See here for Jeremy's comments to my comments. I agree with what he writes. The whole discussion reminds me of a comment made to me once by a statistician who generally works with engineers. He said that when he talks with people about statistical procedures, engineers focus on the algorithm being applied to the data, whereas statisticians are always thinking about the psychology of the person doing the analysis.
Engineers think about the method, statisticians think about psychology
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In my limited experience (and please correct me with counterexamples if I am wrong), this seems to be true of ML folk as well. I know you had an earlier post about how ML grad students seem to be smarter that statisticians, but they seem to apply that intelligence to developing fancy methods, rather than strong substantive explanations.