The Score

We were climbing for different reasons. I wanted to get to the top any way I could—anything that would count as a victory, that would give me that next number. Sherwood would climb a route, get to the top, frown, and mutter, “Well, OK, but that was pretty ugly,” and then keep climbing it over and over again until the movement felt beautiful to him. His comment—that I had to savor the movement—got stuck in my head over the next few months. It changed my whole relationship to climbing. I started to pay more attention to the sweet joy of the movement—to lavish loving attention on the microscopic adjustments, the explosive hip twists. At night, I would dream about how it felt.

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A lot of the time, we don’t know the real reason we’re doing something. I had been telling myself that climbing was making me fitter, and that I was learning some skills. But in retrospect, what I actually loved was how it felt to be climbing. It was an experience of my own grace, a rare taste of loveliness flowing through my bones and fingers. And it was the fact that my life suddenly had rowdy road trips and drunk bonfires in it. I came back from climbing weekends cheerful, refreshed. Climbing made me feel complete.

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The game of climbing has a very specific definition of success: You have succeeded if you get to the top. And the scoring system also tells you, over the course of a climbing life, that you should be trying to climb ever-more difficult climbs. This gave me a focus. It shaped a very specific kind of activity; without that goal, I would never have paid enough attention to my body, never would have refined my movement enough, to discover a pure joy in movement.

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This structure forced me to tune in to how I was moving. It keyed me into a new form of beauty. It gave me a richer form of freedom than I had anywhere else in my life. It showed me the way to a new kind of agency.

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The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought what ultimately mattered in politics was power. The rightful ruler is whoever has the power to control other people’s actions. But for Hobbes, the true source of power wasn’t strength or military might. He believed that ultimate power comes from the ability to control language and define terms—especially the terms of success. The power over definitions is stronger than military or economic power. Because if you can define what good and evil mean for people, if you can control what success and failure mean for them, then you can control them from the inside.

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Games wake us up to a life of play; metrics drive us down into grueling optimization. And sometimes, we let some external, institutional systems—rankings, metrics, and measures—set our desires and goals. Let’s give this phenomenon a name. Call it value capture. Value capture happens when: Your values are rich and subtle—or developing that way. You enter some social (typically institutional) setting that offers you simplified, often quantified renditions of your values. The simplified versions take over. If you want a portable version, try this: Value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them.

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stops caring about making good food and starts caring about maximizing its Yelp ratings. It happens when students stop caring about education and start caring about their GPA. It happens when scientists stop caring about finding truth and start caring about getting the biggest grants. It even happens in religion.

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In value capture, you’re outsourcing your values to an institution. Instead of setting your values in the light of your own particular experiences, instead of adjusting them to your particular personality, you’re letting distant bureaucratic forces set them for you.

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world. But that almost never happens. Metrics are shaped by institutional forces. They are subject to demands for fast, efficient data collection at scale, to demands of fitting into spreadsheets and action reports. Institutional metrics are part of a system that abstracts away from personal difference and local detail and identifies some thin, measurable detail. And what’s easily measurable is rarely the same as what’s really valuable.

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It’s particularly easy, with Twitter, to see the exact contours of the value shift. The platform’s scoring system—its Likes and Retweets and Follows—doesn’t register empathy, or understanding, or finding out something that really transforms you down the line. It measures quick-fire popularity. Twitter’s metrics don’t capture the difference between somebody who chuckled for a second at your tweet and somebody who was shaken to their core. If they both just click Like, then Twitter counts them the same.

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Twitter captures a binary information state. It does not record the difference between loving something, being mildly amused by it, or having it change your life. It flattens complex information into a single binary bit of data. And it captures that data at one narrow moment: the moment of first reading. You encounter a deep tweet. At first you don’t like it; you disagree with it. But it sticks in your craw; it gnaws at you. Slowly, it changes your mind—but that takes a week. The value of that tweet comes in a slow burn. But it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll go back and find that tweet to Like it. The interface of social media tends to capture positive reactions in the first moment of exposure. One of the central reasons we communicate with each other is to learn, to be challenged, to have our understanding transformed, which takes time. But that kind of communication isn’t valued by Twitter’s scoring system.

