The philosopher who thinks we shouldn’t always follow the rules and that ‘screen time’

Are you worried about the amount of screen time your child indulges in?

Before you answer, listen to the American philosopher C. Thi Nguyen discussing his eight year-old son’s use of his tablet: ‘Sometimes he’s zoned out watching hypnotic YouTube videos about unpacking toys.

Locked in: Nguyen thinks the negativity around the term ‘screen time’ is reductive as children may be learning things while on a tablet

‘Sometimes he’s navigating through science videos about how black holes work . . . Sometimes he’s addicted to some dumb free-to-play game. . . The category “screen time” lumps all that stuff together.’

It’s an example of Nguyen’s central argument in this book: when you concentrate on a simplistic measure of something, you’re heading for trouble. And yet more often than not, simplistic measures are the only ones we have time for.

They can cause problems, for instance, ‘when a restaurant stops caring about making good food and starts caring about maximising its Yelp [a review website] ratings’.

An example of economist Charles Goodhart’s Law: ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’

Of course, sometimes we need hard and fast rules, even though they’re imperfect. The legal definition of ‘maturity’, when it comes to ­voting in elections, is ‘being 18 years old’.

Goals: Viewing life as something that has a score leaves you constantly wanting more

Plenty of people are far from mature at that age, and I’m sure, like me, you know adults whose right to vote fills you with doom. But as Nguyen points out, it would be ‘unworkable to park individual judges at voting booths and let them each make their own assessment about who’s mature enough to vote’.

But at the individual level, where you have much more information, you can use ­common sense.

A film might be rated PG-13, but Nguyen won’t necessarily stop his son from watching it: ‘I have a lot of detailed information about this particular movie and this particular kid.’

Even in his own life, Nguyen has seen how statistics can lead you astray. He once went on a diet to get fitter. But after he’d achieved that aim, he became obsessed with his weight as a ‘score’ in itself, and carried on losing weight despite not needing to.

This is the problem with a lot of health measures: ‘They typically target things like weight, BMI and lifespan. They generally don’t target things like joy.’

It’s the old joke about giving up drinking – it doesn’t make you live longer, it just feels that way.

Nguyen’s comments about lifespan should be required reading for everyone who thinks that the only thing that matters about a life is that it’s as long as possible.

There are also lots of real-world examples of how ­metrics can lead to madness, such as the rankings of American law schools.

One of the things taken into account is the rejection rate of applicants – if high, it shows that the school is elite. Once schools realised this, they started encouraging hopeless candidates to apply, simply to reject them.