physicists working in different fields or yeah, I don't know. No. But we'll get there. Don't worry. It'll come back up because I do, the word games is going to be in the title of this episode. So we did talk more about games. Right. So, you know, one of the things you mentioned is the struggle, right? The reason why we like games is this feeling of conquering something or making achievements against it.

And the other, you know, the other is like there is a reward for achieving a goal, right? Like the example that comes to mind for me, which is completely irrational and I know it, but, you know, I have various, very simple, trivial games on my iPhone that I will play when I'm waiting in line for something or whatever. And then once the solitaire game that I play introduced daily goals. So like every morning, it gives you a different goal. Then now I play that solitary game a lot more often because now I can get a daily goal. And I have no idea why it is that I really care about getting that daily goal. I mean, so I think we are the kind of creature that's easily permeated by outside goals, right? Someone can just present a goal to us and we can take it on.

And games are actually not the only, but the clearest example of that phenomenon. So one thing, so first of all, little side of example, not every game is based on the fun, on the, on the, on the, joy of winning. So this is really crucial to my account. So let me give you a little bit about here's a little bit of technical argument from my game stuff. So I think there are two different motivations you can play used to play a game. One is achievement play, the other is striving play. Achievement play is trying to win a game for the value of the win itself. Striving play is temporarily getting interested in the win for the sake of something in the struggle. Right.

So in achievement play, you play to win. In striving play, you make yourself care about winning temporarily for the joy of the struggle. Right. But interestingly, for a lot of the kinds of joys of struggle, you really have to make yourself want that win, right? You know, like the joy of like a good chess match or a good rock climb for me is like, no, You have to be fully in it, fully absorbed in it. Otherwise, you're not processing all the possibilities, all that stuff. But you might immediately think, I mean, some people think, no, no, no, there's no such thing as striving play.

That's weird. The only thing that makes sense of an achievement play. So here are two arguments that striving play exists. One is that sometimes, even when we try to win hard in the short term, we don't try to make ourselves more able to win in the long term. So this is a simple example. This is real. So my wife and I play board games all the time. A lot of the times, a lot of games.

So if a game involves deceit and social manipulation, I'm going to win. If a game involves geometric manipulation, she's going to win. She's a chemist. Like her 3D mind is amazing. Sometimes we find a game that we're perfectly matched at, and it's awesome. And then at night, I will find a strategy guide. And if the point of playing a game was to win, there's only one thing I should do, right? read the strategy guide.

Yeah. Win the game. She's never going to read strategy guide. But I don't read the strategy guide. And I think that reveals I'm a striping player, right? My goal is not to win. Otherwise, I would read the strategy guide. I just have to make myself want to win temporarily to have this struggle.

But the fact that I'm avoiding gaining skill outside the game indicates what I really care about is the quality of the struggle and not winning. I think this is true for a lot of us. Here's another example. This is why I want to talk about. This is where I was headed. So consider the category of what I want to call stupid games. So stupid game is a game where, one, the fun part is failing, but two, you have to actually try to win to have that fun.

Twister. Most drinking games, the kids came of telephone, right? So if you play Twister and you intentionally fall, that's not funny. It is only funny because it's a failure, and it's only a failure if you're trying to win. but I just want to note that our life is permeated by all these silly, stupid, social games that we take on and we try to win at,

but the whole point is that it's hysterically funny when we lose. I mean, think about the structure of most drinking games. The point of most drinking games is to try to do some dumb thing and then fail and then everyone laughs. Let me see, I mean, you paint a convincing picture that there are striving games. But now I want to turn it around and say, are there achievement games? I mean, is it all just about the struggle?

Even in the video game world, where you can often have a setting where you're playing on easy mode or regular mode or hard mode. And people will naturally tune themselves to the mode where they can potentially succeed, but it's hard. Right. So one thing I should say is that achievement play and striving play are motivational states in players, not in games. So you can have one achievement. player in chess or another striving player in chess or someone that has both motives. So I think there are, there's plenty of variation. The place where you're most likely to see achievement play is high-end play, professional play.

People, if someone's just like, well, I'm not, I just want better mileage for my marathons. Like, it's miserable, but I want it. Right. Here's an easy case, professional poker players. Yeah. Right. Like if money is tied to the wind and their main reason to play is money, I actually doubt that they're very, I think there are relatively few achievement players pure in social play. It's going to look really different in professional play. I think there are some. And what that will look like is someone that is entirely obsessed with, say, getting better and uninterested in whether it's fun. But I think most of us pay some attention to how fun it is, how interesting it is, whether we enjoy the thing or not, especially if we conceive of it as a hobby or entertainment. On the flip side of that, I am a poker player myself and I've had a couple poker players on the podcast.

And one of the interesting facts about poker is because I try to play with people sometimes who have never played and teach me and whatever. And one of the moves they try to make sometimes is to say, well, I want to learn, but I don't want to play for money. so let's just play for M&Ms or whatever. And there's nothing less interesting than playing poker for no stakes, right? The stakes really make it, you know, otherwise you just sort of like bet incredible amounts and who cares. So there is something about those stakes that is really important. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm not saying that I think plenty of people play poker with stakes for striving reasons.

