There is an ongoing war between taste and data. Between what is measurable and what matters. The promise of data is seductive: here are numbers, let them make decisions for you. Algorithms we do not understand interacting with, and reporting on, something we hope is reality.
Simple Picture
ELI5: imagine a crystal ball that shows you everything happening everywhere. The more you see, the more you think you understand. The more you think you understand, the more arrogant you become. Perfect information breeds the illusion of control — and the illusion of control is the enemy of caring.
A palantír from The Lord of the Rings gives its user a perfect view into every event, past and present. Such extensive knowledge heightens one’s sense of power and control, which leads to arrogance and overconfidence. The palantír does not make Denethor wise. It makes him brittle.
Core Claim
Caring creates a kind of internally felt compass to navigate an ungraspable reality. It favors action over explanation, because a more perfect description rarely serves the thing you care about.
This is the deep inversion: the person who cares acts before they can fully explain why, while the person who demands full explanation before acting often never acts at all. You may need to reframe reality in a way that is less fully accurate in order to take more potent action. An irrationally optimistic outlook may be more helpful in dealing with a stressful situation than a rationally pessimistic outlook — not because accuracy is unimportant, but because accuracy without orientation is paralysis.
The cat embodies this naturally. A cat does not need to understand the world in order to navigate it. It cares about specific things — warmth, territory, the particular human it has chosen — and that caring is sufficient compass. Humans insist on understanding first and caring second, which is why they philosophize and cats do not.
Finite Games, Infinite Games
The difference between controlling and caring maps cleanly onto the finite/infinite game distinction.
A finite game has known players, fixed rules, and a clear endpoint. You play to win. A parent playing a finite game with their child is parenting to a fixed destination: Harvard, Sheryl Sandberg, the dream the parent holds for the child. This may work great for one child. It might kill another. The difference lies in whether the parent cares more for the daughter or for the dream of the daughter.
An infinite game has no fixed endpoint. You play to keep playing. Parenting done well is an infinite game — the goal is not to win but to sustain a relationship where both people continue to grow. For the parent-child relationship to be healthy, there needs to be mutual trust that each will be involved as long as they are alive.
The finite game parent monitors outcomes. The infinite game parent monitors the relationship itself. The first produces achievement or rebellion. The second produces trust.
This distinction runs through every relationship in the garden:
- Boundaries are finite-game tools when used to control, infinite-game tools when used to maintain mutual respect
- Neediness is a finite game — performing for approval, keeping score, measuring whether the other person has delivered enough validation
- Assertiveness is the infinite-game orientation: confirming your own worth while maintaining the worth of others, which only works if you are not trying to reach a fixed destination
Being Right Is Rarely the Point
Once you notice how relationships actually work — that caring means seeing the world through another person’s eyes while retaining your own — you quickly realize that being right is rarely the most important thing to care about. The rigidity of rightness slowly gives way to a more nuanced understanding of the texture of relationships.
This is the same insight that makes emotional wisdom work: emotions are information, not problems to solve. The person who needs to be right about their partner’s feelings is playing a finite game with infinite-game material. They will win arguments and lose the relationship.
The locally-optimal trap applies here too. Being right feels good locally — it delivers the immediate satisfaction of intellectual dominance. But it is a small hill. The taller hill is the relationship that survives disagreement, and getting there requires descending from the summit of being correct.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “just follow your heart and ignore the data.”
The midwit take is “this is anti-intellectual romanticism — decisions should be evidence-based.”
The better take is that caring and analysis serve different functions, and caring must come first because it determines what the analysis is for. Data without caring is a palantír — it shows you everything and helps you with nothing. Caring without data is instinct — imprecise but oriented. The right order is: care first, then use data in service of what you care about. Most people reverse this and wonder why optimization feels empty.
Main Payoff
The Silicon Valley Tech Mom pushing her daughter toward Harvard is not a bad parent because she lacks data. She has too much data and not enough caring. She sees her daughter’s life as an optimization problem rather than an unfolding she gets to witness. The caring required to know the difference depends on seeing the world with her daughter’s eyes while retaining her own.
That dual vision — holding your own perspective while genuinely inhabiting another’s — is the real skill. It is what makes boundaries work (governing your own response while respecting another’s autonomy), what makes assertiveness possible (confirming both your worth and theirs), and what separates love from desire (seeing the actual person rather than the projection).
References:
- Venkatesh Rao, Caring and Reality, Ribbonfarm
- James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games