"This might seem abstract, but I've seen variations of this problem pop up in business and I've had difficult conversations with non-technical people as a result."

Does anyone have some real life examples? i cannot think of any off hand but would like to be able to cite a couple if someone says "So, what is this good for?".

Any time you start conditioning on something, i.e. selecting subsets of data to analyze. You can fool yourself quite often if you do something seemingly innocuous like select "everyone with at least one X" and compare expectations to what's true unconditionally (meaning not conditioning on anything, not "in all cases") with conditional computations.

"We noticed that our app reviews on TV, Watch, and VR suck, why could that be? Are the OSes on those platforms terrible? Are user expectations just super high? Can we ever make money on those platforms?"

"When you're on TV, you need to use a DPad to laboriously type in a review. Same with the watch and its tiny screen. When you're on VR, you're using a laser pointer. That makes the barrier to leaving a review very high. As a result, people only bother to leave reviews if they have particularly strong feelings. The strongest motivating emotion is anger. Ergo, we are getting a disproportionate number of reviews from people who are angry, and everyone that is happy is not going to bother leaving a review."

Same goes for many kinds of user feedback situations. The feedback you're measuring is P(user holds that opinion | user bothers to tell you that opinion). The denominator needs to be understood in order to evaluate that probability, but by definition, you don't have any data on people who don't bother to engage with you, unless you can measure their interaction in some other way (eg. usage data). This is why online reviews of many offline businesses skew negative; why businesses will often nag you to leave a review if you're satisfied; why corporate executives often overestimate employee satisfaction, particularly in prestigious businesses (anyone who is dissatisfied will leave and get a job elsewhere), and why Congress has such a low approval rating (by definition, you can't escape the laws enacted by Congress, so there is no "exit" option, and you get an accurate appraisal of what people really think).