&gt; he criticizes all of machine learning as simply unprincipled revival of nonparametric curve estimation<p>He&#x27;s right. &#x27;Machine learning&#x27; is just statistics with better, cleaner names for things. The underlying theory is the same.<p>(The commenter below says that &#x27;statistics explains, ML predicts&#x27;, but this isn&#x27;t really true. Both statistics and ML build models, whether you use these models for prediction or explanation is up to you.)<p>One problem is that the &#x27;statistics&#x27; as usually taught in a college course or explained in a textbook comes from a much earlier age, before supercomputers were available to the average man; in essence, it&#x27;s like a kind of machine learning as done by paper-and-pencil. In contrast, &#x27;ML&#x27; assumes from the start that computing resources will be available.