> r² is not useful People want so badly to have an "objective" measure of truth that they can just pump data into and get a numeric result that "doesn't lie".

> r² is not useful People want so badly to have an "objective" measure of truth that they can just pump data into and get a numeric result that "doesn't lie". r², p < 0.05, χ2, etc. It's too far to say these numbers aren't useful at all -- they are -- but we're just never going to be able to avoid the difficult and subjective task of interpreting experimental results in their broader context and reconciling them with our pre-existing knowledge. I think this is why people are so opposed to anything Bayesian: we don't want to have to do that work, to have those arguments with each other about what we believed before the experiment and how strongly. But the more we try to be objective, the more vulnerable we are to false positives and spurious correlations.