[JHonaker]

Agreed wholeheartedly. I have argued with the VP of our department about this paper quite a few times.

I feel like Breiman sets up a strawman that I've never encountered when I work with my colleagues that are trained in the statistics community. That doesn't mean it didn't exist 25 years ago when he wrote it. I concede that we are sometimes willing to make simplifying assumptions in order to state something particular, but it's almost like we've been culturally conditioned to steep everything we say with every caveat possible.

Whereas I am constantly having to point out the poor feedback we've had about some of the XGBoost models despite the fact that they're clearly the most "predictive" when evaluated naively.