But what could there be, besides behaviors, desires, goals, or feelings?

I struggled with this question for many years.

It’s quite deep!

It took years of reading to solve it.

Here's some papers that helped me figure them out.

These are by Amartya Sen, an economist who won the Nobel prize.

These are by philosophy professors—Ruth Chang, Charles Taylor, and David Velleman.

In the the end, based on this reading, I came up with these values cards.

Imagine you're making a space for vulnerability, or an exploratory app for creativity. Or maybe you are expanding a network of farmers markets, and you want them to be good spaces for people to explore localism in food systems.

The cards drill down on a vague word like vulnerability, creativity, or localism. People care about distinct kinds of vulnerability, and you'll pick one or two to focus on in your project.

The values cards aren’t exactly about behavior. That’s good, because behavior can be forced, or manipulated. Because behavior isn’t what we really care about, it’s just a proxy for what we care about.

They’re about what comes right before behavior — what we do internally, during a choice. What we pay attention to. See, one key idea, that I got from my reading, is that values show up when we make choices. They show up in our attention. If you care about something, you’ll pay attention to it during a choice.

So, the center of each card tries to capture what a person pays attention to, and chooses by, when they have a source of meaning.

What we care about, is being able to make decisions in a certain way. We care about what we can attend to, and choose by, in an environment.

The idea of freedom, or choice, is a key part of what we care about. It’s kind of the opposite of manipulation. But the freedom we care about isn’t abstract — it’s the specific freedom, the freedom to attend to and choose along specific dimensions. The middle part of the values card lists those dimensions, that are part of a value.

That’s the central part of the values cards. And it deals with behavioral manipulation. But it’s not the whole story.

We still have the other problem, psychological manipulation. Psychological manipulation might still cause us to attend to things and choose in ways that wouldn’t otherwise matter to us. So, the values cards need to address this problem, too.

So, to review: You can use values cards to measure the meaningfulness of a space, while reducing the danger of manipulation. You can do this by checking three things.

If you do all three, your metric is much harder to manipulate.

So, that’s values cards. They define “a value” or “a sources of meaning” (we use these terms inter-changably) in these two parts, and give it a name.

To show the power of this, consider these two kinds of creativity.

Even though these are both kinds of creativity, they call for different designs.

Put Florencia in environment A, and she won't be able to pay attention to those long lasting curiosities, she won’t have a chance to do deep work.

And vice versa: put Bilal in environment B, and he won't be able to find someone to brainstorm with and do creative riffing.

That’s an important fact. The attentional paths that are written on these values cards let us differentiate one kind of creativity from another; one kind of vulnerability from another, and one kind of localism from another.

And they let us be rigorous about whether a kind of creativity (or whatever) is happening in our designs. It’s simple: for a value to really be happening, people must be attending to what’s on the card, and choosing by it.

If, in your design, people can attend to these particular types of things, and make their choices by them, congratulations—people are able to live by their value within the space you made.

So—having these cards helps you avoid fooling yourself, as you design.

So, imagine if the app store on your phone knew the kinds of spaces you were missing in your life.

For me, what if it knew I’m looking for physical exploration spaces, or intellectual community spaces? What if it could sort apps to help me be more fulfilled?

To pull this off, you’d want a database of the most common sources of meaning that go unfilled in people's lives. Even just a few hundred of them.

And you’d want to know a bit about my relationship to each source of meaning:

At first, you’d want to train this system with explicit feedback

Let's say I had such a recommender built into my phone. Earlier, it recommended this app—Matter—to me, because I wanted intellectual community. Later, it could ask for feedback about how that recommendation went.

It could ask: “oh, are you finding companions to share your interest? Are you finding research questions you're deeply curious about?” It checks in with me about whether Matter’s actually good for the source of meaning I have, based on what’s in the middle of the values card.

So, Apple can use this data to rank Matter, and to decide whether to recommend Matter or not. But it doesn’t have to stop there. We can use the same data to rank Apple’s recommender!

Here’s a kind of report card about how the App Store is doing for me, including all the time I’ve spend in recommended apps and whether they were meaningful. I can use this report to compare Apple’s recommender with others, for my sources of meaning. Is Apple better or worse than Facebook, at bring people meaningful lives?

What’s great about this, is the incentives it creates.

Once this stuff is measured, there’s a chance to align so much with human values.

If governments, tech stacks like iOS and Android, and markets were all accountable to life meaning, that would be a civilizational shift.

The centerpiece would be this review. At first it would need to be explicit. People would need to understand what this data is all about. Later, software will guess our sources of meaning and just have us confirm. Software will find evidence of us living our values, as we message and interact, rather than with an explicit review.