Horizon Information Portal

e-branch

Home

My Account/Renew Loans

Find Magazine Articles & more

Optimal illusions : the false promise of optimization / Coco Krumme.

by Krumme, Coco.

View full image

Riverhead Books, 2023.

658.403015 K94o

Engineering economy -- United States.

Industrial efficiency.

Technology -- Social aspects -- United States.

Mathematical optimization.

United States -- Social life and culture.

9780593331118 (hc.)

243 p. ; 22 cm.

Coco Krumme is an applied mathematician and writer. After completing her doctorate at MIT and working in technology, she founded a scientific consultancy and moved into a cabin on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, where she now resides.

Includes bibliographical references.

"How optimization took over the world and the urgent case for a new approach. Optimization is the driving principle of our modern world. We now can manufacture, transport, and organize things more cheaply and faster than ever. Optimized models underlie everything from airline schedules to dating site matches. We strive for efficiency in our daily lives, obsessed with productivity and optimal performance. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsize cultural shape? And what is lost when efficiency is gained? Optimal Illusions traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America’s founding principles to its modern manifestations, found in colorful stories of oil tycoons, wildlife ecologists, Silicon Valley technologists, lifestyle gurus, sugar beet farmers, and poker players. Optimization is now deeply embedded in the technologies and assumptions that have come to comprise not only our material reality but what we make of it. Coco Krumme’s work in mathematical modeling has made her acutely aware of optimization’s overreach. Streamlined systems are less resilient and more at risk of failure. They limit our options and narrow our perspectives. The malaise of living in an optimized society can feel profoundly inhumane. Optimal Illusions exposes the sizable bargains we have made in the name of optimization and asks us to consider what comes next."--From publisher.

"“By embracing efficiency above all, we’ve crowded out what can’t be measured and optimized and allowed the metaphor of optimization to cannibalize other worldviews,” according to this muddled debut. Krumme, a mathematician and scientific consultant, aims to outline the shortcomings of the modern preoccupation with optimization but stumbles early in neglecting to define what she means by the term. This creates confusion later on when she traces the rise of optimization by lumping together thinly connected accounts of Isaac Newton’s efforts to break down natural forces into their constituent parts, mathematician Stanley Ulam’s innovations in computational methods while working on the Manhattan Project, and Marie Kondo’s gospel of decluttering. Stories about individuals affected by the pressures of optimization are similarly perplexing; for instance, Krumme details the travails of a North Dakota sugar-beet farmer reluctant to adopt GMO seeds, which are engineered to “optimize” crop yields, and suggests that their rise compromises farms’ “ability to adjust to setbacks” without explaining why that’s the case. The stories never quite cohere around a cogent thesis, and “optimization” comes to appear so broad as to be nearly meaningless, describing everything from online shoe retailer Zappos’s efforts to “optimize” customer satisfaction with their call center to the “optimization of buying ranches to restore bison.” This struggles to find the point."--Publishers Weekly.

Horizon Information Portal 3.24_8902M

© 2001-2013 SirsiDynix All rights reserved.

Horizon Information Portal