Why wanking isn't an answer to the Tyranny of Legibility

So recently I finished a book that brought me to the realization that we can now gradient descent everything, and to thinking about why that’s one of the hugest deals ever for humanity. I wrote about that here.

That post started off as a conjoined review and explication of why we can now optimize towards more subjective and qualitative goals, and it was running long (I try to cap my posts at 20 min, and rarely go to 30 min reading time), so I decided to separate the review and the idea.

This is the review of the book.

Was C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score, and nearly the whole time I was reading I was on a knife edge, because the author seems like somebody that I would personally really love, or really hate. I know it might seem strange to judge a book by one’s personal impression of the author, but he truthfully invites it, because the entire book is driven by personal anecdotes and his personal values and proclivities.

On the minus side, he’s an academic, and a philosopher at that, and an avid gamer and general frivolous-things enjoyer. All things that don’t really end up in my social circles for various good reasons.

On the plus side, he’s got broad and wide ranging interests, seeks depth and mastery in a lot of them, and really vibrantly enjoys life. He likes cooking and rock climbing, both highly ranked in my own hobby tier list, and it sounds like he’s genuinely good at assembling fun social circles and having a great time with them. All super valuable, and certainly a road to a life well lived!

And who am I to besmirch gamers, when Zvi himself, among others in our circles, are avid gamers? Well, we’ll get to that.

The book itself is an interesting mix of blindly obvious (guys, Moloch exists, doesn’t that suck?), personal anecdotes, and seemingly being *about* to reveal a solution for most of it, while steadfastly not delivering. Well, I guess that’s a philosopher for you!

But, spoiler alert, his answer to Moloch is that people should play more games. “Hey guys, the gamer guy thinks we should all play more games!” Are we surprised yet?

Much like Sailer’s first law of female journalism, which avers that the most heartfelt pieces will always be one describing some new and better social arrangement such that the author of the piece would be more desirable in that better future, we see a heartfelt argument from a gamer who suggests a future where gaming is higher status and a bunch of noobs enter to be wowed by their more experienced betters. Do we think that’s anything like a realistic or even marginally useful answer? Yeah, me neither.

Much like my review of The Tyranny of Meritocracy, this ended up being a hate read where I agreed with most of his theses and stipulations and interpretations in terms of bad results in the world, but vehemently disagreed with how he thought of things, how he framed and presented them, his values and philosophy overall, and his particular solutions, such as they may be.

On that note, you can see why the book has seen such popularity too. Who doesn’t love a self help book that recommends more wanking as the solution?

Or the book, as the case may be?

Yeah, well. No better way to articulate your own thoughts and position than by hate reading something whose conclusions and solutions you entirely disdain, right?

Because if you agree with all the premises, but disagree with all the solutions, it’s your chance to figure out exactly where and how your world models diverge.

1) Simple, legible metrics obscure and ultimately obviate a lot of subtler and more nuanced value. This is people optimizing income over everything else, or the Ivy red queen’s race, or countries measuring how they’re doing by GDP per capita, and much else.

2) In the limits, when systems or people optimize for those at the expense of the other things, we get the Molochian dynamics we’re all familiar with.

3) One particularly interesting flavor of this that he pointed out, which I hadn’t thought of before, is that this nerfs experts and our ability to do smart things collectively, because “trust” and “transparency” are directly in conflict, and when you require experts to be legible to dumb / average people at any step of the chain, you constrain them to a vastly inferior action space that they have to stay in to be legible to dummies.

Which yeah - great call out. I hadn’t thought of it with that framing, but hasn’t this exactly driven both our loss of state capacity AND the ever-declining trust in experts and expertise everywhere, as well as nerfing our ability to respond well to things like Covid, the housing crisis, the AI race, and who knows what else?

Okay, so yes. We all agree that simplified metrics can and do destroy value, and prevent smart and / or good things from happening.

Nguyen would have us believe the answer is games, because they let you preserve playfulness and explore different success metrics and rule sets in a wide ranging way. His theory is that this lets you broadly explore and find the “yums” for your particular personality and situation.

This is because he thinks that meaning and doing meaningful things is driven by the high dimensional combination of your personality and capabilities and environment and who you know. And once again, it would be hard to disagree with that! I think that’s definitely true.

But then he makes this wild leap to wasting your life on games being some society-wide answer, which lol, I can’t even...just, no. There’s no way, you’re going to do massive and actual harm if you persuade a bunch of people to adopt that, and the reason why I think that is the crux of our difference in world views.