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Call this the Gap. The Gap is the distance between what’s being measured and what actually matters.

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In a lecture on his game design process, Knizia said that the most important tool in his game design toolbox was the scoring system, because it sets the player’s motivations in the game. Scores tell the players what they’ll want during the game. And this is the heart of how game designers shape our actions—and how those actions will feel—in the game. A scoring system specifies motivations for the player to adopt.

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The game asks you to do the seemingly impossible: to be telepathic. And then it teaches you how that’s actually possible. You play the game by developing a shared sense of timing for how long you should wait to play a given card. And you can get very good at it together. Your group can play these wild, precise sequences in lockstep tempo. It will start to feel like you can touch the inside of each other’s brains and hear a collective clock ticking.

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A game can tell you whether you’re selfish or part of a larger collective. Start up The Mind. The game tells you you’re all on a team together, and you win or lose as one. Now your desires are unified; you are a perfect coordinated unit. Start up another game, like the classic first-person shooter Quake III Arena. This video game throws you into an online arena, where you score points by killing other players. Now you are an unapologetic psychopath, a being of pure selfishness, dodging, whirling, bouncing grenades down the hall, head-shotting people as they come down the corner.

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How does The Mind accomplish this little miracle? What’s it made out of? There are two basic parts to the game. First it gives you restrictions: The game strips away all your normal avenues for communication. Then it gives you a goal. It tells you to play these cards in sequential order. Out of these simplest of pieces, the game shapes a very specific set of actions and challenges—and through those, it shapes a mental state.

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This is the peculiarity at the heart of games: They tell you what to desire. And we players are fluid enough that we can let those scoring systems shape our desires. We can slip into alternate motivational states like a new set of clothes. We have the ability to start a game, find out what will get us…

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A game can tell you whether you’re selfish or part of a larger collective. Start up The Mind. The game tells you you’re all on a team together, and you win or lose as one. Now your desires are unified; you are a perfect coordinated unit. Start up another game, like the classic first-person shooter Quake III Arena. This video game throws you into an online arena, where you score points by killing other players. Now you are an unapologetic psychopath, a being of…

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Start up another game: Go outside and play a game of pickup basketball. Now you’re divided into teams, and the basic shape of your cares shifts to match. It doesn’t matter that Tessa is your best friend; she’s on the opposite team now, and your job is to steal her passes and block her shots. It doesn’t matter that in ordinary life you hate Sam. He’s on your team now, and if he’s…

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Games play around with who you are, what you care about, and the basic shape of your relationships to other people. Games reach into you and give you a new form of agency, and you can, for a while, become completely absorbed in that new agency. And what enables that, in crucial part, is the clarity, the simplicity, and the unambiguity of the…

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Striving play involves a motivational inversion of ordinary, practical life. In normal life, we struggle in order to attain some goal that we really want. In striving play, we adopt a goal in order to have the struggle that we really want.

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Perhaps this seems unnerving, letting another human being inside our heads to tinker with our goals. But this goal manipulation can be relatively safe in games. Because often in games, the goal isn’t what really matters. We adopt the goal in order to experience the process. The beauty is in the struggle. This is a very specific kind of orientation. Let’s give it a name: striving play. In striving play, you try to win not because winning is important, but because the act of trying to win gives you a delicious struggle. In striving play, you don’t really care about winning in a lasting way. You temporarily induce in yourself a desire to win, so you can enjoy the process of trying. Striving play involves a motivational inversion of…

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eventually found a way to love rock climbing again by tweaking the goals. I stopped being laser-focused on pure difficulty. I looked for middlingly hard but interesting climbs, which pushed me into new kinds of movement. And I didn’t declare myself finished with a particular climb after the first time I climbed it. I took the Sherwood path. I aimed for smoothness, flow, and total mastery of the climb. What I most wanted was the feeling of complete organized attunement—and I got that from seeking elegant mastery over moderate climbs, and not from the perpetual quest for more difficult climbs. In other words, I was turning into a game designer, by creating my own personal version of the game. I was starting to play around with what counted as winning. I was starting to tune the game to my own purposes, to give me that specific mental state of ecstatic organization and flow.

