They haven't given up at all. And more importantly, they've developed a huge number of "if it looks good it is good" mathematical theorems. This means that und

They haven't given up at all. And more importantly, they've developed a huge number of "if it looks good it is good" mathematical theorems. This means that under many circumstances, you can build a model that satisfies certain abstract properties, test it, and have a high probability of generalizability. I.e. we've circumvented the "understanding" stage. In fact, I'd say that the core of machine learning (as opposed to merely statistics) is exactly this.