Winning the bias-variance tradeoff - Julia Evans

Machine learning is a strange mix of math and weird heuristics. When I started studying machine learning, I was SO FRUSTRATED. Everything was "well it works in practice" and so little of it was math. I was a pure math major at the time, so arguments like "well it works in practice" made me REALLY MAD. I'd kind of given up on having a better theoretical understanding of machine learning.