And there are many cases where the threat of some amount of loss increases the pleasure. I mean, for example, in climbing, if you're climbing in a way on a top rope where you can't fall at all, it's totally different from when you're climbing on lead and you're facing a 20-foot fall and it could hurt. And like that degree of stake changes the intensity of the experience. And it's really clear that like the most intense absorbed, and I'm 100% a striving player here, still is when there's some stakes on because the stakes change the experience. One way to identify the difference between striving players and achievement players is really like it's not going to be how they play during the game because a lot of striving players are going to try just as hard to win and like the same kinds of intense experiences. It's going to be their if you listen to their motivations outside the game about game choice and their reasons for continuing to play a game.

So if you're an achievement player, so here's a reason you could. have to stop playing a game. It wasn't fun for me anymore. Yeah. Right. If you have, if you say that, then you weren't an achievement player, right? If you were doing well at a game, but you stop because it wasn't fun. Then, right? And similarly, I think a lot of people try really hard, but they'll also pick. So I'm, what's in the back of my mind is there have been a set of exchanges in philosophy between me and a couple of people, Tom Hercca and in part Gwen Bradford. And those are two people whose life's work and philosophy is built around the value of

achievements and perfecting yourself. And they, especially Tom Harka, has this very strong, like, games are mostly for, you know, developing your excellence and being more perfect. And that's what most people play at. This striving play stuff is just this weird tiny thing that a few, that's kind of, and I'm like, no, no, like, look at, so when I responded to them, I ended up quoting a lot of game reviewers. and I think like if you have like a model like that, then you should expect people to play the hardest game they can succeed at.

But you don't find that. A lot of the times people will be like, well, that game's hard, but it's boring, right? This game is more interesting. And when you have, I think the majority of game playing going on is striving play. Well, at least their theory made a falsifiable prediction. So that's really good, you know, and you claim to have falsified it. But it is an empirical matter, but I mean, look at game reviews. Right.

And maybe that's really different. I think people like Tom Harker really focus on the on Olympics. And if you listen to player talk at the Olympics, I think it probably does lean achievement play. But if you look at what I've been looking at, which is like board game reviews and video game reviews and people talking about why they chose running instead of, you know, lifting or vice versa, that stuff seems loaded with this kind of talk of like what's satisfying to me, what makes me feel like relaxed or what makes me feel like perfectly like, right? It's experiential talk. After hours of dedicated research, nothing feels better than the satisfaction of finally finding the information you've been looking for. And you can get that same incredible feeling when you're able to find your next great hire after a candidate search with Indeed. If you're hiring, you need Indeed. Indeed is a hiring partner that gets you what you really want, a short list of quality candidates as fast as possible.

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Well, and you've also made the case beyond struggling and striving. You like to think of games as art, and in particular, art in the medium of agency, which is, you know, those are a lot of big words, and maybe I'll let you gloss them a little bit in this context. Right. So the, the, um, all right. So I started this project out of annoyance, which is actually where most of my philosophy projects start. I started the project reading a bunch of books about why games.

So a bunch of other people are defending games. Like, oh, games are important. Games are art. When you read this stuff, what you find often is that people are talking about how games tell good stories or have beautiful graphics or have good characters or have good scripts, ways in which games are like movies, right, which is a familiar form of art. So you find this a lot in that history of art. People say something like, oh, my God, photographs must be a kind of art because they can be like paintings and then making photographs look like paintings instead of doing the special thing that photographs can do. And I was really interested in the fact that there are all these games, these books about games defending games, and they never talked about choice, skill, difficulty, puzzles, all the stuff that seems unique to me about games. So I was interested in developing theory.

And there are other people who are, I'm not alone to this, in developing a theory that talked about games in art form that focused on their gameness. Like what's, it's not saying that games can't tell stories, but what makes games? The distinctiveness, yeah. Yeah. So I remember reading, my favorite board game designer is Rainer Kuditsia. He's this, like, German board game genius. People call him the Mozart of games. He's, like, made like hundreds of games.

Are all amazing. Not all, but like just amazing ones just flow from him. Like, I don't know. Mozart. Milk. So, from a cow. That was the worst. Sorry.

And he said the most important tool in his toolkit is the point system because the point system tells the players what their motivations are. And he's some really interesting games. You can see him playing around with this where a lot of people build this kind of game where you're collecting a bunch of stuff

and you just want to collect as much as possible. And he has a game where, oh, you're collecting four different colors by this conflict system, and then your scores, whichever color you have the least of, right? And that totally changes the way you go about the game. Or he has scoring systems where, like, or he invented cooperative board gaming where everyone scores together, right? So the scoring system sets your motivation to set who's on your side, it sets what you're

trying to do. And I was like, oh my God, that's so interesting. And I haven't seen, I mean, that kind of insight is all over the game design space, but I haven't seen anyone in this critical literature talking about it. So I ended up trying to give a art theory based on that. And it's that what game designers do is not just create environment and they don't just tell stories. They tell you who to be in the game. They, in my language, design an agency, which mostly consist of your abilities, but also your goals.

