Book on the Power of Rating Systems: A Universal Language of Justification

Points systems, rankings and lists are omnipresent today. They can be used to represent the popularity of politicians, universities or restaurants. And compare your own fitness, diet or sleep with the values ​​of others. Not to mention the number of clicks on social media and the relevance derived from them.

In his book "The Score. How we stop playing other people's games", philosopher C. Thi Nguyen addresses the question of how such rankings work, how they have become one of the most formative tools of our time and why it is so important to understand how they work.

All of these evaluation criteria are based on metrics. A metric is a measurable value or function that can be used to show the distance between elements or the success of processes. According to Nguyen, metrics are based on the so-called four horsemen of bureaucracy: rules, scale, sharing and control. In his flowery language he describes her as a demanding deity who offers gifts but also brings limitations.

"Metrics put pressure on all of us to use them once we have them. They are the clear, common system of meaning, a universal language of justification," said the Utah philosophy professor. Their power is based on the fact that they are shared by everyone - which in turn requires “that they are stable and inflexible even on a large scale.”

He uses the world of games as a positive example. Both metrics and games are powerful technologies that each embody different values. The former “filled the world with radically different ways of acting.” The latter robbed the world of its “multiplicity of meanings” and reduced it to a “single, monolithic system of values.”

C. Thi Ngyuen: "The Score. How we stop playing other people's games". C.H. Beck, Munich 2026, 377 pages, 28 euros

Nguyen derives all of this knowledgeably, always supplemented by examples from his personal everyday life. Unfortunately, they are sometimes very extensive, which may be thanks to the publisher's editor, who, according to the author, "helped make this book sound less like academic noise and more like a human confession."

Speaking of human: The most honest sentences are found at the end. After 358 pages, Nguyen tells his readers that he is not sure “how to judge all these things.”