I see these dismissals as "it's just statistics" often, and I don't get where they come from. If anything maybe it's "just" stochastic gradient descent, but there is a distinct "learning" pareto ML that does not obviously follow out of statistics. You could argue it's just addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and root extraction too, but that is a pointless reduction that doesnt help understand what's going on.
Statistics isn't "just statistics." There is no "dismissal" of it. It's a hugely powerful tool. It can be used incredibly badly, and result in evil.
People have an idea what a statistical analysis is and basing decisions on it. Eg Gambling. That is what ML /is/. It's not some incredible computer brain thinking learning magic pixie dust. You know that. I know that. Everybody who knows what ML is knows that. It's a minute proportion of the world. This is the data we need to learn from.
See ML as distinct from stats all you like, go nuts. Take it up with Hinton, Wasserman, Murphy, Tibrishani & Hastie and so on. Your understanding is different from theirs which could well make your textbook a ground breaking best seller.