So they create the obstacles for you and your abilities and goals together. And that's the actual art. So the way I put it in the book is that the art. artistic medium of games is agency itself, right? Someone is telling you what you can do and what you should do, what you should pursue, what your practical relationships are to the world and each other. And that's the heart of game design. That's what makes games special.

There's sculpted experiences of practicality. And one of the things I think that's interesting here is that this is a radically different art form. So in a lot of cases, I think when people, want to talk about the artistic qualities of a thing that an artist made. They want ones that stay in the thing. They want the qualities that are in the novel, in the painting. I think what's interesting in games is, if games are sculpted practicality, then the beauty emerges in the practical action.

So in other words, when you play a game, it's not the game that's beautiful. It's you that's beautiful, right? Or funny or awkward, right? In Twister, you're the person that, like, fell comically and everyone laughs at. in rock climbing like i'm the person that's momentarily graceful or like in chess like the the beauty is in your mind figuring out right so it's like the game designers are creating situations that sculpt our actions where the beauty is supposed to show up not in the environment of the game itself but in our action i mean it can also show up in the environment but like i think a lot of the literature about games has been going around looking for qualities that are in the game like are the graphics are beautiful the sound is beautiful the story is beautiful and there not looking at how radically different games are. And I think there are other things like this that are also mostly neglected.

But here is it, but the thing that makes games unique is that they're sculpted action. Right. Well, and the coin of the realm, in some sense, when you're playing the game, like you say, are your choices, your actions,

and the great thing about the games, or a thing, maybe I shouldn't normalize it as saying it's great, but they're very, circumscribed, right? Like, you're told, here are the possible actions, and then you can take them at any time. It's a little bit, it's way cleaner

than the real world in which the set of actions is dauntingly infinite. Yeah, that's, I mean, that is exactly, I mean, so John Dewey, one of the great American philosophers of art, said that what art is, is you're taking life experiences, and you're, like, crystallizing the special unities

and harmonies in them and, like, accentuating them, right? And I think this is exactly right. Like life is this fucking mess in which we sometimes get these moments of clarity. And games are these circumscribed spaces where the actions in space have been often like lean down and clarified. So your actions can fit per fans. Right. They're clarified not just because the items are, this is what's really important to me. They're not just clarified because the actions you can form have been clarified.

it's because your values have been clarified. Same about that. Because there are a point. Yeah. Okay, so this is, this is what makes, and also I just want to say in the background, one of the reasons I'm interested in this stuff is because this is more stuff about human beings

and essentially bounded and limited beings, right? Like, this is how bounded and limited beings make things that make them feel temporarily okay, right? like spaces where we don't feel too little for this vast world. But like, look, I mean, this is not, this is actually something I'd say in the book that like the real world's existential hellscape of like too many values. And games are this like temporary balm where you like the world makes fucking sense and it's like nice for a little bit.

But yeah. So in our life, there are too many values. There are too many things to find important. And the values are hard to apply. I mean, so I'm trying to be a parent. I want to be a good parent. I'm putting my kid to bed and he has, you know, it's a toddler. He rips off his diaper and throws around and, like, he's pretending to do some story where he's battling his diaper.

And I'm like, I could be succeeding in, you know, raising a creative artist. Or I could be totally failing to create a disciplined, normal human being. I don't know. Right. But in games, the game tells you exactly what to do, tells you exactly how to measure it, tells you exactly. how well you're doing, and it tells you exactly what everyone wants to. So for a moment, you can have total value clarity, and that's beautiful in game. Yeah, we all agree on what the points are.

That is a crucial part of playing the games. And, you know, the clarity of values clearly very, very important, but I don't want to quite leave the clarity of possible actions. Let's just say a word about that, because I know that sometimes on the podcast talk about artificial intelligence, and, you know, there's these great successes with playing Go, and playing chess. And I always make the point, well, sure, those are literally the most obvious places

where a computer should be able to kick our ass because the rules are so well defined. And some people are like, no, no, no, go is very, very complicated, but it's nowhere near as complicated as the real world in some sense. Right. I mean, part of the reason I don't,

I mean, I totally know what you're talking about, but there's a theoretical reason I'm not talking about it. And the reason is that I'm trying to give, so most theories in games, tend to focus on either sports or video games. And I'm trying to give like a pan game theory. Yeah. And I think the thing you're talking about is definitely true of board games.

Like poker is an incredibly clear case. Super limited actions. But it's not clear in every case. So let me give you a few examples. So a lot of adventure sports. So survive, like here's, I mean, I use this example of books. Like someone, you can be dropped into Alaska with nothing but a knife to fight your way out. That counts as a game if you're doing it for game-like reasons.

