The New Yorker:

In “The Score,” the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues that play is the meaning of life.

By Joshua Rothman

Every summer for the past few years, I’ve taught a multiday seminar for philosophy professors who want to write for magazines. The seminars involve a fair amount of after-dinner chitchat under the stars, during which talk often winds its way to the weirdness of being a professional philosopher. It turns out, for instance, that philosophy departments are ruled by rankings. A single website, the Philosophical Gourmet, ranks graduate programs in philosophy, sorting them not just in general terms (N.Y.U., Rutgers, and Princeton are currently the top three) but by specialization (Oxford wins for normative ethics, the University of Toronto for American pragmatism). The rankings are based on a survey which asks philosophy professors to rate one another, and its effects, people say, are widespread. One professor told me that it’s not unusual for hiring decisions to take the rankings into account. In theory, no one cares about them. But any given department knows that, if it brings on the right philosopher, it could dominate Chinese philosophy, or own the Nietzsche space.

Philosophers are supposed to be clear thinkers; shouldn’t they see through thought traps like this? The problem is that metrics are seductive. Once something is being ranked, it becomes almost impossible to get that ranking out of your head. Over time, this can lead to what C. Thi Nguyen calls “value capture.” In “The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game,” Nguyen writes that “value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them.” Because we live in a world in which nearly everything is quantified and ranked, value capture is everywhere.

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