What is the Purpose of Statistical Modelling?

Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine, famously wrote (2008) that "[t]oday companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all." He went on to say, "We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the