Not disagreeing with your second paragraph, but just wanted to point out that Machine Learning has matured way beyond the "unprincipled hacks" phase, and as was

Not disagreeing with your second paragraph, but just wanted to point out that Machine Learning has matured way beyond the "unprincipled hacks" phase, and as was correctly pointed out above, can be seen as a direction in applied statistics. If you look at a modern course in multivariate statistics, there's a significant overlap with ML (http://goo.gl/GTDUC http://goo.gl/GTDUC). I think people's expectation of a new scientific or engineering discipline to be "sexy" or "magic" is simply a sign of widespread ignorance of the field, so it's a good thing when something becomes less "magic" and more "real". I bet airplanes were "magic" until we learned how to fly them consistently and safely :)