The Score with C. Thi Nguyen

It seems like everything we do these days gets boiled down to metrics, from GPA to fuel efficiency to sleep quality. But what is all that data actually doing for us? And what is it doing to us?

That's the question philosopher C. Thi Nguyen set out to answer in The Score. Along the way, he found himself unpacking modern notions of authority and objectivity, the difference between scoring systems in games and scoring systems in real life, and how humans construct meaning (and why we can't use numbers to do it).

In our conversation, I talk to Thi about what it means to live in an era of big data, and how we can hold on to what we value amidst the quantitative noise. I hope you enjoy it.