Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

So it's just the one cartel making the results?

Oh no, you found something.

Is that luck?

Would you call that luck?

They're going to keep investigating.

And depending on what they find, this paper is maybe not passing this phase, the robustness check phase.

Can you draw a big sweeping conclusion about the effectiveness of war on drugs from a change in just one cartel?

They suspect this paper will not hold up.

The other two teams, the group who discovered the missing numbers, the cartels group, they've gotten like a toxic golden ticket.

Now they'll get to write their report, polite and formal, but nonetheless kind of a bombshell, saying just how flawed the research is.

Next, Abel will write an email to the authors, a somewhat standardized note saying, hey, here's who we are and what we do.

We found some mistakes in your paper.

Would you like to respond?

He does not assume nefarious intentions, and the authors get an opportunity to try to fix the problem and prepare their formal response before anything goes public.

We asked Felix from the cartels group what this might mean for him as a more junior person, a person earlier in his career.

kind of throwing rocks towards the top of the profession.

He'd wanted to find something, and now he has.

And for the authors of that paper, getting that email?

This is Giacomo Battistone, a researcher at the Rockwell Foundation in Berlin and one of the four co-authors of the paper.

He says they were thrilled to have their coding results publicly validated.