“If you would consult, well, if you were to consult…umm,” said R.F.K. Jr.
Photo by Destiney Friday
In an effort to introduce the American youth to the new government-wide policy of “science shortcuts,” the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Education (DOE) will collaborate to phase out science fair programs in favor of newly-dubbed “correlation fairs”. In a press conference, President Trump explained, “We all know sci-uh…sciyuh — well, let’s see how we say that…science, is that okay? — isn’t all that. It’s not all that, let me tell ya [sic], folks. Look at those poor, poor scientists who think they have to ‘prove’ everything. They’re not gonna get published. Now my good friend R.F.K. Jr., he’s produced some beautiful, beautiful results. We all know Tylenol causes the autism because of his work, and it’s all fueled by this real good stuff called ‘correlation’.”
Dr. Bernese Lorma, professor of statistics at UC San Diego, explained that correlation is the extent to which two measurements change together. “If there is a high correlation, as one number increases, so does the other. Usually that means there’s some relationship between them, like how a child’s height increases along with their age.” She sighed and shook her head, continuing, “But correlation alone can never prove causation: both ice cream sales and shark attacks increase during the summer, but that doesn’t mean one causes the other!” Dr. Lorma joined thousands of other professors in writing letters of protest to the DOE, “flummoxed” at the prospect of misinforming children. So far, however, their only response has been a Xeet from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., containing a “crudely-drawn” graph of “my feelings” versus “time” with the caption: “Slope of 3 means mad :(”
The DOE hosted its first correlation fair, sponsored by SpaceX, at Del Norte High School in San Diego. Diverging from the traditional scientific method, official guidelines encouraged contestants to be “creative” with their data and “do what it takes” to prove their point. The DOE cited conventionally frowned-upon manipulation techniques such as p-hacking, cherrypicking, and sampling bias as “totally rad” and conducive to “getting good results quick.”
“Using all the data points is just un-American,” one official explained. “You need to pick and choose what you include — like a free market!”
Although the event was open to the public, including Ph. D.s and post-doctoral fellows, fourth-grader Byran Thomas took home the correlation fair’s grand prize of one million dollars after delivering what judges deemed a “stellar” presentation. In his project, Thomas sampled the self-proclaimed “smartness” of his friends and related it to their houses’ colors, producing a graph that looked “uncannily” like a smiling face. Thus, he concluded that intelligence in America follows a “positive” trend. Furthermore, Thomas “imagined” foreigners’ intelligence, related it to their country by alphabetical order, and produced a second graph depicting a frowning face, described as a “negative” trend by the accompanying caption written with dried pasta. DOE judges lauded the “visionary statistician’s” project as “a stunning display of patriotism!”
Despite their unanimous agreement, reactions to the judges’ decision were mixed. “Look, we hired a team of seventeen elite p-hackers to win this thing, and then lost to some kid with a scatterplot?!” fumed David Furough, who reported a p-value below 0.000000001 in his study linking AXE Body Spray inhalation to larger muscles. “I got an r-value of 1! This tot didn’t even cite correlation!” shouted Trina Chair, who used two datapoints to linearly relate the population of LGBTQ+ members to the crime rate. “I can’t say I understand the complex methodology Mr. Thomas used,” admitted head judge R.F.K. Jr., “but those graphs look pretty, and the conclusion seems watertight to me.”
Born of the verboten demicolon, Aidan stitches together phrases, appendages, worlds. He’s allegedly “connected things beyond your mortal comprehension” and plans to horizontally expand across the phylogenetic tree. Resulting from Virginia Woolf's "malign machinations," he has been banished to a lighthouse until he can create functional Icarian wings.
