Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

Alexi Horowitz-Gazi.

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.

I think that's right.

Yeah.

We were there to meet a guy named Abel Brodeur.

Abel is 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.

Because ever since technology has made it easy to crunch data, we've been able to go back and check old research.

And turns out, it wasn't great.

Rerunning an old study today a lot of the time does not yield the same result.

The research no longer proves its conclusion.

And the same thing often happens when we reconduct whole experiments.

Altogether, these problems have become known as the replication crisis.

After a few minutes, we head into a big lecture hall where Abel takes center stage.

Abel starts didactically clapping like an elder millennial camp counselor and his audience joins in.

And I'm Mary Childs.

Over the past couple decades, the world of science has been stuck in an existential crisis over whether we know the things we think we know.

It started in psychology, spread to medicine and economics.

Now people across disciplines are trying to figure out how to solve it.