But you’re not learning that from a persona, you’re learning it from talking to 100 real people. You can put that into a persona if you like, but it won’t give you any new knowledge.
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It's very common for a new perspective on knowledge you already have to enable breakthroughs in deriving new knowledge from it. In particular, imagining a person rather than a statistical abstraction will tend to activate useful neural wetware that simulates other humans.
Agree 100%, but I don’t understand how that leads to personas. Just talk about real people instead and you can get all of these benefits.
Maybe if you can find the exact right real person who reflects the statistical reality you've already measured, and if you don't feel it's creepy to obsess over this one person in your target demographic, and you don't end up needing their consent to disseminate information about them. It's much easier and approximately as effective (more effective wouldn't surprise me) to make one up.
That is a bad practice with respect to customer privacy.
A persona is a heuristic model, that’s all. It seems you feel like it’s dehumanizing. Would it make you feel better if we called it “human behavior model 748263”? There is nothing inherently bad about saying “if you like video games, you likely own a gaming PC or a console”? What if you call that association “748263”? What if instead of that number you called it “Wendy”? Does any of this make any difference to you?