Yeah. There's no limitation. and your affordances. Right, right. You can, the, the, another really interesting case is

tabletop role playing. Because tabletop role playing has a few rules that like set your motivations and there are a few, there are a few rules for how you decide things. But when you're trying to figure out

how to navigate this environment, the world is your oyster. Like you basically can invent stuff and part of what's going on there is a game master that can like come up with the world's response. So I think that like, the vision of games as having delimited clear actions is true of board games and card games,

is partially true of video games, although there are somewhere the emergent space of possible actions is becoming richer as the number of actions get richer. And it's not true of a lot of physical games and real-world games and more narrative imagination games like tabletop role-playing, which don't have that character at all. Okay. No, that's a very good point. But even those games do share this clarity of value. We all have the same goals.

And now with that philosophical point in mind, this is what leaks back to the previous discussion about echo chambers and so forth. And maybe this is where gamification comes in. That games are fun and we all agree on the points. And so wouldn't it be great if the whole rest of our lives were like that and we assigned points to everything and everyone can come up with their favorite examples of how that works?

Yeah. Yeah, no, this is, so this, So at the, so the standard view kind of in the industry is that games are great, so gamification is great, right? If you believe in games, then you should believe we should gamify work, gamify education, gamify fitness, make it all more like a game. And I actually think, if you believe all the stuff I've told you, you understand why games are great, then you should see that gamification is a fucking existential horror. Yeah. Because games are a temporary artificial clarity, and they're fine because they're temporary, right? Game values are hyper-crist up, and that's fine if you put away those values at the end.

But when you gamify something like education or communication, then you're forcing a singular clarified value system on a real-world activity. So I have a paper about Twitter, and I'm working on new stuff about how this happens with grades and things like this. But notice the difference. And Fitbit. Fitbit is a really important exam. But notice one difference. if you decide to play games, what that looks like is you get to pick from a vast menu of different games and try them on temporarily and then reflect on whether they were fun or not.

If you're engaged in Twitter, there are not a lot of other choices for social media social discourse, and there's if you let yourself be gamified by it and be captured by those points, there's no ability to change systems set those points aside. And what you're getting is instead like this, you're squashing the values that'll large. So people normally communicate with a large, a wide variety of pluralistic values. And people like me think this is really important. It's really important that people bring different communicative values to the social ecosystem. But something like Twitter's gamification squashes those values and get everyone into far as they're motivated to be motivated in the same direction.

So the very thing that's like fun and sexy in games, that's okay because they're limited, that everyone, pursues the same point. And a really simple one, when you export it to communication, it like squashes one of the most important things about a vibrant social, political community. So I don't think it's good. I've got a lot more examples. Well, there's lots of examples. I mean, just the idea that there's a number out there we can maximize is a seductive one, but a dangerous one. One of my favorite examples, again, as academics, I used to be at the University of Chicago, which obviously has always been academically super duper strong. But back in the day, it wasn't like the place you applied,

if you were interested in Harvard or Stanford or Princeton. Like it was less well known. So it suddenly, you know, there was a strategy that they undertook at the University of Chicago because they were being hurt in the U.S. news rankings. And they were being hurt because the only people who applied to the University of Chicago were the ones who really wanted to go there. And you are rewarded in the U.S. news rankings by having a high selectivity, right?

by rejecting most of the people who apply. So they intentionally encouraged people to apply knowing they would reject them because it increased their selectivity and they leapt up in the rankings. That's an example of maybe the goal perverting the original aspiration. So this is, by the way, if you're interested in this stuff, the best document I know about it is this book, Engines of Anxiety by Wendy Espland and Michael Sauter, which I just recommend to everybody. it's a book about their sociologists,

it's a 10-year empirical study about what happens to the law school culture and student culture when the US News and World Report starts ranking law schools. And they've data from before and after. And basically, they say, they chart a bunch of stuff like what you're talking about, about people gaming the rankings, but I think there's something even more devastating,

which is, so one of the things I point out is that different law schools used to follow different missions before the rankings. Yeah. But if the mission is skis, to the ranking at all, then you drop in the rankings. It's force everyone to pursue the same values. It's the same thought again.

It drives value plurality out of the system. I mean, that's definitely bad when you have people gaming it faking like the example you're talking about, which they talk about stuff like that too. But even if it's all like kind of like not just gaming the algorithm, genuinely trying to up the targets, you're still. So like having a social justice mission doesn't get counted in the US News and World Report. So if you spend resources on that, you're going to get fucked. But the most interesting thing to me, this is actually the center of the stuff I'm working on right now.

