[carschno]

And because “science takes too long” (and is expensive, and tedious), people tend to fall back to pseudo-science. There is often no way to derive robust numbers from techniques like A/B testing, for instance because of confounding factors that are not measurable. Given that, I have regularly heard the argument that “these are the only numbers that we have”.

Relying on such numbers, however, is equivalent to falling back on intuition and gut feelings for decision-making (or worse), while believing that the decisions were based on numbers.