Comment by derbOac

Arguments like this have been around for decades. I think it's important to keep in mind — critical even.

At the same time, as I've been forced to wrestle with it more in my work, I've increasingly felt that it's sort of empty and unhelpful. "Crud" does happen in patterns, like a kind of statistical cosmic background radiation — it's not meaningless. Sometimes it's important to understand it, and treating it as such gets no one anywhere. Sometimes the associations are difficult to explain easily when you try to pick it apart, and other times I think they're key to understanding uncontrolled confounds that should be controlled for.

As much as this background association is present too, it's not always there. Sometimes things do have zero association.

Also, trying to come up with a "meaningful" effect size that's not zero is pretty arbitrary and subjective.

There's probably more productive ways of framing the phenomenon.