Bezos is making a subtle point here that I feel people are overlooking. 1. Anecdotes that you notice, by their nature, tend to come from reasonably sized group

Bezos is making a subtle point here that I feel people are overlooking. 1. Anecdotes that you notice, by their nature, tend to come from reasonably sized groups of people. 2. "Data" as the term is normally meant in business and government does not. It may originally consist of many individual data points that represent something about large groups of people, but by the time it reaches a decision maker it has been filtered through normally just one or two people who have selected it, normalized it, and analyzed it in various ways. In other words, "data" is often not being used with its dictionary definition of a raw CSV file but rather it means "analysis". And unfortunately the nature of data analysis is that not only is it easy to make genuine mistakes but it can also be very easily manipulated in all sorts of ways to present whatever the analyst wants to be true. Academic research is an especially prevalent form of this problem because people don't hesitate to claim they've made a "data" based decision then cite an academic paper that presents a model with some absurd assumptions, or where the model outputs aren't visibly connected to the paper's conclusions at all, or which shows signs of P-hacking, or where the dataset is unusably small and so on and so forth. Hence why I find myself agreeing with the other posters - if you find yourself strongly disagreeing with Jeff Bezos about something that seems to be within his domain, think twice.