The Plural of Anecdote is Data: A Relaunch

November 20, 2025

This is a first installment of a series that explores a path to answering the question: what does the future of science, medicine, and technology look like? In this installment I examine what we mean by examining what we mean by data, as it relates to evidence-based-medicine, knowledge making in science, and an approach to technology.

“The plural of anecdote is data,” was a wisecrack I heard as a med student on ICU rounds. The large medical team was dragging itself room to room, droning lab numbers and teaching tangents. This would all abruptly halt when we faced a challenging clinical impasse, usually 3 hours into rounds, caffeine fading, pagers shrieking. A difficult clinical case was a situation for which, despite following evidence-based medicine, there was no clear path. There was no established protocol, no hot-off-the-press phase 3 clinical trial to guide our action. The patient was instead a trial of 1: some unique combination of other health conditions, scar tissue, goals of care, and social circumstances. We were confronted with the biological and social complexity of a human body, that regularly humbled our dense veneer of protocols, statistics, and mechanistic explanations.

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Photo from: Merely a reminder—the world is unimaginably vast, life unbelievably weird. Huge tracts of the Amazon river basin are unmapped, layered with unseen biodiversity and secret cities,