So Nguyen loves board games, and video games, and yo-yo-ing, and philosophy, and probably a bunch of other stuff in that neighborhood. I personally think the reason that this mostly works for him (in the sense that I think he has a reasonably fulfilling life that I wouldn’t be sad for one of my own kids to have, for example) is that he turns some of those impulses towards good ends - he plays board games with his wife frequently, and they are one of the engines of his social circles, and that’s a great social technology to both have some fun and get some good social time, because you have frequent Schelling Points to rally the troops together around.

But this is all in the service of “more yums” (and I am using this phrasing, which I personally hate, specifically to communicate something I feel is core to his worldview).

The crucial difference in my worldview and his is that I think we should be outward oriented. We should want to positively impact other people and the world, and that is a good in and of itself that should inform most of our actions, and the reasons that most of those other things on the list, from yo-yo’s to philosophy to video games, *aren’t* good is that they’re all basically wanking.

Why should “meaning” be about other people and contributing to things larger than ourselves? Because selfishness and hedonism is always narcisistic and hollow. How many Hollywood stars or musicians, who have everything any mere mortals could want, fall into serious drug abuse and nihilism and despair? It’s because they’re self oriented, and because wanking, personal hedonism, isn’t actually fulfilling or meaningful.

You can literally have all the fame, money, women, and respect in the world, and still be miserable, if you’re entirely self-oriented. There are COUNTLESS existence proofs out there! Meaning exists out there, in the world, and in other people, not in yourself and your personal “yums.”

Don’t think I’m some dour puritan either. I mean, if anyone can be accused of being a hedonist (or even having taken it too far on numerous occasions), it’s me, believe me. But I pay my taxes, dammit! (both literally and metaphorically)

I spend a lot of time and effort towards positively impacting the world and other people, and that provides meaning in my life, and indeed is the higher level goal I’ve personally been following for more than 20 years.

If you’re either a deist OR a simulationist, and I count myself as giving a high-and-increasingly-higher simulation likelihood as our AI world-journey is unfolding, then the main reason we’re here is BECAUSE of other people and things larger than ourselves!

There’s 6 thousand years of religious traditions pointing to the fact that hedonism is NOT The Way, and doing the right thing towards other people and being a part of things larger than ourselves ARE The Way. Don’t you think there’s a chance that 6 thousand years of minds across a diversity of civilizations, societies, religious traditions, and theological beliefs all arriving at the same Schelling Point might be onto something deeply relevant to the human experience?

And even if you’re a strict materialist (hi, this is me too, zero conflict with Simulationism), the fact that you were born in a society that enabled you to flourish and take advantage of your gifts can still suggest that it’s a good and reasonable thing to pay that forward and improve and contribute to and enable similar systems for future people to similarly benefit.

Empty because gamers largely don’t positively impact other people. But guys doing sick yo-yo tricks can get a lot of views on youtube or Tik Tok! Live streaming video games is an umptillion dollar industry now! Entire civilizations have risen and fallen based on some particular Twitch streamer’s political opinions! Except no, that’s not a good measure of positive impact. Cigarettes in the US are an $80B - $100B industry, too. So is cocaine or fentanyl. So is Tik Tok or sports betting for that matter, are you going to tell me they’re good? Some things, in particular some “yums,” are just straightforwardly BAD for aggregate humanity, and their popularity is bad, too.

As to formal academic philosophy being useless, well given that it’s been working on the same problems for about 2,000 years and still hasn’t reached any answers, and given that when he’s tried “ungrading” none of his own students would attend his intro philosophy classes, I’ll go with a an “it’s obvious” there, too.

Him on “ungrading” ending in nobody showing up to his classes:

“But we can see the larger reason why. My grading system does not exist in isolation. A college class is not a game. It does not exist in a magic circle; its scores are not disconnected from the rest of the world. Class grades lead directly to aggregate grade averages, which lead directly to scholarship and job opportunities. And what matters to most of my students, at least for the very next stage, is not what they learned, but what grade they got—because that is how the world will evaluate them. The scoring system in my class is part of a larger scoring system, a world-spanning one, that is out of my control. And if I try to detach myself from this large-scale scoring system, I render my class irrelevant to the powers of the large-scale system.”

Just like games - this irrelevancy towards the outside world is WHY games are bad! They give you the artificial easy chair of accomplishment with mediocre input and efforts, and take away all the hours that could have gone into real world results that matter. And to be clear, I’m not talking about just jobs! Other people, charities, even hobbies that end in some material result like woodworking or working on cars (or even your own personal fitness) is a better use of that time.

