I just watched this last night, rewatching TNG after a couple years and remembered I loved this episode so jumped in here. What a lovely coincidence to see this meme today!

Also agreed - why did Data shut down Riker like that? Was Data so certain decompressing the shuttle bay wouldn't work?

It's a special case of the more general rule: right-wing free-market anyone is self-deluding.

It's interesting to note that in the three studies cited in the Wikipedia article, the plurality of the answers to the headline-questions studied were "yes"