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Games tell you what to desire, through the scoring system. But you can also take charge of which games you play, and choose which scoring systems you adopt. You can tweak your games, shift to new ones, jump from ordinary Super Mario Odyssey to speedrunning it. Or you can quit Mario entirely and learn archery, or start a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

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And that’s the core problem: We don’t have a massive dataset for good art, but we do have a massive dataset for engagement hours. And this is no accident. Some kinds of things are systematically harder to measure because they are more variable, more personal, or more delicate. This is what a lot of this book will be about: why so many of the important things in life seem to consistently defy measurement. They vanish from sight when we insist on using the measurement tools of large-scale institutions and bureaucracy. What’s meaningful is intimate and unpredictable; it eludes easy classification. If we let institutional metrics set our values and drive our lives, we end up chasing what’s easy to count, and not what’s really important.

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But games are different. Games grant us a precious experience of clarity. It is a clarity of purpose—a clarity of value. In a game, for once in our lives, we know exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, and afterward, we know exactly how well we have done. There are no larger questions about the meaning of our lives, no existential angst about our goals, no ambiguity. We know what we are pursuing in explicit, immaculate, unquestionable detail. Games offer value clarity. They are an existential balm for the confusion of ordinary life.

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In most games, that clarity is happily artificial. The points are made up. In most games, the goals are things we invented for the sake of fun or satisfaction—to shape some delicious form of action. Game goals can be adopted and then thrown away again. Game cares are temporary and disposable.

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In the first half, we’re going to discover that we can each approach scoring systems with two very different attitudes. We can approach them playfully—bending ourselves in and out of them, dancing between them, changing them, modifying them. Or we can be captured by them—we can let scoring systems dictate our goals and targets to us, even when those goals fit poorly with our lives. So at first, it’s going to look a lot like the difference is a matter of individual attitude. Maybe, you think, the solution is simple: We should, as individuals, try to have the right attitude, and just be more playful about everything.

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Sometimes, metrics pull on us because they are tied to simple incentives: money, opportunity, status, power. But incentives don’t explain everything. Often, metrics do give us status and power—but only because everybody else has gotten sucked in already. Again, philosophers could have ignored the philosophy rankings; they had no official authority. But we gave them power, by believing in them.

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And most fascinating of all is that so many of us get sucked into public metrics even when they don’t give us status—even when it hurts us. Pursuing weight loss into declining health and sorrow; obsessively chasing more Likes and Follows even when it doesn’t matter for our job. The very clarity and universal comprehensibility of metrics seduce us into value capture, even when it makes us miserable.

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Metrics are understandable, interconnected, and perfectly transparent. And in this clarity is a certain kind of trap. We become beholden to what everybody can understand. Games are isolated, disconnected, and unimportant. The joy we take in them is often private and opaque to others. And that opacity gives us the space to be free.

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She said my talk had made her realize that she’d been trapped in all kinds of bad games. Life had given her some scoring systems and she’d just been trying to get as high a score as she could, without wondering if she should have accepted them into her heart in the first place. Thinking about these things as games, she said, had helped her get some distance from the rankings and metrics. She could step back and ask herself if she actually wanted to accept these systems, if they really mattered to her. She sent me a picture of her phone. She’d changed the default background so it gave her a message, a reminder, every time she looked at it. Her phone says, “Is this the game you really want to be playing?”

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But this isn’t only a superficial cover for meditation. If I just stood in a river and tried to clear my mind, I’d get pretty bored, fast. I can’t simply will myself to focus on the surface of water. The pursuit of fish creates an attentional focal point. It structures the way I look at the river—it gives me a goal, tells me what to look for, what to see. This intense, diffuse attention produces in me a state of profoundly calm soft focus. Weirdly, taking on the goal of catching fish has the result of meditation through attention to the river.