The Esplin and Souther say that before the rankings, prospective law students used to talk about what different law schools valued and talk about their own values and decide what their values were and to pick which school to go to. But that happens because there's a presentation of a plurality of values. Now, they say, 99% of the students just assume their goal is to get into the best school, where the best school is set by the ranking. So they don't go through the process of value self-deliberation. So I say this a little bit at the end of the book, but this is basically the next book I'm working on. The way I want to put it these days is I think that in these cases, you end up outsourcing your values. you know, letting somebody else perform value deliberations for you. And what goes into those values are often very much based in what's in the interest of large-scale institutions

and the kind of information management systems at large-scale information. Like, they need shit. I mean, we can talk about, there's a huge amount of stuff to talk about here if you want, but like large-scale institutions need things that can be input in a standardized way into a spreadsheet. Yeah. And so any value systems they emit are going to be subject to those kinds of interests. and are going to be standardized across a vast institution. So in a lot of these cases, I think what we're doing is we're like uptaking values that aren't specialized to us,

but are set by institutions to be the kinds of things that institutions and track. And like, I mean, this is one example. I think Fitbit is another example, right? You could have a lot of values in your life with exercise. I mean, I'm not saying that every use of Fitbit is bad. but what you're doing when you're letting Fitbit motivate you is that you're letting a specific target that's been set because it's the kind of thing that can be measured easily by a watch

dominate your goal system. Well, the line that I read from you that I'm going to paraphrase that made it very vivid to me was we shouldn't worry about games creating serial killers, we should worry about them creating Wall Street bankers. Yeah, no, the point there is just that people, worry a lot about games creating violence. And there's actually a lot of data that mostly they don't. And I think part of that is that the violence in games is fictional. And we have a lot of information that people are mostly capable of screening off fictions. The thing that I'm really worried about is

people becoming used to the idea that the goal is some simple quantified thing that people share. And what we're supposed to do is do everything in our power to up that simple measure. And one thing to note, that's not fictional. If you get points in a game and you beat, like, here's one way to put it. If we're playing a shooter and I headshot you in the shooter, the fact that I killed you is fictional. The fact that I beat you is not fictional, right? That's real. And the worry is that that doesn't have the fictional screen.

And so people who leave games, the bad side of things might be that they keep looking for systems that offer them clear, quantified views of success, and then they'll enter into worlds and pursue those quantities without reservation, without limitation, without balancing. Which is what you're allowed to do in a game. Well, and we think even more broadly in life, we tend to say that clarity is a virtue, right? Like, we're clear about things. Like, we know what's going on. But one of the very interesting things about, you know, how you've written about these things

is that, you know, the dark side of clarity, right? The fact that clarity, when we reach clarity, that's when we stop thinking. And so, you know, this search for very, very simplistic, conspiratorial ways of looking at the world are seductive for exactly that reason, because it gives us that clarity. Yeah, no, this is, so one way to put it is that,

one way to put it, essentially the game stuff, is that games are an artificial clarity. It's lovely. We love it. It feels great. But it's important when we leave games to realize that that's an artificiality and that we have to spend much of the rest of our lives living in unclarity.

And refusing that will tempt you into a system of belief that's like, oh, the more money in my life, the better. Money equals success. Something like that. Another way to put it, this is one of the, this is, so this is one of the worries I've been developing. So looking at both the literature on how quantified values work in bureaucracy and looking at the literature on conspiracy theories. One of the things I was struck by in both is the way in which in all these accounts, people seem to, when things feel clear, they stop thinking. And so I ended up writing this paper that you're referencing, the selections of clarity. And this is again about bounded rationality and limited rationality, right?

So here's the theory. We're limited beings. We can't think about everything. We need to know when to cut off our investigations, right? We need to manage our efforts. It looks like, from the empirical literature, that the way that many of us do this is that at the moment we use a heuristic. And the heuristic is, if things feel clear, we're done. Mm-hmm.

Right. And so my suspicion is if we're using that to heuristic, then we should expect malicious actors to to game that heuristic and present us with things that feel clear, or that feeling of clarity has been amped up. And I think, like, so conspiracy theories are one example, this kind of like bureaucratic metrified language where everything that you do has a clear measure of success. Like, that's another version of this. And one way I think about it is like, it's not that clarity is always bad. Like there is, when you have intellectual success, you do have this feeling of clarity. My worries, the feeling of clarity actually comes apart from real understanding.

and that outside actors can game it. I mean, another way to put it is, I think, in the course of evolution, in an earlier stage in evolution, it made perfect sense for us to pursue sugar and fat. Because, you know, calories are scarce. It's hard to get enough fat. Just as much of that shit as you can. And then the world changes in industrial forces figure out that they can maximize the feeling of sugar and fat separate from any nutritive qualities.

and then if you're still stuck on that old heuristic and chasing sugar and fat, then, you know, you're kind of going to kind of be screwed. And I think that clarity can be like cognitive sugar, right? Someone can aim to max out the feeling of clarity. And what that looks like is a conspiracy theory. I mean, it's interesting that as you climb up the ranks of Scientology, there's an achievement unlocked, which is going clear.

That's literally what it's called. And you're right that it can be itself gamed, right? That search for clarity. And you bring up a very interesting distinction between filter bubbles, which we're all worried about these days. We're only listening to people saying what we want to hear, versus echo chambers, which are a little bit more insidious than filter bubbles.

