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.