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There are two very different motivational states in which we can play a game. There’s striving play, and then there’s also achievement play. The achievement player is trying to win because they actually value winning. The striving player, on the other hand, doesn’t actually care about the win, deep down. They are only trying to win because they value the struggle. The achievement player cares about the win itself; the striving player cares about the process of trying to win.

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Striving play might sound weird described this abstractly, but you’ve probably already been doing it instinctively already. Say we’re having a dinner party and decide to play a party game. Let’s play Spyfall, a truly delightful game of hidden identities that reliably puts people into joyful hysterics. One person is the spy, trying to beat everybody else. Everybody else is on a team together, trying to figure out who the spy is. But, of course, since the spy’s identity is hidden, none of the team players can be sure who, exactly, they can trust.

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Striving play involves a motivational inversion. In ordinary, practical life, you take the means for the sake of the end. You struggle in order to get the reward; all your effort and strain is justified by the outcome. But in striving play, you take the end for the sake of the means. You chase the goal in order to have the struggle. If you want to understand the achievement player’s motivation, you have to look at the value of winning for them. But to understand the striving player, you have to look at the joy of the struggle itself.

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And notice that striving players don’t just have to be in it for the sheer joy of the game. You can also be a striving player if you’re using the game as a tool to get something else. You can play games for health or relaxation or to break the ice at a party. But a striving player gets those benefits from the struggle, not the victory. If you run marathons to improve your cardiovascular fitness, you’re also a striving player—because you can get a fitness benefit even if you place last.

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Maybe you doubt that striving play is real. But a lot of ordinary, everyday game-playing behavior only makes sense as striving play. For example, when I’m playing serious board games with my friends, I will pursue the win intensely during the game. But in the long term, I make choices that actually decrease my chances of winning.

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Consider, too, a stupid game. A stupid game is one in which: The fun part is failing. It’s only fun if you’re trying to win. Twister is a stupid game. So are many drinking games. My favorite stupid game is called Bag on Your Head. Bag on Your Head is a gloriously idiotic party game in which everybody puts a brown paper grocery bag over their head. The goal is to take the bags off of other people’s heads. Once somebody

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A friend of mine told me about a game of Monopoly he once played with his ten-year-old son. The son was winning for the first time in his life. The dad had been on the brink of defeat for hours, but he never quite lost and he didn’t understand exactly why. And then the dad discovered that whenever he was about to run out of cash, his son would distract him and reverse-cheat and sneak some extra money into the dad’s pile, so the game could keep going. The son was trying to stay there forever, perched in that glorious moment of total domination over his helpless dad.

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It’s funny because what the son was doing makes a certain amount of sense. The son actually got the basic spirit of striving play. He knew that he was playing Monopoly for the joy of the struggle. But he misunderstood the subtler logic of striving play.

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We often use striving play to sneak up sideways on these delicate mental states. A lot of the time, my true purpose in climbing is to relax. But if I aim at relaxation directly—if I consciously try to relax—I’ll absolutely fail. The worst way to do it is to sit in a chair and try to will yourself to relax. To actually relax, I have to forget that I’m trying to relax. I have to put my true purpose out of my head and focus on a very simple, very narrow goal: to get to the top of the cliff.

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Philosophers have a term for this kind of thing: a self-effacing end, which is an end that cannot be pursued directly. Games help us achieve self-effacing ends—relaxation, meditation, absorption—by providing us with smaller goals to focus on. This is why people often use goofy games as icebreakers. If you take a party full of awkward strangers and just tell them to relax and get to know each other, they’ll probably fail. Social chill is a self-effacing end. But if you give them some stupid game, like charades or Twister, they actually might have some fun together.

