“Value capture is… where your values are rich and subtle or in the process of developing that way. And you get put in a setting or near a technology or an institution that presents you with a simplified, typically quantified version, and the simplified version takes over.”
That’s C. Thi Nguyen, professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and author of the newly released The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, in an interview on the podcast of journalist and commentator Chris Hayes.
[archived image unavailable] [“Slices of Time” (detail) by Emmanuelle Moureaux]Value capture happens in various contexts, for example, joining a social media platform “to connect to people, and then becoming obsessed with likes or follows… or going to school out of a love of education, and getting becoming obsessed with GPA.”
He continues: “You might’ve thought that if anybody is not vulnerable to this, it would be [philosophers].” But as it turns out, “we are vulnerable as hell.”
He then shares part of his story:
So I went into philosophy because I loved weird, interesting questions about like the meaning of life and why any of this is here and why are things beautiful. And then I went into philosophy grad school and I got enculturated. And in philosophy, there is a status ranking collated by survey of what the status is of the journals you publish in and the departments you can be at. And you don’t know any of this when you go to grad school. You’re like, philosophy is cool. I want to think about the meaning of life. And then almost everyone comes out being like, what is my highest rank publication? What is the ranking of my job? And there’s a shift.
And this is the shift that I started thinking about because when that happened, what my sense of what I was trying to do changed because as it turns out for various complex institutional reasons, a lot of the stuff that gets you published in high status journals is not big meaningful questions. It’s fairly technical work on fairly arcane issues and it’s kind of micro moves. I mean, I would say some of these micro moves are very valuable, but it’s like tiny technical logic pushing… And I got obsessed with this.
I got obsessed with moving up the ranking and I started writing philosophy that bored me. And then I wanted to die. And then at some point I was in some place where I was like, I’ve made the weirdest decision in my life, which is to abandon any possible financial reward by not being a lawyer, by leaving Silicon Valley, by being in this weird ass dumb profession, which the only possible reason you could do it is out of love. And yet somehow… I have found myself writing boring philosophy I hate in order to move up this internal ranking system. And then I was like, and I think this is, there’s this raw reaction I often have, which is kind of like, what’s going on? What are we doing here?
The full interview is below. Discussion welcome.
