Why We're Addicted to ‘Sh*tty Flow’

Why We're Addicted to ‘Sh*tty Flow’

From Plain English with Derek Thompson by The Ringer

March 31, 2026 · 49 min

About this episode

The episode discusses how modern metrics and quantification can hijack personal values, featuring insights from philosopher C. Thi Nguyen.

One of the themes we’ve circled in the last few weeks is the way that the modern world can hijack our values. This principle was recently articulated by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen in an episode called "How Metrics Make Us Miserable." Thi told us that he became a philosopher to answer the biggest questions in life but discovered, in grad school, that everybody around him mostly cared about numbers. Journals were ranked by status: numbers. The university departments were ranked by status: more numbers. Individual researchers had their own h-scores and other public quantifications of prestige: numbers, numbers, and numbers. And this cult of quantification completely took over his life. The internal value of “I want to answer the world’s deepest questions” becomes replaced by the external value of “make number go up.” What do we call this extraordinary force for bulldozing our values, and replacing them with something outside of us—synthetic, bureaucratic, inauthentic? Let’s call it the machine. If you become a philosopher to discover the meaning of life but only work on the papers that you think will end up in journals scored highly by a bureaucracy you’ll never see … that’s the…

People in this episode

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: C. Thi Nguyen

Topics covered

  • values
  • quantification
  • philosophy
  • machine
  • addiction

Keywords

  • addiction
  • values
  • metrics
  • philosophy
  • machine

More episodes of Plain English with Derek Thompson

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Plain English with Derek Thompson podcast page.