Welcome to Money for the rest of us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works,

how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein. Today is episode

505. It's titled, Optimization, AI, and Opting Out with Coco Crummy. In this our final episode of the year,

I have a conversation with Coco Crummy

whose work I referenced this past May

in episode 480 on optimization.

In that episode, I mentioned Mervyn King,

former governor of the Bank of England,

wrote, as humans, we don't optimize. We cope. Yet there's a

great deal of optimization occurring that has brought incredible benefits to humans. There are also

costs. Cocoa Crummy describes herself as a writer, applied mathematician, and occasional filmmaker.

She earned a master's and PhD from MIT.

Her book, Optimal Illusions, The False Promise of Optimization, was published last year.

Her consulting business helps research teams with computational science and strategy in agriculture, climate science,

logistics, materials, and biosciences. She writes on her LinkedIn profile, I have some fancy

pants degrees from fancy schools, and I was a professor for a while, but I don't consider myself

a fancy person. These days, she writes, I mostly live in a small rural place where I get to

pretend to be a farmer. In our conversation, Coco and I discuss what is optimization? What are the

benefits and costs? We explore AI and where it overlaps with optimization. We consider the pros and cons of optimizing our lives and finally discuss the extreme challenge

of opting out.

I hope you enjoy this year-end episode.

We'll be back on January 8, 2025 with Episode 506.

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