Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

Freyal Lasued is a researcher at the University of Saskatchewan, and she's in a group of economists focused on agriculture with Shixia Wu from the University of Ottawa.

You want to find that the paper checks out.

Yes, you can think like that, yeah.

In terms of your personal incentives, would it be cooler to find like, oh no, this paper's messed up?

You're laughing so hard, why?

Do you know them?

No.

You just have sympathy for them.

Yeah, because we've all been in their shoes.

Okay, fair.

But we go up to another group, and they're kind of like...

Duh.

That's Felix Fosu, a postdoc at Queens University.

His group is digging into a paper about cartels in Mexico.

I tell him what the other researchers said, that maybe it isn't very nice to want to find something terribly wrong in someone else's research.

But it seems like, to Felix, I have now misunderstood things in the opposite direction.

Why?

So now each team takes the original code, copy and paste it, and basically hits enter to see if it runs.

Or another kind of mistake they might find, maybe the code runs, great, but it spits out a different answer than what the authors wrote.

Not so great.