And most of all, any “skills” one picks up in games do NOT generalize or transfer to the real world - by his own account the author has spent countless hours on games structured around incentives, mind reading other people, and negotiating outcomes, and loves these specific games a lot. On the face of it, those sounds like extremely valuable skills that could improve yours and your family’s life on a number of fronts! Have these years, nay, decades of game play booted the author’s actual skills or outcomes at all? They have not. He’s an associate professor at the University of Utah, after graduating from Harvard and doing his Phd at UCLA. Womp womp.

He’s highly sense oriented, loves experiences for the sake of experiencing them. Every experience he has in the book, from rock climbing to tasting his own cooking to doing a yo-yo trick, is “radiant” or “incandescent” or “rich and sublime” That’s fine, I’m genuinely glad strongly sense oriented people exist. I might be one of them myself!

But at some point in life you have to inspect your values and decide how much time you’re going to allocate to pleasing your own personal senses (ie wanking, “yums,” and so on), and how much time you’re going to spend doing stuff that positively impacts other people and the outside world.

And THAT is the self-insight and inspection and framing that is 100% absent in the book. Nguyen takes it as a given that qualia-sluthood is his right as a free and autonomy-loving American, and he has no philosophical or moral obligation to do anything else. Or if that’s not true and he actually believes doing right by others is an ethical oblication, there is zero cognizance or voicing of this reflected in the book’s ideas or framings *at all*.

This is interesting to me, because much like myself, Nguyen points out that he’d be dead in the absence of modern medical technology.

His literal life is only unfolding because of the systems built on the legible metrics and large scale coordination he’s decrying throughout the entire book, because large scale society exists and has coordinated in the ways that simplified and legible metrics allow, and created the medical technology and hospitals that have kept him (and his son) alive. If more people had been as interested in wanking / gaming as he is in our societies, those systems probably wouldn’t exist. Seems ungrateful, but then what do I know?

So MY position is that given we were born in industrial and advanced societies with high standards of living and stuff like medicine and hospitals, and (in our circles at least) we were also born with various gifts, advantages, or talents, we have an obligation to try to pay some of that forward by contributing to the same systems and society that enabled said birthrights. Ideally by advancing them, either technologically or economically. But at the minimum by preserving and participating in the systems that enabled our lives and standards of living.

This is so foreign to Nguyen that he literally goes on an anti-capitalist rant at the end of the book. Like he has zero understanding of capitalism, why it drives prosperity for everyone by aligning selfishness via the clear and legible incentives he’s villainizing throughout the book.

This is actually his “cynical” ending. In archetypical philosopher style, he cannot give AN answer or final synopsis or call to action at the end of his book, but must waffle over two, and in it he entirely misses the point of capitalism and coordination entirely:

“We needed to make a language to work together—to describe what we were trying to do, and how we were going to do it. But private pleasures, intimate connections between peculiar people, and the strange joys in the process—these were hard to point to and name. They were hard to make language for.

What’s easy to make language for, though, is all the basic stuff in the world. And we all need some basic stuff: food, clothes, tools. And we tend to need pretty similar kinds of stuff in our quests to fulfill our own idiosyncratic desires. This stuff was just some tools—useful to get what we really wanted. But those tools were easier to put labels on. It’s easy to point to a chair or a sandwich and give it a name, and much harder to point to the strange beauty of feeling yourself in a moment of balance. So we ended up with more language to describe the basic stuff and less language to talk about the strange, rich, but private pleasures. We had less language to talk about what we really cared about.

But it’s easier to think about the stuff we have language for. Especially when we tend to forget things, and need to write things down to remember them.

So we started talking more about how much we cared about the basic stuff, and less about the weird loves that had originally inspired us. And because talking with other people is very motivating, we mostly started thinking and caring about just the basic stuff. So we ended up working really hard to make more piles of that stuff, and forgot what it was all supposed to be for in the first place.

We did, though, sometimes notice there were still these vestiges lying around: odd bits of junk leftover from what we used to care about. We didn’t have good words for them, and had mostly forgotten about what they were for, anyway.

So we gathered up all that weird, incomprehensible junk, and we shoved it into one big garbage bucket.

And the name we gave that garbage bucket was ‘play’”

Lol. Literally “civilization and especially capitalism was a mistake, except in the sense it enabled my life at all and / or creates better wank material. Worst of all, it socially downgraded wanking, the thing I like best, in favor of producing goods and services for everyone!” Isn’t that bad, guys? Guys?