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To understand why so many of us play games, you have to remember the distinction between goal and purpose. For achievement players, the goal and purpose are one: They want to win. But for striving players, goal and purpose are very far apart. The in-game goal is just a disposable tool that they use to approach their real purpose: the experience of that delicious struggle. And this difference between goal and purpose is everywhere, far beyond games. For a lot of folks, the goal of knitting is to make scarves, but the purpose is to be buried in this pleasurable zen dance of delicate finger motions. And we can tell that scarves aren’t the true purpose, because a lot of knitters end up with way more scarves than they could possibly need, having to give them away to anybody who will take them.

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We dally with them for as long as it takes to get what we want. And then, when it’s done, we throw those cares away. In striving play, we don’t let the scoring system dominate us. We use it to give us focus, and to align our cares for a little while, so that we can abandon ourselves to a gorgeously ordered, intense, purified world. We care about points because they give us a particular thrill. The scoring system is just a means to an end. And if we don’t like a scoring system and what it’s doing to us, we can just stop playing.

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Something had happened. I had gone into this whole thing for health, to make my joints hurt less, to make my body feel better. But then something shifted in me, and I stopped caring about how my back and joints felt. I started caring about a number on a scale—my weight—and continuing to make it go down. My original goals had changed. I was focused on achievement based on an external measure—and the form of the new goals was set, in part, by the demand for external clarity.

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Here we run headlong into the Gap again—the distance between what’s easy to measure and what matters. But there should have also been an easy solution to the Gap. I should have been able to think to myself: “I started this whole dieting thing to feel healthier. I adopted this simplified scoring system of dropping weight in order to feel healthier. But if those simple scoring systems aren’t helping, I should just stop using them. They aren’t getting me what I actually care about.” Once I became aware that I had fallen into the Gap, I should have been able to course-correct and adjust my scoring system to achieve what was really important. But I didn’t. I had slowly forgotten what I had originally cared about. I was letting the sharp, clear metric dominate my inner vision. I had been value captured. I wasn’t using a scoring system to achieve my own values; I was letting the scoring system set my values for me.

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Value capture doesn’t only occur around metrics. You can be value-captured by a slogan or a simplified belief system. But some of the most obvious, most common, and most powerful versions of value capture happen when we are exposed to a simple public scoring system—a ranking, a metric, a numerical score—and it takes over our decision-making. Those simple quantifications invite value capture. They cut through the noise;…

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And value capture isn’t just for individuals. Groups can be value-captured by metrics and measures that come from external sources. A newspaper can be value-captured by clicks and page views; a whole police precinct can be value-captured by the case-closure rate. In fact, large-scale institutions will turn out to be among the most…

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In value capture, you adopt some simplified value as given and use it as is. If you start the road to exercise with a Fitbit and eventually start modulating the goals, hacking them to suit you, then that’s not value capture. Value capture is when you ingest it wholesale.

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I named value capture after regulatory capture—a problem in which government regulators go astray. These regulators are supposed to serve the public interest. Regulatory capture occurs when they end up, instead, serving the interests of the very companies they’re supposed to be regulating. For example, the Food and Drug Administration is supposed to regulate the pharmaceutical industry. But sometimes some government regulators become friends with folks in the pharmaceutical industry—and the cushiest job for retired government regulators is often on the other side. So they start identifying with the…

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Value capture doesn’t only occur around metrics. You can be value-captured by a slogan or a simplified belief system. But some of the most obvious, most common, and most powerful versions of value capture happen when we are exposed to a simple public scoring system—a ranking, a metric, a numerical score—and it takes over our decision-making. Those simple quantifications invite value capture. They cut through the noise; they make decisions so much easier. Scoring systems are a particularly seductive format for simplified values.

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And value capture isn’t just for individuals. Groups can be value-captured by metrics and measures that come from external sources. A newspaper can be value-captured by clicks and page views; a whole police precinct can be value-captured by the case-closure rate. In fact, large-scale institutions will turn out to be among the most vulnerable to value capture, because metrics speak directly in the language of bureaucracy.

