I don't think Andrew Ng would agree with your assertion. His Coursera ML class assumes little more than a basic high school math education, and at the start of the course, he teaches the very small subset of linear algebra required to understand his course materials.

I think what Andrew Ng would say is that without a rigorous statistical background, you will be limited in your ability to use ML, and you will certainly be more liable to blow your foot off by using it improperly. That being said, in a subset of cases, you may be able to achieve non-trivial insights through the techniques he teaches in the course.

So how I would rephrase your assertion is that a hacker can probably get a lot more out of ML techniques if they are willing to learn the math underlying them.