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.