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When I visited the laboratory of the Zeitgeist Research Institute recently, the most striking aspect was the rank aroma which reeked from a steaming cauldron.
Dr. Factor Fixx lifted the lid to examine the batch.
Inside were roots, surds, logarithms, integrals -- all
sorts of mathematical arcana. We always get this
terrible odor when we're cooking numbers,
he
apologized.
Cooking numbers?
I wondered.
He sighed. Some people call it
he explained. doctoring results
and others call it fudging,
At any
rate, the principle is quite simple.
At my puzzled look and wrinkled nose, Dr. Fixx stepped
toward a blackboard. It works this way. You give us the
result you wish to see, and we cook the numbers until we
get that result.
You mean that if I want a scientific-sounding proof
of a current notion, I come to you?
The scientist nodded. Precisely. We were the ones who
proved conclusively in 1978 that day-care children are the
happiest creatures under the sun. When Ronald Reagan said
trees were the leading cause of air pollution in 1980, we
cooked numbers about ketone emissions and showed that the
Chinese elm in your yard was at least as lethal as a tank
car of chlorine. Now, however, President Bush needs
evidence to support his claim that trees are good for the
atmosphere. Want to see our new data on oxygen
replenishment and global temperature stability?
I shook my head. I don't need you or George Bush to
tell me that I should like trees. What else are you up
to?
We continue to work on second-hand cigarette
smoke,
he confessed. We still have no causal data to
demonstrate that it is anything worse than an annoyance to
non-smokers. But any day now, we shall generate some
plausible numbers which demonstrate that it is a definite
health hazard to be within 50 yards of anyone who has
touched tobacco during the past fortnight. There is a
considerable demand for such numbers, and we aim to cash in
by meeting that demand first.
You guys seem fairly clever,
I complimented.
But didn't you get caught in the cholesterol campaign? I
know a mathematician who checked the numbers which were
supposed to demonstrate that some cholesterol-reducing drug
lengthened lifespans. He couldn't get a 50 percent
confidence level, let alone the 95 percent level claimed by
the American medical establishment.
Dr. Fixx frowned severely. Again, we must look at the
market forces. You must understand that a drug dealer is a
drug dealer, whether legitimate or illegitimate.
The illegitimate ones hope to get you addicted to an
expensive substance, so that you will be a source of steady
income for them. The legitimate pharmaceutical houses are
not all that different, except that they do not stand on
street corners.
Then what do they do?
I asked.
They hire me to cook numbers. With rigged statistics,
they can frighten 50 million American men into believing
that they are in immediate danger of heart attacks unless
they take expensive drugs to reduce their cholesterol
levels. Those scared men will each spend $75 on drugs each
month for the remainder of their lives. That comes to $45
billion a year. Now that is an impressive number, is it
not?
But you were just exposed,
I pointed out.
He shrugged. We can always cook some new numbers.
Then he ran to the cauldron, where a Bush request showed
that a balanced federal budget would definitely result from
cutting the capital-gains tax, and an NEA proposal
demonstrated that acid rain would vanish utterly as soon as
classroom sizes were reduced by 46 percent.
I planned to wait around and see the formal proof of how the Post's circulation would double if my pay were raised, but the smell started getting to me.
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