Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

not really challenging their findings because they think the replicators misunderstood the basic hypothesis of their study.

They say they started with this idea that there was this one big new cartel in Mexico, Los Zetas, and it had been doing a lot of crimes, generating a lot of data points.

Here's another author, Marco Lemollier, a researcher at Bocconi University in Milan.

What the Montreal replicators did, in the opinion of the paper authors, was to remove the main part of the data set and then say the conclusion was broken.

You can do that, but why would you?

We looked at their paper.

And to be fair to the replicators, the original paper does not say explicitly, hey, it's just Los Edas we're focusing on.

The data from Los Edas is lumped in with several other new cartels.

So if the paper authors meant to study the behavior of just Lusitas, that was never quite spelled out.

These papers they're replicating have been published, meaning they got past journal referees, professional economists who are supposed to be gatekeeping the quality of what they publish.

Some of the top journals do check that the code runs.

They press play.

But in the government trust case, the journal referees apparently didn't catch that numbers were missing.

That when the paper said, oh, the documentation is in the replication package, it was pointing to nothing.

So the broader system is still broken, even after putting on more than 50 games and replicating about 300 papers.

Abel says the more games he can put on, the more the rest of the academic world will start to shift.

Because the evidence shows that people don't actually change their behavior based on the severity of the potential punishment, like losing their job or public shaming or whatever.

They change behavior based on the odds of enforcement, the odds of actually getting caught.

Just the idea that someone might walk through their apartment one day, that's enough of a threat to keep it clean.

Hey listeners, what are you doing on the evening of Monday, April 6th?