Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

like a big copy and paste error.

To Abel, this was disconcerting.

He could relax.

It turns out most of the papers were not terrible.

Even better, with that first event in Oslo, Abel had found a way to crowdsource this massive academic auditing project, essentially for free.

If he could host enough replication games every year, he just might be able to scare the social sciences into acting right.

So we are at a replication game in real life in Montreal.

Abel Brodeur says that the game part is a little bit of a branding exercise.

There are no winners or prizes.

It's more like an all-day hackathon.

After everyone claps their rendition of We Will Replicate You, the researchers start streaming out of the lecture hall.

And we run after them.

The groups are scattering into classrooms across the building to start digging into their papers.

Economics PhD student Jolene Hunt and her team are looking at a paper about education.

They're all education economists.

And so Jolene has sort of a pedagogical view of the day.

Rolling up their sleeves, getting down to the actual coding.

Because they're only going to have seven hours, each group has a little list of the things they've decided they're going to try to get through today.

There's one group led by a guy named Thibaut Dupre, who is sitting alert and ready to unpack a paper about pensions in different countries.

I've started with a group in the lecture hall huddled around their laptops.