[oliwarner]

That's definitely a viewpoint amongst other branches of mathematics. Statistics isn't too bad, but applied statistics is viewed as a crap shoot of confounding human factors, widely practised by charlatans trying to prove their brand of science by abusing numbers.

[screye]

Isn't all of machine learning, economics, industrial engineering and statistically social science a form of applied statistics ?

That's a lot of fields to dismiss by simply handwaving.

[oliwarner]

Yes. These are exactly the sorts of soft science a pure mathematician would snub.

It's not, I think, that they're without utility, it's that the science involved in discovery is often accidental or observational.