From: JRP1@phoenix.cambridge.ac.uk (Jonathan R. Partington)
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
Subject: How to be a Statistician (believed to be true)
Date: 12 Aug 90 10:30:03 GMT
A friend of a friend, who is a probabilist, made a bet that he
could write a publishable paper in Statistics within 24 hours.
He did this as follows: first of all he went to his filing
cabinet and found some unfinished work on probability
distributions which he’d given up because he couldn’t prove
anything. He then invented a ‘cover story’ involving sheep and
fruit trees, and wrote a Statistical paper on the subject,
including the results he couldn’t prove together with ‘heuristic’
arguments, i.e. hand-waving. He then sent it to a well-known
journal which shall remain nameless but for the sake of argument
we’ll call Biometrika.
Some time after he received an acceptance letter for his
content-free paper, with a comment from the editor that he hoped
the author would revise the paper to make it less theoretical. So
he had won his bet.