I'll let you explain why. Right. So I can imagine listeners right now being like, what does this person work on? what? Trust, I think it's all connected. Really? I now sound like a conspiracy theorist.

Everything is connected. So, so the, I got really interested in this stuff when I was watching the rise of like the alt-right and all the stuff.

And I saw this research that said like, oh, there are no such things as echo chambers. And I was like, what? Look at the world. Yeah. What's going on? And so I looked at the data. And it turned out that what they were saying was that, so there were, there are all these papers showing that they're saying that they're not saying it's echo chambers. And the data they were saying was like, oh, if you look at liberals, they actually click and their clicks online. They actually click through and read Fox News. If you call it conservatives, they actually click through and read like MSNBC. And so this idea that you're not hearing the other side is just wrong. Right.

And I remember thinking, that's not, wait, that's not it, right? And so I'd just been reading about echo chambers in the philosophy literature for a really strange reason. I've been really interested. This is where this actually starts. I'm really interested in aesthetic echo chambers. Oh, okay. I started researching based on things like, oh, if all you've ever been exposed to is classical music and everyone you trust is a classical musician, you're never going to find a way into rap. And it could just because, like, so I was reading this stuff and I remember seeing a definition of echo chamber.

In the original definition of echo chamber that comes from this really important book from Kathleen Hall, Jameson and Frank Capella. the book is called Echo Chamber. It really pushes the word into the forefront of the conversation. Is that an echo chamber is a system in which people have been taught to systematically distrust people on the other side. It's a system of, they don't quite say that it's a cult, but, you know, they basically almost say it. This book is an empirical analysis of the world around Rush Limbaugh. And so it's that Rush Limbaugh has taught people to systematically distrust and dismiss people on the other side. Which is different than not hearing them at all.

Yeah. So what happens is that later, especially Eli Pryser writes this book called the filter bubble. In the filter bubble, the idea is, oh, everyone in your Facebook feed has your political alignment. So you're never exposed to arguments with the other side. I think what happened is, right, in kind of the cultural consciousness, these two concepts collapsed, and people got stuck on the Pryzer concept. You don't hear people from the other side. And all this research I was saying, saying there was no such thing as echo chambers, all this was focused on the hearing.

They were saying, like, look, Fox News people actually know what the liberal arguments are. And I think this confirms my experience. Like, if you go on climate change denialist YouTube, like they know what the arguments are from like the standard arguments are for the existence of climate change. They just have some reason to think that the institutions are wholly corrupted. Yeah. So I think what's going on right now is clearly an echo chamber effect in the original sense that it's a systematically disrupted trust. rather than this kind of filtering effect where you don't hear the other side.

And that's like, we were talking about this before already. Like, a lot of public policy figures are fixated on the filter effect and thinking like, oh, we just need to create these public spaces where people can meet each other and talk to each other. That's a standard view in a lot of political philosophy and public policy. And I think that's not going to work if trust has already been systematically undermined. It doesn't matter if you meet and hear the other side. If you already have a prevailing story that says they're malicious, manipulative, evil people. And I presume this kind of attitude can

grow up maybe, you know, self-organized or spontaneously, but it can also be engineered by the cult leaders, right? You know, you can, you can teach your followers, traditional cult behavior, that anyone, of course, the cult will be criticized by outsiders. That's because, you know, they They're bad, and therefore, when the cult is criticized, it's just getting a prediction right and it looks good. Yeah, that's, so this is, this is an effect. The clearest explanation of this effect is from this philosopher named Andre Begby. He has a paper called Evidential Preemption, and it's amazing. It really helped me understand what was going on.

It's exactly the effect of like, if you're following Rush Limbaugh, and Rush Limbaugh says, when you go, when you talk to those filthy liberals, they're going to say this and this, and this about me, but don't trust. Like, you're pre-prepared for it. You have a pre-story ready. You have a story already ready to dismiss it. And when you do dismiss it, when you do dismiss it, then Rush Limbaugh's predictions will be confirmed, which if you're rational, means you should increase your trust in Rush Limbaugh, right? So it's, I mean, the point here is the point of a lot of this stuff is that what looks to, I mean, on the outside, like totally rationality.

is like a clever rationality manipulating construct. And that once you're in, very rational behavior gets subverted. Well, and the connection back to the gamification comes from this idea that clarity is enhanced, right? That you've simplified your life and made things a lot less ambiguous and nuanced by just having this kind of simple worldview where you can dismiss a whole bunch of people. Right. Yeah. No, the one, I mean, this is this weird way in which, I mean, in which I feel like the game experience and the conspiracy theory, Echo Chamber experience, are such similar things. In the game experience, you get to ignore all these other moral constraints and voices and considerations because you're temporarily pursuing one simple goal. Yeah. And in the echo chamber experience, you get to ignore all these complex moral considerations because you've cut out of your trust world all these voices that say something morally distinctive,

and you've centered yourself on a world of generally a univocal moral attitude and causal story about the world. And if you do that, then, you know, you can feel really smug and secure. or the world is all crispsed up and simple again. And like that's intoxicating. I think that's, I mean, I know it's intoxicating. That's why I play games. Yeah. But I mean, that's a slightly, I don't know, that's a slightly depressing thing to say.

