I don't think Andrew Ng would agree with your assertion. His Coursera ML class assumes little more than a basic high school math education, and at the start of the course, he teaches the very small subset of linear algebra required to understand his course materials.
I think what Andrew Ng would say is that without a rigorous statistical background, you will be limited in your ability to use ML, and you will certainly be more liable to blow your foot off by using it improperly. That being said, in a subset of cases, you may be able to achieve non-trivial insights through the techniques he teaches in the course.
So how I would rephrase your assertion is that a hacker can probably get a lot more out of ML techniques if they are willing to learn the math underlying them.
> And at the start of the course, he teaches the very small subset of linear algebra required to understand his course materials.
I tried doing the ML course without any prior knowledge of Linear Algebra and dropped out after the first three weeks. In hindsight, I realized it wouldn't have been possible to appreciate how PCA works without understanding eigenvectors, how collaborative filtering is an elegant application of matrix factorization and so on.
But after I completed Strang's Linear Algebra course, the entire ML class was a breeze.
Sure! The course has a slow start. The first few lectures focus on the mechanics of matrix operations instead of starting with linear transformations, and compositions of linear transformation - the core ideas behind Linear Algebra. But after lecture 10, the course picks up pace.
I think what Andrew Ng would say is that without a rigorous statistical background, you will be limited in your ability to use ML, and you will certainly be more liable to blow your foot off by using it improperly. That being said, in a subset of cases, you may be able to achieve non-trivial insights through the techniques he teaches in the course.
So how I would rephrase your assertion is that a hacker can probably get a lot more out of ML techniques if they are willing to learn the math underlying them.