This is his best capsule synopsis of what he’s been trying to tell us? If he’d put this front and center, I would have chucked the book across the room right away, instead of waiting for the end.

Lol, academics, amirite?

Well, still not as bad as Michael Sandel.

Okay, so why would spending excessive time on video games and philosophy and yo-yo’s be bad in my framework? And I’ll call out video games as the main bad guy here, because people just won’t immolate anywhere near the same amount of hours on the other stuff. It’s because they’re memetic hazards that take people away from any accomplishment or positive impacts in the real world and towards real people.

The world is complex and messy, it’s difficult to navigate, to decide what to do, to decide what “winning” means at any time scale. Video games sweep all of that away, and give you crystal clear objectives and rules, and tune them such that median people can put median levels of effort into them and be arbitrarily and increasingly awarded simply based on the amount of time they’re putting in. And this is great for the individual! Soooo much clearer and more rewarding than the real world! Why, I’ve never rescued a princess or made a billion dollars or beat up three hookers and stolen a Ferrari in the real world, but people do that shit all the time in make believe land! They’re King Kong and Napoleon and Elon Musk himself in there, often literally!

And isn’t that seductive? It is. The overwhelming majority of serious gamers, serious in the way Nguyen is and is advocating for other people to be, are wasting their lives in make believe land and contributing nothing to the real world. They are wanking in other words - fine if you do it in reasonable amounts and get on with your life, but when you make it your whole identity and sole source of joy, it’s gross and weird, and shouldn’t be applauded.

It certainly shouldn’t be recommended on a broader scale than the already distressing extent it’s happening, because those people will, with 100% certainty, be sniped by the Infinite Jests when they come. And so will Nguyen and probably his entire family.

The reason games are not the answer to Moloch is that they will not end with any contribution to the real world, and that’s why I don’t think his solution is any good. In terms of articulating the problem, sketching out some of the many impacts, decrying it artistically? Absolutely top marks, I think he did a great job. In terms of solutions? No, wanking in a closet forever isn’t going to give anybody “meaning” or beat Moloch.

Meaning happens outside of us, it can’t be found by pursuing personal hedonism.

It’s a solid explication of the problem of legibility with some great examples and implications. It’s a portrait of a fairly interesting guy, and he writes such florid and breathless recommendations of various games (video, board, or social), that you can’t help but want to try them. But overall? I probably wouldn’t.

Philosophically and morally I think it’s basically a dead-end, and it also features rants against AI art and an entire chapter driven by DEI sentiment where he tries to equate “simplified and legible goals == racism! Boo, hiss!” Which is funny, because to adopt his own framing and viewpoint there, all the while he’s man-AND-asian-splaining all this to us, and asian-mansplaining HAS to be worse than white-mansplaining, because Asians are discriminated against the most in every DEI framework. So fie, and to the thought police with you, sirrah! I pray they treat you as you treated any of your own victims.

Oh, also his second “optimistic ending” is some completely muddled and wild stab in the dark he apparently arrived at LLM-style by just assembling probable sounding sentences together, with zero relation to reality or any results in his own life. And it’s literally just dreaming of a world where more and better wanking will somehow lead you to true meaning in your life.

Basically, games let you temporarily try a lot of different value endpoints, and this could theoretically let you back into what’s actually meaningful for you. When actually, no, as practiced they probably leech and prevent VASTLY more meaning than they ever enable, because “meaning” is about other people and contributing to things larger than ourselves, not wanking in a corner for infinity. In actual practice, the overwhelming majority of people will end up like Nguyen and preferring “just playing games” over any particular value endpoint any given game puts at the top, because having a clear and legible set of rules to win by with median amounts of talent and effort is way nicer than navigating and winning much-harder-and-more-complex reality. But you know, enjoy the Infinite Jests when they come, you’ll do great in those.

But as I said, the real takeaway is that this problem is solved! This genuine, pernicious, widespread problem, so bad that it inspired *the* inimitable Meditations on Moloch, and it finally has a solution!

The whole value-capture-and-loss problem inherent in simplified legible goals need exist no longer, for individuals, groups, or organizations. The tyranny of legibility is no more!

Because AI exists, we can now literally optimize towards whatever qualitative, nuanced, human-flourishing-aligned goals we want to, either individually or collectively. And I mean we can literally gradient descent towards them, and this is one of the biggest deals in history.

I go into that in more detail in my post We can now gradient descent EVERYTHING.