I visited the Museo del Prado in Madrid some years ago. It was memorable mainly because I spent the whole trip trying to find all the paintings on a “top 20 must-see” list of museum artworks.
What was meant to be an opportunity to marvel at the works of El Greco, Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya became a box-ticking exercise. I had gamified the cultural experience and made it less meaningful in the process. I realised this on a return visit to the Prado recently when I made a point of neither counting masterpieces nor watching the clock – and left the building with a feeling of appreciation and awe at what I’d just seen.
The use of a “top 20” to guide your behaviour is an example of what philosopher C Thi Nguyen might call “value capture”. I had come to believe that following a measurement, purporting to represent a successful visit to the museum, was more important than being led by the artwork itself.
“Value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them,” he writes in a new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.
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How you decide to spend your time in a museum is relatively trivial and a “top 20” list recognisably open to debate. Far more troubling is value capture through metrics, backed up by big data, in areas such as personal relationships, education and work.
Dating apps, for example, tell us what it means to be “a 10” in terms of attractiveness, encouraging us to compare ourselves against an algorithm’s idea of beauty. University league tables tell us how colleges rank against one another, which influences student application numbers and, in turn, encourages institutions to make as their core mission moving up in the rankings.
“Scoring systems offer us relief from the painful complexity of life,” writes Nguyen, who teaches at the University of Utah in the United States. “In value capture, you’re taking that decontextualised nugget and internalising it. You’re letting it set your values.”
Underpinning this observation is a wider concern about the use of data to monetise behaviour. Data can aid understanding. It can also help us to make more informed decisions, challenge preconceptions or identify previously unseen problems. But, if overused, statistics can start to replace human judgment entirely.
While Nguyen sees the odds stacked against humanity as “big data” gains a firmer hold, he has two general pieces of advice. First, be more sceptical about metrics – don’t forget the old adage, “Lies, damn lies and statistics”. Second, make room in your life for playing games. No human who is playful can be reduced to a data point.
One very practical idea would be to make a list of metrics that are sucking the meaning out of your life and then pay less attention to data they produce. You might add to this blacklist of scoring systems all those measurements about which society is unhealthily obsessed. In a playful spirit, I’ve made a start: a top-five list of metrics the world would be better off without.
Likes: Initially trialled 20 years ago by video sharing platform Vimeo and first popularised by Facebook, the “like” button has become the ubiquitous measure of knee-jerk reaction and mob rule. What does 10,000 likes for an opinion posted on X tell us? Not a lot, other than the platform is awash with Russian-engineered bots.
Streaks: Maybe you and a friend are on a Snapchat streak, exchanging images on the sharing platform daily for months? Or maybe you’re on a Duolingo streak, keeping up language learning on the app for endless consecutive days? Make yourself immeasurably happier by turning your phone off for 24 hours and never streak again.
Netflix auto-recommendations: You’ve just watched a movie on Netflix and up pops “Recommended for you” – a selection of five things the streaming platform has calculated best matches your tastes. Can we not watch the film credits in peace, without having yet more content jammed down our throats?
IQ scores: The French psychologist Alfred Binet who invented the IQ test in 1905 was wary about its use as a predictive tool. Some people “assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism,” he wrote.
Far from being a permanent mark on one’s being, an IQ score contains what Nguyen calls the two “masks of metrics”. The first is the mask of clarity. This entails “presenting a seductively clear picture of what’s important”. The second is the “mask of fake objectivity”. This involves disguising a value judgment as a God-given fact. The judgment in this case is that people who are good at doing IQ puzzles are the definition of smart people.
You might have an IQ of 130 but if, for example, you can’t control your temper – or if you’ve an ego as big as Greenland – then, well, you’re probably an idiot.
GDP: The concept of gross domestic product (GDP) was invented in the 1930s and it has since become the most common measure of economic growth. But it’s 2026 now and we’re facing possible climate catastrophe. We need to stop worshipping growth and follow a better metric. What about flourishing?
