Coco Krumme

Optimal Illusions by Coco Krumme

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS
-PRINT: © September 12, 2023; ‎978-0593331118; Riverhead Books; 256 pages; unabridged (Hardcover Info from Amazon.com)
-DIGITAL: © September 12, 2023; Riverhead Books; 978059333132; 250 pages; unabridged (Digital version info from Amazon.com)
- *AUDIO: © 11 September 2023; Books on Tape; 7 hours (approx..); unabridged (Audio info from Libby app.)

-FILM: No

SERIES: No.

CHARACTERS:
N/A

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: Perhaps I was searching for an economics book when this popped up and I decided to check it out and download. It wasn’t very long ago, but I have no memory of how this arrived on my virtual Libby shelf.
-ABOUT: The author describes a world built on the recommendations of computer models which assist in developing economic efficiencies toward an end of optimizing resources in the production of goods and services.
-OVERALL IMPRESSION: Coco has an impressive mathematical and scientific background, and a great vocabulary.
I get the sense that she herself developed (maybe still does) models for efficiency and optimal gain, so I don’t think she is anti-optimization (a concept I wasn’t familiar with until reading this), but perhaps a bit disillusioned, and certainly intent on explaining why we should consider the possibility that just because processes and procedures can be economically rewarding, doesn’t always mean the end result will be balanced or wholesome, in fact, I think she’s convinced that it OFTEN isn’t.
I enjoyed learning of her interviews with individuals as she asked about their experiences within their industries. Like the reluctant farmer, Bob, resisting the temptations of more lucrative practices that felt like betrayals to his values, until he eventually got swept up with the tide.
I felt I learned from her perspective of Las Vegas-style entertaining, railroad constructing, and more.
If I were to apply symbolism to the mood the book instilled, it would be the image on the Rider-Waite Tarot version of the 5 of cups where a wizened gray-haired figure cloaked in black stands gazing at three prone cups, their contents spilled; while two upright cups stand behind the figure, which I would say in this case would represent a nostalgic preference to ignore what’s been gained from the technology and science of optimization (the two standing cups) and focus on those slivers of humanity, spirituality, community spirit, and the like, that feel lost to the sands of time.
I came away mentally humming, “They Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot.”

AUTHOR:
Coco Krumme. From cocofolio-dot-com-slash-bio:
“I'm an applied mathematician and writer. My book OPTIMAL ILLUSIONS comes out in September.

I have a phd from MIT and spent time in academia and tech before starting Leeward Co, a consultancy that works with scientific r&d teams.

These days I live on a rural island where I run a craft distillery, make sculptures, and am learning to fly a small airplane. Occasionally I write about other topics, like why Silicon valley has no sense of humor. If you're looking for the S.V. Poetry Magnets, you can find those here. To get in touch about speaking or consulting, try leeward at cocofolio dot com.”

NARRATOR: Coco Krumme (see above)

GENRE: Non-fiction; economics; Technology; Psychology; Philosophy; Science; Business

LOCATIONS: (not all-inclusive)
Kentucky; Washington; New York; California

TIME FRAME: Contemporary and historical

SUBJECTS: (not all-inclusive)
Industry; Construction; Farming; GMO; Progress; Economics; Values; Buffalo; Optimization; Technology; Mathematical models

DEDICATION:
Not found

SAMPLE QUOTATION: Excerpt From “Introduction”
“In the middle of the field, the bulldozer pauses, and out pops its driver for a cigarette break. It’s a perfect September day in northern Kentucky: crisp, blue, free. A neighboring dozer carves ant-hill ruts through the construction site. In the distance are horse pastures and strip malls.
I weave past the open gate up one of the bulldozed roads until I reach the end of an ant rut. I park my small pickup truck, windows down, and let the dog out for a walk. The sun warms my face and my thoughts are lost in the dirt canvas, until suddenly, I feel the driver’s eyes fix on me. This isn’t any anthill to explore. He crushes out a cigarette and settles his gaze again in my direction, indifferent now, before turning back toward his rig and the work ahead.
Some say America’s too new a country to have ruins. I say, our ruins are just better hidden, under the sheen of the new.
In Athens, the Parthenon stands tall and crumbling, like a drive-in movie screen strung high above the tourists and café’ dwellers below. In Rome, the Colosseum anchors a swirling city, its cold stone presence cutting through the chatter of tour guides and the grease of chap pizza and the plastic trinkets made overseas. At Teotihuacan, you can clamber up each imposing pyramid and practically touch the scorching sky.
In America, by contrast, we hide our ruins in the desert or cart them off to Chinese scrapyards. After September 11, the remnants of the World Trade Center were wrapped like widows in black canvas , quietly disassembled, and sent abroad. An engineer named Cao Xianggen says to the Chicago Tribune, of the injured steel: “America can’t use it all, but China has a huge demand.”
Now I watch the bulldozer driver carve new ruins into his field. He’s helping build the Amazon Air Hub, a $1.5-billion site expected to host some one hundred cargo airplanes, three hundred trucks, and a robotic sort center sprawling over a million square feet. Slated to open in 2021, it’s currently a mess of construction equipment and barricades.”

