What happens when the relentless pursuit of optimization backfires? What ethical dilemmas and hidden complexities exist inside of this obsession? How does our fixation with efficiency and quantification come at the cost of essential human values and spontaneity?
Coco Krumme is an applied mathematician and the author of the book Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization, where she lays out how optimization has stealthily transformed from a technical tool into an all-encompassing philosophy driving various fields, from economics to personal decision-making.
Greg and Coco discuss the fundamental pillars of optimization: quantification, abstraction, and automation, and question their impact. Coco sheds light on whether optimization is avoidable, and they evaluate the ethical trade-offs, especially in crucial sectors like healthcare where lives hang in the balance. They also reflect on the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic with regards to optimization. Enjoy this engrossing conversation that ends up questioning the very fabric of modern living.
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
Looking at optimization as a game
13:57: There are ways to enjoy optimization. It's a game, and you can see progress, and I think that's something humans enjoy. We like seeing ourselves or seeing the world get better. I do think it's pathological at the kind of Silicon Valley elite level. You know, I think there are varying degrees to which these different people that you mentioned and, beyond, right, actually, to what extent that belief in optimization is, very deeply rooted versus an intellectual exercise of posturing to justify whatever investments they're making or whatever success they've had. It's a very curious thing. And I do feel like in the last however many years, I'd be curious what you think as well, but maybe five years or so, we've, as a general population have become more skeptical of those kinds of techno-utopian proclamations.
Does optimization cause unhappiness?
10:38: I think part of our modern unhappiness is that all we have is optimization, and we are able to question it. We are able to say, "Well, maybe it should be working better," and then where do we reach if we don't have that alternative of a cultural or religious mooring that's been passed on for generations?
Breaking optimization into a components
15:46: I break optimization into a few sorts of necessary requirements or components, and one of them is quantification, or, specifically, atomization of the world into seeing things in terms of self-same units that can be tallied up. The other two sorts of necessary requirements that I see are abstractions. In order to optimize, we need to be able to think in terms of models with these atomized units as building blocks. What structures are we building? The third is automation, which is popular, or it's a term on the tip of many tongues these days, but to optimize, we need to be able to scale those abstractions up in a kind of hands-off way, so I do think quantification and optimization are certainly related. You can quantify without optimizing, though, right? You could simply count things up without seeking to improve or make things better.
On navigating modern modernity
28:53: I do think that's the struggle that, as modern Westerners, we face for the next number of years. We are aware that some of these ways of thinking and these systems are failing, both in the material world and in our intellectual and spiritual world. We don't feel happy. We feel we're going too fast. We feel we've lost track of some of the important things, and I think the question that we face is: how do we continue to live in the modern world with its many conveniences and its many fruits of optimization, and at the same time expand our ways of seeing that world and of being in that world, and expand our belief systems and our way of knowing, to hopefully a place where we feel more at ease in it.
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