> I’ve been working in a hedge fund as a quant dev for more than 10 years. Before that I worked in 3 banks.

I guess you know too much about it, then.

> “this seems to work, but we don’t really know why, so we probably shouldn’t use it”

The same could be said of human intelligence. With that attitude, you can just throw out machine learning altogether. Most models are not interpretable. It's too many variables. That's how the world works though, there are too many variables for you to ever understand cause and effect at any broader scale. That's especially true with finance, where models have relatively little predictive power anyway. I'm surprised to hear an "appeal to reason" coming out of that corner, of all places.