Score Review: Can we fight the dark side of a rules-based world, asks a new book

Score
C. Thi Nguyen
Allen Lane

Last year I wrote an article for THIS The new scientist about the perfect way to cook the classic pasta dish cacio e pepe, say physicists. The fine, glossy emulsion of black pepper, pecorino cheese and water is hard to come by without lumps. Ivan Di Terlizzi of the Max Planck Institute for Complex Systems Physics in Germany and his colleagues brewed cacio e pepe hundreds of times until they developed a challenging and reliable method.

The story became a favorite among readers. When I recently caught up with one of the scientists involved and asked him why, he told me it was perhaps because the research seemed to find order in “a world that looks like disorder if you don’t look too closely with the eyes of rigor and mathematics.”

Seeing the world this way can be seductive, but also dangerous, C. Thi Nguyen argues in her book Score: How to stop playing someone else’s game. Nguyen, a former food writer and now professor of philosophy at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, uses recipes that are guaranteed to produce a perfect result as a caveat.

Hidden behind their apparent authority, he writes, they are actually making a value judgment, an “exercise of taste and preference” about what food should look like. They use scientific rigor with precise measurements and sequences to produce repeatable results. But in doing so, they limit the variety of possible outcomes and the innate human messiness that makes food so much fun.

Cooking is just one example of how the modern effort to categorize, score, and impose order on a chaotic reality, often driven by the homogenization of nation states and centralized bureaucracy, can lead to less than ideal results. Nguyen paints a picture of a world teeming with them.

Take his own academic career, where he had to contend with university and journal rankings. In philosophy, these rankings are determined by websites that rank departments according to metrics such as the prestige of the journals in which their academics publish, which in turn depends on how well they answer “relatively arcane technical questions,” he writes.

This was the opposite of the “wild, unmanageable questions” that drew Nguyen to the field in the first place, but he began to feel the grading system getting under his skin. He experienced what he calls “value capture,” where we are instead ruled by metrics designed to be useful.

One way to cope with today’s plethora of rules-based systems is to actively choose to play by the rules in the form of games, says Nguyen, an avid game fan and player. The book is full of his rich experience with the game, from Dungeons & Dragons and rock climbing to yoga and yo-yoing.

Nguyen convincingly shows why choosing to follow the rules in the artificial sandbox of games can help us explore, be open, and expose ourselves to life’s riches, acting as a kind of “spiritual vaccine” to the institutional scoring systems we begrudgingly accept in everyday life, such as school exam grades. The idea that games can save us can be a tall order, and it’s certainly an unashamedly optimistic and personal view of the world. But overall, Nguyen makes a good case for it.

Many of the ideas in his book are not new, as Nguyen readily admits, referencing the many philosophers and academics who have shaped his intellectual journey. Their work includes Geographic prisoners Tim Marshall, who delves into the “geo” in geopolitics, and See as a state James C. Scott, who looks at why scientifically planned societies so often fail.

However, Nguyen’s playful framing of the arguments in line with the central thesis of his book feels fresh. This is a good place to start.

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