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How to be a Statistician (believed to be true)

JRP1@phoenix.cambridge.ac.uk (Jonathan R. Partington)
(true, chuckle, science)

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.

(From the "Rest" of RHF)


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