Well, I certainly agree that many people use ML in this way. But to me it's just bad terminology. The thing that happens during ML -- the L part -- must be the

Well, I certainly agree that many people use ML in this way. But to me it's just bad terminology. The thing that happens during ML -- the L part -- must be the same as what happens during statistical learning. Many (sophisticated) ML algorithms are statistical in nature, so there is nothing there that stops simple stat-learning algorithms from being ML algorithms. And there is nothing in the terminology that says ML has to be sophisticated relative to stat learning.