Kent Wallace different people have different learning styles and preferences. So its may not be accurate to say this won’t work. The author does not claim that people should never learn the Math behind ML (the click-bait title is unfortunate though). He is just offering another approach for people who want to get into this field. Even in programming world, I don’t think most people start by learning about Context Free Grammars , FSA, Turing Machines etc which is part of core theory behind programming languages. They start by writing simple programs while learning how computers works. I find this approach much similar and may work for some people.