Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Tade Souaiaia, a statistical geneticist at SUNY Downstate about his new preprint, Striking Departures from Polygenic Architecture in the Tails of Complex Traits. Souaiaia trained as a computational biologist at USC, but also has a background as a division I track and field athlete.

Razib and Souaiaia discuss what “genetic architecture” means, and consider what we're finding when we look at extreme trait values in characteristics along a normal distribution. Though traits like height or risk for type II diabetes can be thought of as represented by an idealized Gaussian distribution, real molecular and cellular processes still underlie their phenotypic expression. Souaiaia talks about how genomics has resulted in an influx of data and allowed statistical geneticists with a theoretical bent to actually test some of the models that underpin our understanding of traits and examine how models like mutation-selection balance might differ from what we’ve long expected. After wading through the depths of genetic abstraction and how it intersects with the new age of big data, Razib and Souaiaia talk about race and sports, and whether there might be differences between groups in athletic ability. Souaiaia argues that the underlying historical track record is too variable to draw firm conclusions, while Razib argues that there are theoretical reasons that one should expect differences between groups at the tails and even around the memes.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid. A native Pennsylvanian of Egyptian ethnic background, and Islamic faith, Hamid completed his Ph.D. in politics at Oxford University. He is an assistant professor at Fuller Seminary, co-host of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast and website, and now the author of his own Substack and a recent book, The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. Hamid is also the author of Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East and Rethinking Political Islam.

Hamid and Razib discuss the tail end of the war in Gaza, from the explosion of 10/7 and the wave of atrocities against Israelis surrounding the Palestinian enclave, to the brutal counter-attack that has resulted in tens of thousands of Gazan civilian deaths. While Hamid points to the deep structural issues that divide the two parties, and make final resolution of the conflict difficult, Razib highlights the many pitfalls of third parties becoming involved in such a highly polarized and fraught topic. They also discuss the growing identification of the global Left, including American progressives, with the Palestinian cause, the difficulties of grappling with and containing anti-Semitism within the movement. Though Israel’s counter-offensive is finally reaching a denouement, Hamid strikes a fundamentally pessimistic note about long-term possibilities.

Then they pivot to domestic politics, and recent cultural trends that culminated in a Trump victory in the 2024 USelection, and the alienation of many nonwhites in the Democratic coalition from the hegemony of woke cultural elites. Hamid reiterates his long-standing critiques of racial identitarianism on the Left, and the irony that the progressive awareness of racial minorities only tends to extend to them when these minorities cosign woke nostrums. In contrast to the seemingly interminable nature of the conflict in the Middle East, Razib and Hamid both see hope for a path forward with reduced racial polarization and a reorientation of politics around substantive material interests rather than symbolic racial or ethnic categories.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Conn Carroll, the author of Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy. Caroll is currently an editor for the Washington Examiner, but previously he was the communications director for Senator Mike Lee of Utah, an assistant director at the Heritage Foundation, White House correspondent for Townhall.com and a reporter at National Journal. Carroll wrote Sex and the Citizen in response to what he felt was misleading and biased reporting in the mainstream media on the origins and implications of marriage and monogamy.

Razib asks Carroll how he refutes the ideas presented in Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn, which argues that prehistoric humans were non-monogamous. Carroll outlines the current mainstream thinking in evolutionary anthropology and primatology, and all the biological reasons that indicate that Homo sapiens is far more monogamous than our common chimpanzee and gorilla cousins, most clearly in our reduced sexual dimorphism.

But while our hunter-gatherer past was defined by monogamy, Sex and the Citizen argues that the rise of agriculture resulted in the explosion of polygamy, as high status males in societies defined by incredible inequality began to monopolize access to women, culminating in the explosion of Y chromosomal “star phylogenies,” where supermale lineages exploded all over Eurasian 4,000 years ago. Carroll then explains that the Romans and Greeks took steps toward enforcing monogamy as a legal institution, and Christianity introduced the idea of sexual fidelity upon men. After Christianity popularized egalitarian monogamous marriage, Sex and the Citizen follows in Joe Henrich’s wake in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Carroll discusses the Catholic Church’s strict policies on incest and adoption, which destroyed the power of elite related clans in the West, and hastened the emergence of the Western European marriage norm of independent and separate nuclear families, rather than extended families as the primary unit of kinship in society.

