The Danger of Keeping Score

Last Friday, the Washington state Attorney General sued Kalshi, the prediction market platform where users can place bets on real world events, such as the number of deportations this year or the winner of Survivor 50. Washington’s civil lawsuit is now one of twenty waged against Kalshi, and follows on the heels of Arizona’s Attorney General filing criminal charges against the platform earlier this month. Prediction markets generated almost $64 billion in trading volume last year, up 400% from 2024. And when the US and Israel initiated strikes on Iran in early February, Kalshi users took to the platform in droves, spending $54 million on “Ali Khamenei out as Supreme Leader?” during the first week of the war. 

Prediction markets are just an intensification of a process that’s been slowly transforming our relationship to our bodies, our careers, our hobbies, our lives – everything is now saturated with numbers, and we can’t stop counting them and tracking them and comparing them. But what do we lose out on when we become obsessed with numbers or lines moving up or down on a graph, when we turn aspects of real life into games? Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen turned to actual games, like Twister and The Mind, to root out the answer in his latest book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. For the midweek pod, host Micah Loewinger speaks to him about the dangers of scoring systems and metrics in the context of real life, why those same scoring systems are so freeing in games, and what the philosophy of games can reveal about the meaning of life.

 

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