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I named value capture after regulatory capture—a problem in which government regulators go astray. These regulators are supposed to serve the public interest. Regulatory capture occurs when they end up, instead, serving the interests of the very companies they’re supposed to be regulating. For example, the Food and Drug Administration is supposed to regulate the pharmaceutical industry. But sometimes some government regulators become friends with folks in the pharmaceutical industry—and the cushiest job for retired government regulators is often on the other side. So they start identifying with the pharmaceutical companies and caring about those corporations’ interests. Those regulators have been captured by the industries they were supposed to regulate.

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Value capture is real. Empirical researchers—sociologists, anthropologists, and historians—have provided exhaustive documentation. Rankings tend to seize an outsize chunk of institutional and personal attention, even when they’re clearly oversimplified.

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But that publicity has a cost. In condensing all the complex information into a single ranking system, U.S. News changed how people thought about and valued law schools. The rankings heavily weight a small handful of stats, including the incoming class’s average GPA and LSAT scores, and they measure the employment rate of students at the nine-month postgraduation mark. Obviously, these are thin measures that leave out important information. But law schools have come to devote themselves to moving up in those rankings, which means they have put those thin measures at their very core. Huge shares of university resources have been diverted away from genuine pedagogical activity and toward efforts designed only to game the rankings. For example, the rankings care about the school’s rejection rate for applicants, because a higher rejection rate is presumably an indicator of elite status. So many law schools have started spending a lot of resources on encouraging unlikely applicants to apply, simply so they’ll have more people to reject.

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But we do not yet have a clear case of value capture. These effects might simply be the result of bad incentives. An incentive is just an offer of some desirable resource—like money or attention—that can be used to get what you really want. Incentives can provide some motivation, but they don’t change your core values. They just change which crap you have to slog through to get the resources that let you do what you really want. But you still have a choice. Let’s say you really value your family. Your job incentivizes you to work more hours with bonus pay. Sometimes you’ll choose to work those extra hours to get money to support your family. But you can also choose sometimes to ignore those incentives and take more time at home with your family.

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The problem with outsourcing is also not just that your values are coming from the outside. We learn most of our values from external sources: our upbringing, our culture, art, and religion. But when you pick up your values from your family or your community, you’re free to modify them and adjust them on the fly as you live your life. You can start with an external value and then tailor it to fit. But something very different happens when you’re value-captured by an institutional metric: You’re binding yourself to an inflexible external standard.

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Metrics are formulated to meet the demands of large-scale institutions: They are made to be usable by anybody, comprehensible by anybody, and consistently applicable by anybody. There are limitations on every institutional metric, bound up with their basic function. They tend to track what’s easy to measure—simple externalities and obvious outcomes. And they tend to be rigid. The very nature of institutional metrics resists adjustment and tailoring. Institutional metrics are made to fit the needs of fast and efficient organization at scale, and not to fit your particular individual needs or the needs of your small-scale community.

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Much of our sense of meaning and worth is peculiar, personal, and local. And metrics will always be deeply insensitive to such intimate, small-scale senses of meaning. Metrics are tuned to the needs of massive institutions. They are blunt and insensitive tools for sensing the meaningfulness of life. This is what we’ll spend much of the rest of this book exploring: how metrics aim at large-scale comprehensibility—and how the price for that is intimacy,…

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With value capture, you’re buying your values off the rack. They won’t be tailored to you; they won’t be made for your…

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Let me be clear: I’m not saying that metrics are useless, or that they’re always made for malicious purposes. Many metrics are created by good people, for perfectly sensible reasons. Metrics can make our progress clearer and more transparent; they can introduce accountability into formerly opaque systems. They can make us more objective and help us get rid of biases. Their simple clarity can help push us toward the big but easy-to-measure social goods: reducing poverty, decreasing CO2 emissions, increasing vaccination rates. The weakness of metrics lies in pursuing subtler goods.…

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I’m not saying that games are always good and metrics are always bad. You can be value-captured by a game. Plenty of high school athletes get value-captured by the sports they play. I spent years obsessed with grinding my way up for more poker wins, until I realized the whole thing just made me miserable. And it’s possible to be playful with institutional metrics, to find the ones that make your life fun. But it’s unlikely. The basic nature of games encourages—but does not mandate—playful…