In the second half of Sex and the Citizen Carroll addresses the social history and policy changes in relation to marriage in the US. While Western European societies took a significant step away from familialism, Carroll explains that American marriage was even more individualistic and radical, as nuclear families spread out to the frontier, away from their extended kin networks. He also contextualizes the rise of the 1950’s nuclear family, which some scholars have argued was an aberration in American history. Carroll argues that actually it was an extension of earlier American norms, but the rise of the wage-based capitalist economy allowed for couples to set up separate households earlier in their lives. Carroll concludes the discussion outlining the 1970’s policy changes in welfare provision that discouraged marriage, noting the decline of the institution across American society over the last 60 years, and how government policy might reverse it.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib has a wide-ranging conversation with Dan Hess, the man behind the More Births account on social media. An engineer with a large family in the DC area, Hess’ essays on topics like Israelis’ high birth rate have gained the attention of X, with an account that has come from a few hundred followers to more than 30,000 in 2 years.

Razib and Hess first review the birth-rate collapse seen worldwide in the past two decades. They discuss the relatively abrupt cultural pivot that has occurred since the turn of the century, with the end of the “overpopulation” narrative typified by Paul Erhlich’s Population Bomb, the rise of the “birth dearth” and the natalist movement. They talk about the most extreme cases of low total fertility rates (TFR) in Europe and East Asia, but also the decline in societies like the US, Latin America and the Middle East. Hess addresses both possible causes and possible solutions. They also discuss historical and demographic factors that impact fertility; for example, which religions have been the most pro-natalist? Hess also puts a particular focus on South Korea, the world’s most extreme case of a sharp decrease, with a TFR of about 0.70 children per woman (vs. 2.1 replacement), as well as exceptions to the rule like Haredi Jews and the Amish. Finally, Razib and Hess tackle why we should care about slower population growth in this century, from dependency ratios to the impact on cultural vitality.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Brian Chau, who writes at the From the New World Substack. A graduate of the University of Waterloo and former software engineer with a background in pure mathematics, today Chau is executive director of the Alliance for the Future, a think tank that believes artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better.

Chau addresses the great “doomer vs. anti-doomer” debate, and argues for an anti-catastrosophist position. He also makes the case that increasing scaling has started to hit diminishing returns, and the expectation that artificial intelligence will continue to gain power purely through throwing more resources at the same problems. Then, they discuss the revolutionary impact of the recent advances DeepSeek has made in China (an issue he addresses on his Substack). Chau breaks down the technological nuts and bolts, as well as geopolitical and economic consequences.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, third-time guest John Hawks returns after two years to discuss what we’ve learned in paleoanthropology since he and Razib last talked. Hawks obtained his PhD under Milford H. Wolpoff, and is currently a professor in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Hawks has also co-authored Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story and Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins with Lee Berger.

Razib first presses Hawks on what we know about archaic human admixture into modern populations, and particularly what we’ve learned about Denisovans. They discuss how many Denisovan populations there were, how many Denisovan fossil remains we have, and why it has taken so long for researchers to assign a species name to this lineage of humans. Hawks also address the puzzle of the phenomenon of why there are at least two pygmy hominin populations in Southeast Asia. Perhaps humans too are subject to island dwarfism like many other mammals? Also, Razib wonders why Southeast Asia was home to such a startling variety of humans at once prior to the arrival of modern populations. They discuss all of this in light of the framework of Out-of-Africa, the recent spread of anatomically modern humans outside of Africa. Razib questions how robust this model is today given our understanding of modern humans’ extensive and repeated interactions with both Neanderthals and Denisovans. Finally, Hawks covers some controversies over fossils being sent into space that roiled the archaeological world last year.

Three years ago David Mittelman came on Unsupervised Learning to talk about emerging possibilities on the frontiers of genomics, and his new startup at the time, Othram. Since then, Othram’s work has been featured widely in the media, including in a Law & Order episode, and the firm has solved thousands of unsolved cases, with nearly 500 public. For over a decade, Mittelman has been at the forefront of private-sector genomics research. He trained at Baylor College of Medicine and was previously faculty at Virginia Tech.

