Brad Feld

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The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data

Sep 29, 2007
Category Random

My long time friend and first business partner Dave Jilk sent me an email with the quote of the week in it – “The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data.”  Perfect – brilliant.  After responding that it would find the light of day in a future blog post, he respondedf that he tracked the attribution down to a guy named Frank Kotsonis (a pharmacologist), apparently in The Clinical Evaluation of a Food Additive: Assessment of Aspartame of which Kotsonis was an editor.

A little time poking around on Google uncovered a much more complex attribution issue summarized in the post The Matthew Effect.  I didn’t end up with a definitive attribution, but I increased my affection for this quote.