Ask HN: Is machine learning just glorified convex optimisation and statistics?

I was going through Prof Stephen Boyd's video lecture series on Convex Optimisation on youtube. I realised that it is basically what we call machine learning, popularly, with proper grounding in theory. Most machine learning courses do hand wavy explanations of the methods and teach step by step algorithms to work on data even in top schools. Why not teach proper theory based teaching like Boyd does? It will prevent practitioners from applying wrong methods to unsuitable datasets and arrive at false conclusions.