> The plural of anecdote is not data. Except it literally is. How do you think rare vaccine side effects have been discovered and recorded? By collecting thou

> The plural of anecdote is not data. Except it literally is. How do you think rare vaccine side effects have been discovered and recorded? By collecting thousands of "anecdotes" from individuals reporting anomalous symptoms. How do you think illicit drug harm is measured? They can't exactly pump people full of cocaine and ketamine in a lab to study overdose effects - you collect anecdotes (individual cases), catalog them, aggregate and adjust for sample bias. Anecdotes are individual, cherry-picked testimonies. When you collect enough of them you get a statistically significant data point. It may be biased based on how your data was collected but the same can be said for many scientific studies that turned out to be flawed in their data collection. As long as you are aware of what the possible bias is, you have data.