Nate Breznau

Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Sure.

The original study got together 73 different research teams with 158 different researchers in those teams.

And we gave them the same data and same hypothesis.

And we wanted them to test the same research question.

And the research question was immigration reduces support for social welfare programs, social security programs.

And they came to all different results.

And, you know, from really strong positive effect, really strong negative effect and everything in between.

And that was pretty surprising in some ways, but in some ways not.

And that probably has to do with what I might call like two categories of variation.

And one of them is more like noise, stuff we don't know about.

And one of them is more like bias, stuff where we can look at

attributes of the researchers that might have caused those different results.

There's probably two good suggestions.

And one of them is that we as scientists could be more humble about what we're doing.

And if we have some findings we want to share with the public or with the government, we should be cautious about what we're recommending they do with that until many other researchers have also

looked at a similar, you know, done similar studies or also looked at the data.

So if we can see a consensus where a lot of researchers are coming to similar results, that's when we should start to think, okay, here we really have something.

Rather than relying on any one, because if you pulled any one result from our study, it's not very representative of the universe of results that a scientist might come to, any random scientist, if they were to study the topic.

Yeah, you kind of hit the nail on the head there.