I enjoyed the article Hank. As someone working on developing data-driven machine learning systems for marketing purposes, it made me think twice about some of the conclusions I am able to jump to based only on correlation. Certainly, these methods are quite useful in my field and the other less precise social sciences. In the hard sciences, however, advancing theory without a model seems preposterous save perhaps for a supportive role in special cases.

EDIT: almost feels like a republic (model) vs. democracy (data) political discussion