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 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”