[cs702]

"...in an environment punctuated by slow, progressive changes followed by cataclistic changes in the opposite direction, individuals that track the enviromment better will overfit (and die). More inaccurate individuals will be the ones surviving long term."

Reading this made me think of the numerous financial firms in history that become very efficient at making money in a particular type of market environment, which inevitably changes suddenly in unexpected ways, causing those financial firms to blow up and maybe even start a financial crisis:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stock_market_crashes_a...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banking_crises

Society might be better off with financial firms that are "dumber!"

[pjmorris]

'When Genius Failed' is a terrific book about the ironically-named efficiency-focused 'Long Term Capital Management' hedge fund which was bailed out in the 1998 crisis.