Mary Childs

You might shave.

You might take care of your body.

You might take care of yourself.

a bit of deodorant, you know, perfume, maybe if it's your thing.

You're going to make an effort to look prettier than you are usually.

The other person fully understand that this is a nice version of you.

We're fully aware of that, but I don't know about you much.

And perhaps it's not.

Or maybe you made a massive effort and usually you're a disaster.

You never clean nothing.

So when, you know, you go to the apartment, it's like, oh my goodness, this is your apartment?

So research is a bit like this.

So when I see a published paper, I know it's been, you know, it's beautiful.

It looks nice.

but there's an information asymmetry.

I don't know how dirty it is, actually.

Abel thought one thing that might help this problem was to make researchers care as much about the cleanliness of their data analysis as the significance of their results.

And to do that, he'd have to go full-on room raiders on people's published papers to shine a fluorescent spotlight on the backrooms of their research.

If you could take all of the data that somebody had gathered for a given paper and meticulously retrace their coding steps, you could see if it was possible to replicate their findings.

You could make sure there weren't any errors, conscious or unconscious, in what they'd done.