Razib and Mittelman discuss the changes that the rapid pace of genomic technology has driven in the field of genetics, from the days a $3 billion dollar draft human genome in the year 2000 to readily available $200 consumer genomes in 2024. One consequence of this change has been genetics’ transformation into information science, and the dual necessities of increased data storage and more powerful, incisive data analysis. Genomics made information acquisition and analysis so easy across the research community that it allowed for the pooling of results and discoveries in big databases. This has pulled genetics out of the basic science lab and allowed it to expand into an enterprise with a consumer dimension.

Mittelman also discusses the improvements and advances in DNA extraction and analysis techniques that allow companies like his to now glean insights from decades-old samples, with bench sciences operating synergistically with computational biology. Razib and Mittelman talk about how he has helped solve hundreds of cold cases with new technology, in particular, at the intersection between new forensic techniques and both whole-genome sequencing and public genetic databases. They also discuss the future of genetics, and how it might touch our lives through healthcare and other domains, passing from inference to fields like genetic engineering

On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning reviews what we know about Indo-Europeans as 2024 comes to a close. This is prompted by a new preprint Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages, which finally establishes that populations in Northern and Southwestern Europe derived from a different steppe-origin population than the Greeks and Ilyrians of the Balkans, as well as Armenians. Razib talks about how ancient DNA is resolving long-standing disputes in historical linguistics, and coming down on the side of very particular sets of hypotheses. He discusses Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, and its models about the origins of Indo-European languages, and how they have been falsified by paleogenomics. Razib also steps through the relationship of particular Indo-European groups to ancestral archaeological cultures like the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker and Catacomb Cultures. He also talks about the connections between charioteers and the early Mycenaeans, and looks at Robert Drews’ ideas in Coming of the Greeks. Finally, he addresses outliers in the ancient DNA data that indicate connections between locales as disparate as Scandinavia and Cyprus 4,000 years ago.

This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Megan McArdle, author of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success and Washington Post columnist and op-ed board member. McArdle was raised in New York City and attended Riverdale Country School. She obtained an undergraduate degree in English from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Chicago. A pioneering blogger based out of New York City and covering the site of the WTC in the wake of 9/11, McArdle went on to work at The Economist, The Atlantic and Newsweek.

In this episode, the discussion largely focuses on McArdle’s research about the cultural history of food and cooking in the US. But first they discuss the economic implications of Donald Trump’s election, and the domestic consequences shifting toward a tariff-heavy trade regime. McArdle lays out the case that a massive tariff would have the same impact as a tax, not to mention the broad disruptive economic effects on large companies’ supply chains.

Then they move on to the changes in American cuisine over the last few centuries, and the shifts driven by technology and innovation. McArdle points out that in the 19th century, gelatin dessert was a luxury and an exotic treat because it was labor intensive to prepare. But by the middle of the 20th century industrial-scale food processing made gelatin, in particular Jell-o, a cheap commodity, and it became associated with the lower classes. Similarly, before factory farming, chicken and eggs were more expensive than red meat, and thus viewed as high-end ingredient (whereas today, chicken is far cheaper than beef). Finally Razib and McArdle talk about how the plentitude of food available in the 21st century contributes to the obesity epidemic that has only ceased its relentless expansion with the advent of Ozempic.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib catches up with Nikolai Yakovenko about the state of AI at the end of 2024. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player,and research scientist at Google, Twitter and Nvidia. With a decade in computer science, Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that has given rise to multi-billion dollar companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity and hundreds of smaller startups. Currently, he is the CEO of DeepNewz, an AI-driven news startup that leverages OpenAI’s latest model. Full disclosure: Razib actively uses and recommends the service and is an advisor to the company. 

