> Yet we turn around in our professional contexts and see numbers like “142,432 users gave this a ‘thumbs up’” and we forget everything we knew about our own individual experience with these systems.

The data people know this, the executives do not. Or rather, they choose to ignore it, because they prefer metrics be as simple as possible.

They even try to reduce numeric values to boolean ones. When you get asked on a survey to rate from "Very Unsatisfied" to "Very Satisfied", they often reduce that to a percentage count of people who answered the top 1 or 2 boxes.

I worked at a medical company where the CEO was very enthused with the idea of having large thumbs up and down buttons at the front desk, right in front of the staff. What worked for convincing him this was a bad idea was a story about staff at a retail store panicking because a child started banging on the thumbs down button. Customers got an email with thumbs up and down instead.