Wright traces the allure of “model-free” methods to their objectivity. This has indeed been a holy grail for statisticians since day one—or since March 15, 1834, when the Statistical Society of London was founded. Its founding charter said that data were to receive priority in all cases over opinions and interpretations. Data are objective; opinions are subjective. This paradigm long predates Pearson. The struggle for objectivity—the idea of reasoning exclusively from data and experiment—has been part of the way that science has defined itself ever since Galileo.