Razib and Yakovenko first review what makes the last few years special, the rise of large-language-models on top of neural network architecture of transformers. Yakovenkoi discusses how far they’ve come since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in the fall of 2022, and how people have been using the underlying technology to develop applications atop it. Despite predictions of mass unemployment, Razib points out that two years later America is at full employment, and only niche fields like translation have been impacted. In contrast, Yakovenko points out that most software developers use artificial intelligence in some form to aid in their daily engineering work, noting the possibility that the AI revolution is integrating itself seamlessly as a utility for preexistent jobs. They also discuss the fact that though AI is a booming field, only one brand-name company has so far emerged in the industry, OpenAI. Though they agree that the current hype cycle is now abating, it is clear that the major investments in the field like data centers will continue from major players as AI-driven applications like self-driving cars become more and more mainstream.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Yasha Mounk. The founder of Persuasion, a contributor to The Atlantic and a professor at Johns Hopkins, Mounk now has his own Substack, where he hosts his weekly column and podcast. He is the author of The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It and The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. 

Razib and Mounk first discuss Mounk’s immediate reaction to the 2024 election, and how the Democrats might pick up the pieces going forward. Mounk believes that the argument in his book The Identity Trap, neatly captures many of the problems for the party. Democrats leaned in on the inevitably of racial polarization in an age of progressive depolarization. Razib also asks Mounk for his retrospective on the COVID-19 epidemic, in which he was a commentator who argued in The Atlantic for more stringent habits and then later, for an opening up. They also discuss how the Public Health establishment COVID interventions threw the whole field into disrepute, and what it tells us about the nature of expertise.

Then Razib asks Mounk about European nations and their future. In particular, whether their low productivity and fertility rates combined with mass migration doom them to a future of irrelevance and national dissolution. Mounk highlights the unfortunate case of the UK in particular, though he notes that his home nation of Germany is finding itself in a precarious situation with China competing with its manufacturers and Russia cutting off its gas supply. Finally, Razib closes by asking Mounk whether he is still as worried about American democracy in the wake of the 2024 Trump win as he was in 2016.

Today Razib talks to Russian commentator and transhumanist Anatoly Karlin. Karlin has a BA in political economy from U C Berkeley. For most of the 21st century he had positioned himself as part of the right wing of the transhumanist movement. He returned to Russia after living in California’s Bay Area for several years, and from there he promoted a nationalistic vision in opposition to American military and cultural power. With the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he joined a chorus of Russian warbloggers cheering on the inevitable conquest.

And then, like Richard Hanania, he did an about-face on the Russian invasion, reversing many of his views. Today Karlin is a digital nomad, and aligns firmly with American cultural and technological progressivism. He endorsed Kamala Harris and promotes what he terms a “Biosingularity.” His Substack is  “Elite Human Capital,” a term popularized by Hanania. Arguably Karlin has gone further than Hanania in endorsing the new American global order, underpinned both by the US’s technological and cultural dominance.

Razib and Karlin talk about how he came to invert so many of his views, while at the same time remaining fundamentally committed to the transhumanist project, like combating aging. They discuss the contrast between Russia and the US, and how Karlin came to see Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and stand against the West as folly. Karlin also discusses his peripatetic lifestyle,  the new friends made and those lost due to his conversion to what he would have previously called “globalism.”

On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib covers the archaeology, genetics and history of the horse. Dogs may be man’s best friend, but for thousands of years horses were humanity’s most valuable domesticate. While pigs, cattle and goat were essential elements of the world’s subsistence economies, the horse in its military roles was a luxury good, with Chinese emperors sending delegations to Central Asia in search of “heavenly steeds.”

But while dogs have been humanity’s sidekick for at least 20,000 years, and cattle and caprids for about 10,000 years, the horse is a relatively new addition, tamed on the Central Asia steppe only some 5,500 years ago. But despite their late entrance, horses quickly proved economically critical, opening up trade routes, increasing farming productivity and remaining weapons of war down until the last futile Polish cavalry charges in 1939 against invading Nazis. The horse’s role as a loyal steed was not inevitable; repeat attempts to domesticate tropical zebras have failed, while most other Eurasian megafauna, from moose to elephants, remain wild.

