Here's my take: 1. People want their formula to tell them things that are impossible to know objectively (like the probability that headline A is better than h

Here's my take: 1. People want their formula to tell them things that are impossible to know objectively (like the probability that headline A is better than headline B). 2. They want methods that are easy to use (just plug in some data and press play). 3. And they care more about getting the job done than doing the job right (going from no number to a decent number is more important than going from a decent number to the best number). I think the reason that frequentist statistics are popular is that they meet these three (misguided) desires. Frequentist statistics is full of numbers (like p values) that can easily be confused for the probabilities that people desire. People don't actually care that a p value of 0.05 does NOT mean that the null hypothesis has a 5% chance of being true. They just care that there's an easy objective number that justifies taking an action (like choosing one headline over another). (Of course, this is all my personal speculation.)