That's what the saying means. "The plural of anecdote is (probably) not statistically significant data" is not very catchy. Imagine if you had to say "a rolling stone (most of the time) gathers no (or at least very little) moss."

Yeah, I understand the intent of the phrase, I just think it's a bad way of putting it.

By the way, I did enjoy the Optimism presentation. I didn't mean to take away from it with my nitpick.

Or else it's biased. It's easy to fool yourself with a large number of anecdotes (listening only to like-minded people, for example), but "data" implies some directed collection was done and some thought was given as to what you're actually sampling.