The horse is part of the “secondary products revolution,” with high-fat milk and manes that can be refashioned to adorn human helmets, but just as importantly it was a pre-modern information technology revolution. Mongolian cavalry-messengers were able to cut a year-long trek across Eurasia down to a month. And between about 300 AD and 1500 AD, mounted cavalry dominated the Eurasian continent, driving the emergence of new empires and hastening the collapse of old ones. Since its domestication on the Pontic steppe in 2500 BC, which may have saved the species from extinction, the horse has played a critical part in world history, only really finally passing into obsolescence on the farm, the road and the battlefield in the past century and a half.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to returning guest Wilfred Reilly about his new book, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricula. Reilly holds a Ph.D. in political science from Southern Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Illinois. Raised in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, he worked in the private sector before his career in academia, including stints as a political canvasser, real estate investor and a corporate sales executive. He is also the author of Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can't Talk About] and Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War. His writing appears in a wide array of publications like Commentary, National Review and Quillette. 

Razib and Reilly tackle the reality that over the last few decades the American education system has reoriented itself to teach values by slanting  a neutral historical narrative not specific to a particular viewpoint in the direction of what is  arguably distortion and misinformation. Perhaps the most egregious case of this is the narrative about slavery, making the institution a uniquely American sin when the reality is that until the 19th century it was a widespread practice across almost all societies. In fact, as Reilly points out, it was the West, and in particular Britain, that ended the practice across much of the world. An aspect of counterfactually reorienting the historical narrative for didactic purposes is that many educators have reinvented peoples and places to serve their own idealism; Native Americans for example have become repurposed into premodern environmentalist activists, even though their arrival in the New World over 10,000 years ago was indisputably associated with megafaunal extinction. Reilly shows that this pattern of reinterpreting and shading the past applies even to events within the lifetimes of the living. The various retellings of the “Red Scare” periods of American history after World War I and World War II obfuscate the reality that the US in the 20th century did have a Communist movement that infiltrated the professions and even the diplomatic corps; Joe McCarthy’s excesses seem to have ended up justifying amnesia about a global political movement that transformed much of the world and had very real aims to take over the USA.

Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me highlights that current attempts to retell history are not actually even liberal, but simply radical, and reflect the capture of education schools by Leftist activists since the 1970s. Rather than equipping children for the modern economy and expanding their understanding of the world, the regnant generation of educational practitioners seems intent on creating a cadre of 21st century radicals whose vague view of the past is rooted in ideology rather than any observable reality.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes Leighton Akira Woodhouse back to the podcast. Woodhouse is a freelance journalist and a documentary filmmaker, currently based in Oakland, California. He grew up in Berkeley, and was a doctoral student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. After leaving academia he contributed to outlets like The Intercept and The Nation, before starting his own Substack, Social Studies, as well as working with Michael Shellenberger. He also has a new podcast with Lee Fang, Le Pod.

Woodhouse and Razib discuss the broader issue of the necessity of order in cities, how important cities are to American economic dynamism, and how the problems of cities impact us all. One of Woodhouse’s beats has been crime and public disorder, and living in the Bay Area he has been unwitting witness to some of the most flagrant dysfunction of the current era. He outlines ‌the culpability of the judicial system in the rise of petty crime and details organized crime’s opportunistic manipulation of the system. 

Razib inquires about the political elite’s role in fostering disorder, in particular the policies and views of the mayor of Oakland and the Alameda County district attorney. They address the rise of the movement against law and order on the West coast, its connection to social libertarianism, and how that differs from East-coast big city liberalism. Woodhouse believes that the West coast’s homelessness crisis emerges in particular from its unique political configuration accelerated by a judicial system that aids and abets social libertarianism that is operationally pro-crime. Finally, they discuss the possibility that the 2024 elections will throw out of office many of the mayors and district attorneys brought in in the last few years on a plan of social justice activism.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Lyman Stone, a soon to be PhD in sociology from McGill University specializing in population dynamics. Stone runs the Pro-natalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, and has had appointments at AEI, and has written for The Atlantic and The New York Times. Well known for his social media presence, Stone is a published academic who has explored COVID policies, religion and divorce rates. Stone has previously been on Unsupervised Learning to discuss his work on religion, but this episode they shiftto his bread and butter: demographics and the preconditions for a pro-natalist society.

