Don't hate the replicator, hate the game
2/27/202636 min
The world of science has been stuck in an existential crisis over whether we actually know the things we thought we knew. Re-running an old study today doesn't always yield the same result. Same with re-enacting old experiments. Collectively, this is known as the “replication crisis.”
Economist Abel Brodeur has come up with one way to help fix this crisis: he’s invented an internationally crowdsourced surveillance system, designed to keep social scientists honest. He calls it the “Replication Games.”
Further Listening:
- Fabricated data in research about honesty. You can't make this stuff up. Or, can you?
- The Experiment Experiment
- How Much Should We Trust Economics?
This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by James Sneed and Emma Peaslee, with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, and engineered by Ko Takasugi-Czernowin. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
[upbeat music] This is Planet Money from NPR.
Mary Childs· Host0:04
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi.
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi· Host0:08
Mary Childs.
Mary Childs· Host0:09
Yes. You and I took a little trip up to scenic Montreal, one of the jewels of French Canada, for a little Planet Money mission.
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi· Host0:16
Yes, we did, and even though it's a little bit sad that that mission did not entail joining the maple harvest or, you know, like, infiltrating a poutine cartel- Mm.
Mary Childs· Host0:26
Next time ...
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi· Host0:26
dare I say next time, it did have much bigger implications for anybody and everybody whose life is impacted by science, which I think is basically all of us.
Mary Childs· Host0:36
I think that's right, yeah. We were there to meet a guy named Abel Broder. Abel's this very energetic economics professor in his late 30s at the University of Ottawa, and we found him bounding around the halls of this modernist school building in downtown Montreal. He was getting ready to host an event he's become sort of famous for, something called the Replication Games.
Speaker 30:57
It's, uh, getting exciting now.
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi· Host0:59
How are you feeling?
Speaker 31:01
I'm, uh, feeling good. Uh, it- it's the beginning of the event, so this is the moment I'm full of energy and, uh, full of enthusiasm. In seven hours from now, it's gonna be a different conversation.
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi· Host1:10
Abel is gonna be tired in seven hours because at a replication game, he is running around between 16 teams of three to five people in a kind of hackathon. People will work all day to replicate recently published social science papers to reproduce the results and see if the findings hold up.
Mary Childs· Host1:28
Because ever since technology