Preach.

There are way too many people that conflate MSE or other abstract technical measurements of model performance like they actually represent the impact any model has on a problem. Even if we could somehow perfectly predict an actual realization instead of a conditional expectation that still forgets to ask the question of why we predicted that. Are we exploiting systemic biases, like historically racist policies? Almost definitely (unless we've consciously tried to adjust for them, and still we've probably done that incorrectly). I've become much less interested in models that basically just interpolate (very well I might add), and more in frameworks that attempt to answer why we see particular patterns.