How to be a statistician

How to be a statistician

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.

Jonathan Partington 1

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