I'm not sure it was intended to be read "Can't win? Don't try." An interesting corollary to that analogy is that some of the things humans built thousands of years ago are still standing... so it's possible some of our systems could also pass the test of time (they can be optimized more easily than a bridge).
he does point elsewhere that machine learning solutions must account for "long tail" data , so it seems to me he 's looking for perfect solutions that will never exist.