Like, what is the way out of this? Because we are all finite, right? And we do like clarity. And clarity is good if it's aligned with the truth. So, you know, what's the recipe? What's the cure for this? So I can tell you the answer on an individual level. I don't know the answer on a social level.

So I mean, I don't know. I have some hints. So here are some hints. One thought I've had is that... So the end of the game's book tries to say something like... I try to say something like... The value of playfulness? So Maria Ligonus, who's this amazing feminist philosopher,

has this wonderful paper about playfulness in world traveling. And what she says is playfulness is the quality to transition between different world perspectives, easily, lightly, to hold your perspective lightly and slip between different ones. I think like playing a lot of games, what that is, if you're doing it right, is slipping in between different value perspectives in and out, in and out, where gamified worlds and a lot of the echo chamber worlds are ones in which you're dogmatically stuck rigidly on one value perspective and unable to adopt another. So one thought is that the tendency to playfully explore alternate perspectives is the kind of thing

that could let you see your echo chamber from the outside. How you instill that? I don't know. Here's another thing if you're anxious about your own world. So go back to the sugar analogy. So I think at one point in here, human evolution, we could just eat as much sugar and fat as we wanted. Now we have to be aware that there are forces that are trying to manipulate this. And we've developed, I mean,

heuristics can change, right? And I think some of us, I've had to develop the following counter heuristic. And that looks like this. If I eat something, I'm like, oh, that's so yummy. I just want to like cram it in my mouth. I immediately stop it. I'm going to like, okay, wait, stop. Did someone manufacture this to make me addicted to it? It's just too yummy. Let me look at the nutritional information of the package. Oh, shit. Maybe I can have a little bit. Don't either.

Right. So you have to be, and I think there's an equivalent, and that equivalent is, is this moral view or worldview too yummy? Is it just, is it just like too, is it just too satisfying to someone make this just for me and people in my cohort to swallow down? This is just a recipe for sadness. No, but really. Like, I mean, here, here, this is, by the way, this doesn't mean that never eat yummy

foods or never believe satisfied things. It's just that given that the world is full of forces that have good incentives to create as incredibly compellingly yummy food and belief systems as possible, and that they make so much money off of it, that your first

reaction now should be suspicion. This is now how I like survive, I feel like, in the current media landscape, right? The moment I read something, like on Twitter, I'm like, oh, I immediately have to be like, Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Hold on. Is that actually right? Or does it just feel good to believe it?

I feel like I have to do this constantly. Like, but, but this is like, this is your, like, I feel like my experience of living in the nutritional world is the world just constantly being like, eat this. It's fucking delicious. I'm like, oh, hold on. Wait a second. Right. No, actually, I like the yumminess analogy there, cognitive yumminess, because we, one of the values we have in. certain circles is skepticism, right? Like, you know, be skeptical of these outrageous claims that you're hearing. And you don't want to be too skeptical or you're led down some, you know, rabbit hole not being able to understand anything. But this is sort of a fine tuning of that where you're saying, you know, be skeptical of things that are suspiciously yummy that, you know, like, oh, that's a little bit too good to be true. And maybe not necessarily just be skeptical of the substantive claim, but of why you like the claim so much.

I mean, and this is definitely not a blanket. I mean, the thing is, you also get clarity and pleasure from really getting at truths, right? So, like, you can't throw all that stuff away. You just have to realize that the signal is amenable to, you know, perversion and misuse and be. I'm starting to, I think I can, like, I develop, like, an internal feel for it now, what it feels like to, like, slip a little because something is a little too easy. But it's hard. Like I said, like this is a, this is a personal thing that, like, I think individual can try to develop. But as for, like, getting people on the large public scale to do with, I have no idea.

Well, but maybe to rephrase your implicit advice here, within the game, whatever game it is, there's clarity of values and goals and your, your structure. and that's that's rewarding and you like this. But there, but it's also dangerous because clarity can be a chimera. But there's the meta game. There's the fact that you can play different kinds of games, right? And that kind of training and playing different kinds of games, I think you put it, at one point, like it's yoga for the self. You're like, you're stretching yourself into different positions and it's usually used to.

And that actually can, you know, help you rebalance what it is you should be paying attention to and believing. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is the idea of playfulness, right? Like, I mean,

this is not, in some ways, it's not a new, like, there are plenty of accounts of like, this is, so Martha Newsbaum thinks, like,

a version of what Martha Newsombsom's view is like, this is what literature does. You occupy different emotional perspective. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just think that games offer you a similar version of this. Sure.

But the, the, the transition between if one of these traps works by getting you to stop considering the basis for these beliefs, then the way out is to get out of the trap by reasoning for a while from a different worldview. And that, I mean, that would be great. It's hard to do. It's hard to put on different worldviews as like different outfits.