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understand why, we need to look much more carefully at what scoring systems are, and what they do for us—and to us. Scoring systems lie at the heart of many games and bureaucracies. All these scoring systems perform a very similar task. They offer points, which get turned into a ranking. They say who did better and who did worse. But they can have profoundly different effects: deep and joyful play in some circumstances, and misery in others. To see why, we need to…

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Scoring Systems Create…

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This is what a scoring system does. When we agree to use a scoring system, we are all agreeing to adopt the same clear process for evaluation. That scoring system will deliver a single judgment, which we have agreed to abide by. Scoring systems create agreement about who won.

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Let me offer a definition: A scoring system is a social process that delivers a quantified evaluation, and so enters a singular verdict into some official record.

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A score is a quantified evaluation. It presents numbers to us not as a report of neutral data, but as a sign of progress toward a goal. And a scoring system makes it official. Not everybody needs to personally agree with the scoring system’s verdict, but everybody usually agrees with the fact that it is, in fact, the official verdict. Think about when you have judges who score some kind of artistic performance, like the artistry scores in Olympic figure skating. Competitors and audience members might easily disagree whether the judges actually picked the most beautiful performance. But if we followed the procedure properly, everybody will agree about who the official judges are, what points they gave, and what the official final scores were. With a scoring system, we may not agree about who deserved to win, but we will agree about who, in fact, won.

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you need it, here’s a portable version: Scoring systems engineer a convergence of judgments.

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But, you might ask, what’s the big deal? A score is just what you get when you add up the points and find out who wins, right? But this hides the real action. Adding up the points is the easy part. By then, all the real work has already happened in the background. The hard part, the interesting part, is how we got the points in the first place—how we translate our achievements into clear numbers that can be easily added up.

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I can count all kinds of things if I’m doing it on my own. I can count the number of truly great American poets in the twentieth century. I can count the number of good, authentic Chinese restaurants there are in Salt Lake City. I can count how many dependable people there are in my workplace. But not everybody will agree with my counts.

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Public counting is a completely different beast. What we’re counting has to be sufficiently obvious, so that very different people can follow the same procedure and come to the same result. This is objectivity, for a very specific sense of objective. Judging the originality or grace of a skateboard trick requires some skill, and not all judges will agree. But the height of a jump is different. There is no need for sensitivity or special insight to count height; it’s a judgment that everybody can make. It’s a mechanical score.

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But notice what happened. We didn’t keep to the same goal—cool, awesome tricks—and invent some incredibly profound better way of measuring coolness and awesomeness objectively. We changed the topic. We focused our judgments on something that was easier for us all to evaluate in the same way.

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Mechanical scoring systems offer us a trade-off. We get automatic agreement by using a mechanical evaluation procedure, but there is a price to be paid for that automatic convergence. Mechanical scoring systems will tend to ignore things that are hard and subtle to count. They will tend to change what we score—and what we care about—to what is easy to count mechanically.

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It’s pretty hard for me to communicate my feelings of what makes a graceful skateboard trick, but it’s easy to communicate a method for measuring the height of a skateboard jump. Scoring systems are, then, a way of clearly writing down goals and values, and specifying a procedure for evaluating our attempts at those goals. Scoring systems are recipes for evaluation.

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The food writer John Thorne once said that the difference between a recipe and a dish is that a dish is a live thing, an idea of balance that’s in a creative cook’s head. A dish has to be remade anew each time, in response to changing ingredients and changing circumstances. But a recipe, he said, is a dead thing, a writing down of how a creative cook made something once.

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One of the first dishes I ever really understood was fried eggs over spaghetti, from Naples. It’s quite an elegant recipe. In your pot, you boil some spaghetti. Meanwhile, in your pan, you heat up some olive oil with a couple of crushed cloves of garlic until the garlic infuses the oil. Then you fry the eggs in the olive oil for a bit, aiming to just barely set the whites while leaving the yolks still runny. Then you quickly break up the eggs in the pan and toss them with the spaghetti.

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