[jomtung]

It's surprising to me that you would describe the field of statistics as a separate 'sociological artifact', but then refer to the actual definition of the term when using the abbreviated word 'stats', as in your sentence ' I have no stats to back up this claim'.

Statistics are tallied numbers and represent actual measured values. The field of statistics is concerned with tallied numbers collected, probability is concerned with the likelihood of those numbers being produced under specific assumptions, and machine learning is a process that uses statistics to verify and adjust the probability model being used for study.

Those are all definitions used by mathematicians and statisticians (who are a subset of mathematicians), not 'sociological artifacts'. Things don't sound like heresy to a statistician unless he is arguing implicit versus explicit logic. That is regardless of how it feels when he walk into his department.

There is no need to prescribe artifacts' if we can just keep the correct definitions clear and not conflate them.