Don't hate the replicator, hate the game

🎙️ The Speakers & Context

• The Format: Narrative-driven host discussion with on-site reporting and interviews.
• The Key Players:
  • Hosts: Alexei Horowitz-Ghazi and Mary Childs (NPR Planet Money), investigative journalists blending economics storytelling with fieldwork; credible for unpacking behavioral incentives in science.
  • Key Guest: Abel Brodeur, economics professor at University of Ottawa; credible as "Star Wars" paper author exposing p-hacking, founder of Institute for Replication, originator of Replication Games (50+ events, 300+ papers audited).
• The Vibe: Energetic and investigative, blending hackathon excitement with sober reckoning on science's trustworthiness.

🎣 The Executive Hook

• The "One Big Idea": Randomized surveillance via crowdsourced Replication Games—hackathon-style audits of published papers—creates a low-cost "IRS for academia" that shifts norms by raising the odds of detection for sloppy research, far more effectively than punishment threats. This enforces clean data/code practices without overhauling incentives.
• Why It Matters: Flawed social science underpins policy, investing, and strategy (e.g., smoking bans, drug wars); in an era of AI-driven data analysis, unreliable empirics amplify AI hallucination risks in decision-making, demanding verifiable knowledge for capital allocation.