RATING:
3 stars. It's perfectly well written and interesting. But I rarely give 5 star ratings, so my 4 stars are usually fairly riveting reads. 3 stars isn't bad, it just means it's not a subject that I get enthusiastic about.

STARTED-FINISHED
12/11/2023-12/14/2023… (meer)

I feel more than little misled by Coco Krumme’s Optimal Illusions, The False Promise of Optimization. From the title, I reasonably expected an analysis, backed by research, expert opinion and maybe some facts, showing how we’ve gone overboard with optimization and the dangers and the fallout from that. And then, maybe a projection of where this is leading to or will end up – two very different things. After all, Krumme is a PhD from MIT – a mathematician of the highest order. But what I got was a travelogue across the USA, visiting people off the grid to varying extents, or considering it. A farmer here, a baker there and so on. Her book is unfocused and meandering, flowery and technical, uneven and not very engaging.

Ever since the industrial revolution, we have been optimizing. We invented assembly lines, systems, systems analysts, robots, phone trees and No Child Left Behind, wherein schools that do not improve the score of even the developmentally disadvantaged will eventually be forced to close for such inability to optimize education. Optimization is, in other words, inhuman.

It would make for a good book. Just not this book.

This book is about a baker who grows his own wheat, tall and flavorful, unlike commercial wheat, which is short (to fit the combine) and intensely fecund (to optimize yield). Wheat has been not just domesticated, but optimized. It is also about a corn farmer. Corn is right up there too, optimized with Roundup-proof GM seed, polluting the soil and the waterways with optimized herbicides, insecticides and fertilizers. Agriculture today would be totally unrecognizable to farmers even from the previous century. For example, today’s farmers optimize their operations by playing the futures markets, because they have to. Farmers who don’t opt in are left with no ways to distribute their crops. It’s optimize or die in modern agriculture.

She tells of breakthroughs in optimizations like the mathematical process of predicting any process. She even spends lot of ink on Marie Kondo, famous for over-organizing her clients into unlivable strictures. We have made the world into a place where the top question is not about the benefits to the customer, “But how does it scale?”

Optimization never ends. We are never satisfied with the latest version of anything, and eagerly await the next iteration, be it a phone, a car or a house. The pressure is on industrial systems to deliver, and industrial systems put pressure on users to desire such processes. It is at best irrational.

In her best and most extreme example, she examines online dating from an optimization standpoint. The conclusion is that the ideal age to stop dating services is 27 (mathematically being 37% of the way through one’s 20s and 30s, she reports). If subscribers haven’t found a spouse by then, optimization says they likely won’t ever, and should settle for the next candidate who even barely exceeds the most decent past experience the service provided. That’s the extent to which optimization runs lives in the West. At least the west driven by the madness of Silicon Valley optimization.

It has become so crazy that Sam Altman, Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence mascot, thinks “optimization can help us escape the problems that optimization has wrought.”

Optimization is obviously how to get more out of time, out of life, out of money and out of the planet. And it is very much out of control. Mass production, planned obsolescence, helicopter parenting and insane consumer societies – none of which she examines – are signs of optimization out of control. Optimization means Man is the only animal whose waste is toxic to the planet. But Krumme doesn’t venture into any of these areas. The gaps are big enough to drive optimized trucks through.

Krumme’s own answer has been to move to a small island off the coast of Washington State. There she can enjoy the benefits of optimization she chooses, while not being swallowed up by it. From this base she takes transcontinental trains to commiserate with the likeminded. That’s the backbone of this book.

This kind of madness has always been around. Krumme gives the example of the sainted Gifford Pinchot, environmentalist supreme, who pushed for unheard of national parks and forests to a receptive Teddy Roosevelt and advised numerous later presidents in his long, famous and successful life. Yet he was all about efficiency and profitability. In 1912 he went on record as saying “The only proper basis for the protection of game birds, wild fowl and indeed all animals, is an economic one.”

This is why I say capitalism is to blame.

Capitalism is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Krumme never hits on the concept that optimization is a byproduct of capitalism. But as such, there is no stopping it. As long as there is an additional buck to be made, engineers, designers, mathematicians and entrepreneurs will try to optimize even further to grab it. About as close as she comes is when she says: “When we scale up algorithms, the acceleration can turn nonlinear.” OK, not so close. But I couldn’t believe I read that isolated thought among all the descriptions of countryside, diners and laborers, that I had to speed through because I wanted something, anything, to chew on.

The most cogent statement she makes comes near the end, when she says: “The metaphor of optimization is showing ruptures precisely because of the paradox at its core: the more we optimize, the less we’re able to do (and see) things any other way. Put differently, we can’t reconcile the shortcomings of a particular optimization within the framework of that optimization . . . and likewise: we can’t reconcile the shortcomings of the idea of optimization within the framework of optimization. Like the railroads, it’s a centripetal and unifying force.” It’s a totally jarring change from the travel narration, and will cause readers to go back and read the paragraph again. Which is not a great stylistic strategy.

But then it’s back to her dreamy island and the many ways it is still connected to the overoptimized mainland. For example, being on a remote island today has absolutely no effect on her ability to connect instantly on demand with anyone via phone or internet. It is selective optimization for Coco Krumme.

It is perhaps ironic if not over-obvious that this book is far from optimized.

David Wineberg… (meer)