Sometimes I think, I mean, this is going to become the world's oldest chestnut. But sometimes I think like, this is what the fucking. humanities are for. Like, like, read some art, like, read some novels, motherfucker. And, um, and, um, I mean, if you want, like, the, the background paranoid view, it's something like, the world has very good reasons to get us to onboard to, like, super simple, clear targets. Um, and when I look at universities cutting humanities programs in favor of business goals and

STEM because those are higher earning jobs or lead to more clearly measurable productivity. I'm like, I mean, of course, like reading weird subtle art and experiencing weird subtle art, including games, but also including novels and music and all this other stuff, is this stuff that might have clued you in to like different value perspectives other than make a lot of money and get a good job. And of course, they're going to get cut out in a world dominated by hyper-simplified institutionalized values. You know, I mean, yeah, I'm on your side. I'm a scientist myself. Some of my best friends are scientists and engineers and some of them are very, very smart. And yet you constantly see this

syndrome where they fall prey to just wanting a more simple and clear picture of the world than actually matches onto what the world is. Yeah, there's a, I mean, there's, in many cases, is I think that I mean, Aristotle this feels like a philosopher like waxing, it's always Aristotle has he has a dictum that every

domain has its own degree of clarity and we shouldn't expect more clarity than the domain can provide. And one of the suspicions I have is that certain domains, especially the domains that science has a lot of success with, are the kinds of domains that admit of extraordinary clarity.

And other domains like the domain of life value and the domain of and domains of like personal health and fitness and aesthetic joy are not domains admit of the same systemic clarity and we demand them we start hitting simplified targets and the reason I think that there is a base reason for this and I think that this is okay I'm about to get out of my pay grade a little bit

but this is stuff I've been thinking about a lot. It's late in the podcast go nuts. So if you read, I've been reading, so Michael Strevin's, have you read Michael Strebens? Have you read Michael Strebens' new book, The Knowledge Machine? It's extraordinary. I love this book. But I think one of the things that makes clear is that scientific tools, in general, the tools of large scale observation and information aggregation are best at looking at qualities that are invariant across time and space. So one of my favorite books in the background here is Theodore Porter's book, Trust in Numbers, which is a historian. He was really influenced by a philosopher. of science, Ian Hacking. And he has his view where he says, look, there's a difference between qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data is really rich and nuanced and subtle,

but it's really context sensitive. It doesn't aggregate. It doesn't travel well. Quantitative data focuses on some invariant quality that doesn't change between context, and so everyone inputs the same quantity, and he says portable across context and easy to aggregate. So an easy way for me to understand this is,

Think about the difference between qualitative student evaluations of like written work and a quantified letter grade. The qualitative information is so much rich, so much useful has all the stuff in it. But I can't like people outside of my little discipline can't interpret it. And it isn't aggregatable. So instead we produce this thing that's like standardized ranking that suppresses all this data. And that aggregates easily and travel as well. So that's that's Porter's view. And you can add this to James Scott view.

So, have you read James Scott Seeing Like a State? No, I don't think so. It's one of the most amazing books to have come out in the last few decades. And Scott basically picks up on this and says, look, what you should think is that large-scale institutions can only see the parts of the world that are in, that are processable by large-scale bureaucratic machines, which are quantified data. They can't register the parts. So think about this. A large-scale school district or an educational bureaucracy can't. register individual student evaluation data.

They can only register aggregatable data like GPA. So, says Scott, the world, large-scale institutions have a reason to remake the world along lines that are more regular so that they can be legible to the institution and actable by the institution. Anyway, so I've gone on too far. So to sum up, if you buy the story and you buy like, I think the kind of coherent view of science as good as creating standardized data, then what you should think is that the methods of science

are really good at looking at things that are naturally invariant across people, like, I don't know, the way our immune systems work. But it should be less good at looking at things that vary radically between people than are highly personalized. Like, what makes you joyous, what makes you happy, what makes you satisfied. And if you approach it using the methodology, then it'll only be able to track features

that are standardized across people. So there's actually an interesting work here in the philosophy of well-being. But one thought is that people are looking for a measure of well-being that's like, and that might not exist. It might not be the kind of thing that exists.

That admits of standardization. And if you look for that, then you're going to get the world of Fitbit. That's my massively paranoid, pessimistic world's view. Well, and that's a good place to wind up. But I think the real lesson here that I've learned is that I would make a terrible cult leader. I'm not, I have this following on the podcast that I'm just not using it correctly to instill a false sense of clarity among my listeners. Maybe I should start doing that.

Yeah, you should definitely do that. I mean, figure out how you do that. I actually, one of the things I think that's really fun to do is to game out exactly how you would instill a false sense of clarity and a bunch of people. Look at the system you create. and then ask yourself how much that's like certain real world belief systems are circulating. That is a very scary game you have just suggested to us, but we can all go contemplated at home. So T. Nguyen, thanks very, very much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you so much for having me.