A related mistake I made was to be impressed by the cleverness of the aphorism "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'." There may be a helpful distinction between scientific evidence and Bayesian evidence. But anecdotal evidence is evidence, and it ought to sway my beliefs.

The selection biases in anecdotes make them nearly useless for updating. A more correct version would be that you can update on the first anecdote, less on a similar second one, even less on a third, and so on. Once you have ten or so anecdotes pointing in the same direction, then extra anecdotes should have essentially no impact.

So yes, the plural of anecdote is not data. Their value does not scale in the same way.