Values seize | Seth’s Weblog

When tradition pushes us to measure issues that don’t matter to us, our values are captured.

As soon as the metrics flip a revenue for firms and people in energy, they’re amplified, and nearly in a single day, start to matter to us, even when they run opposite to what we initially got down to do or develop into.

We’re simply seduced by scoreboards, competitors and darkish patterns.

Professor C. Thi Nguyen has written a superb ebook on the philosophy of video games—massive and small. The Rating helps us perceive that dominant industrial and cultural methods push to deskill us as we develop into fungible, replaceable elements in an simply measurable enterprise. His ebook is huge, deep, and unforgettable. (It additionally consists of riffs on yoyos and fly fishing.)

Measurements are sticky, contagious, and relentless. As soon as a competitor begins to maneuver forward on a metric, it provides them a bonus, and that pushes us to give attention to the identical metric or fall behind. The Purple Queen races forward, just because racing forward is what they’ve been skilled to do.

Maybe, although, falling behind on a metric we don’t care about is perhaps precisely the best factor to do.

In a sport like Scrabble or chess, the values seize is true there within the guidelines. It’s specific, agreed upon, and the entire level. You be ok with touchdown a seven-letter phrase as a result of that’s what scores, and also you don’t thoughts buying and selling your rook for a greater place—that’s the sport you signed up for. However after we carry that very same intuition into how we spend our working hours (and months, and many years), we’d find yourself sacrificing way over a rook.

As soon as we see values seize unfolding, we’ve got a shot at making a selection. Measure what issues.

June 11, 2026