Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of Pulling the Thread. Today I'm talking to Cocoa Krum, the author of

Optimal Illusions, the false promise of optimization. Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of Pulling the Thread.

On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we're here.

My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness

so that we might all collectively learn and grow.

Here is today's guest, Cocoa Crumb, on the dark side of optimization.

And the larger issue is that we start to see the world as something to be optimized.

So even if we were able to optimize, quote, unquote, for the right

things, right? Even if agriculture said, okay, we're going to optimize for all these things that

matter, we're still, you know, servants to this idea of efficiency. Cocoa Crum is an applied

mathematician and writer.

She got her doctorate at MIT and has spent time working on data modeling in Silicon

Valley, as well as some time living a bit more off the grid, on a remote island in the

Pacific Northwest that I used to visit as a child.

Through her work, Coco came to question how and why we've

become so obsessed with optimizing nearly every system in our country and every aspect of our own

lives. She wrote a book that explores the myriad ways we've optimized too many things, what we've

lost by allowing optimization to become our

denomination worldview, and what might be a more compelling and ultimately life-affirming

perspective or priority. That book is aptly titled Optimal Illusions, the False Promise of Optimization.

Today, we talk about the kind of optimization we're seeing playing out in our collective

right now.

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