Wednesday, August 8, 2012

A Handy Guide

Although many of our supporters have no doubt already found this recent article extremely helpful we have decided to post about it here.  After all, at the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not helpful!  We do take issue with the labeling of this behavior as "fraud" as we prefer to call it "creative science," but the steps Ars Technica has published for publishing scientific papers without doing any "real" experiments are extremely well-written and should provide the student of propaganda with a good starting point for any endeavor.  We would like to add a few steps for our supporters:

11.  Never implicate the GPD.  It is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged to implicate organizations which do not share our values such as the New Company.  Implicating the GPD in your paper immediately raises the profile of the paper and increases the chance for scrutiny.
12.  Bully your readers into accepting your premises and conclusions.  Make them feel that if they don't agree with you they don't deserve to be in the field you are writing about.  The more confident you are about your data the fewer questions you will receive.
13.  Cite "sources" that are difficult to retrieve1.  The more effort involved in finding raw source material, the less likely people are to try.  Don't make your "sources" obviously fake, however, as that increases the likelihood someone will investigate.

We believe that these principles are useful in many disciplines and that most of our supporters will be able to lighten their workloads without reducing their output by adhering to these steps!

1.  Tom Gersbach and Federico Brinner, "Reducing the Likelihood of Being Labelled a Fabricator of Data", Massachusetts Journal of Propaganda and Related Sciences, June 1932.  Community Press, Boston, Massachusetts.


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