> many base assumptions made by e.g. statistics will not help you at all with neural networks

There is lately a lot of hate against classic statistics on HN. I don't know why. Does it help to understand why and how NNs work? Not yet. But saying that it is utterly useless and won't provide any useful insights in the future sounds to me like telling the young Steve Jobs that dropping out of college and taking calligraphy classes instead of is utterly useless. And still, I am writing this on an Apple product, which set the standards for digital typography...