First, Razib and Stone discuss the variables behind the fertility crash in the USA since 2008, and Stone debunks the notion that it is driven purely by decline in teen births. Despite the reality that teen births have dropped, disproportionately among Hispanics, Stone notes that since 2008 there has been an increase in both the age of first birth and age of marriage, resulting in reduced lifetime fertility. Stone also addresses worldwide patterns, and notes that aside from Niger almost the whole of Africa seems to have been impacted by the demographic transition that is leading to reduced fertility on other continents. He does note that the gap between the number of children women want, and the number they have, is particularly large in Africa. Razib and Stone also discuss the fiscal/monetary rationales for reduced fertility, as well as social and cultural changes. They also discuss the genetics and heritability of pro-natal dispositions, concluding that the changes we see in total fertility rate are driven by cultural change.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to the pseudonymous commentator “Peachy Keenan.” A native of Los Angeles with an Ivy League education, Keenan worked in entertainment before detouring into punditry, writing for the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind, appearing on Fox News and penning Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War.

Razib and Keenan discuss her peripatetic and unique journey from a relatively apolitical member of America’s liberal professional managerial class to a conservative Catholic housewife with a large family. Keenan talks about her ability to connect with audiences of all stripes despite her partisan leanings as the product of her cosmopolitan upbringing among coastal elites. Though in her values and practices she lives the life of the “domestic extremist,” she still retains an aesthetic appreciation of the broader culture in which she grew up. Domestic Extremist is to a great extent a roadmap from where she was, to where she is. Keenan offers a sort of  primer on how to change the “factory settings” for the American professional class, proposing traditional family life as an exit out of the endless rat race.

They also discuss the reality that the modern conservative culture falls short of produce any art for its own sake, at most putting out fare that ranges from  overly didactic films produced by the Daily Wire to the cringe-inducing Christian film industry. Keenan emphasizes that good art must be good art, first and foremost, and whatever ideological valence should be layered in with subtlety and taste. She also discusses the problems with raising consciousness among conservative philanthropists about the problem of right-wing philistinism, and why aesthetic excellence would be a boon in any attempt to recapture the cultural high ground.

On this episode Razib talks to Jesse Singal, a journalist who has covered the social science beat for the last decade. Singal has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from University of Michigan and a master’s in public affairs from Princeton. Currently a freelance journalist who writes his own Substack, Singal-Minded, and contributes to Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog, Singal is formerly an editor at New York Magazine. His first book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, covered the replication crisis.

Razib and Singal first talk about what he learned, and unlearned, during his time as a reporter at New York Magazine, especially social psychology results that were long on glamor but short on robustness. They discuss how long we’ve known that social psychology had a problem, and whether it still hasn’t reformed itself. Singal also reflects on his role in publicizing sexy findings, and how journalism has taken steps to be more careful lately. They also address some of the specific findings that came out of early 2010’s social science, from implicit bias to power posing.

Next, Razib asks Singal about youth gender medicine, and the major controversies over the last few years. Singal discusses the differences between female to male transitions as opposed to male to female, and relates the whole domain back to the replication crisis and the lack of good research. They also discuss political and social aspects, and where Singal sees youth gender medicine going in the next few years.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to economist Sam Hammond.  Canadian-born Hammond serves as the Senior Economist at the Foundation for American Innovation. His work primarily focuses on innovation and science policy, with particular attention to the societal and institutional impacts of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Before his role at FAI, Hammond was Director of Poverty and Welfare Policy at the Niskanen Center. Hammond also held a research fellowship at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, focusing on policy issues related to technology and regulation. He holds a BA in Economics from Saint Mary’s University and MA's in Economics from George Mason University and Carleton University.

After a quick discussion about Canadian housing, Razib and Hammond consider his piece 95 theses about AI. Hammond’s contention is that AI might prove as impactful as the printing press, or, at the outer edge equivalent to photosynthesis. Nearly two years into the current “AI hype cycle” we still haven’t found the “killer app” of AI, but thinkers like Hammond are getting ahead of the likely inevitable societal changes. He believes that change is inevitable, and the details that need to be worked out are how we as a species adapt and evolve in response to our technology. Hammond contends that the AI-revolution is likely to produce changes in the next generation analogous to industrial transformations of the late 19th centuries and early 20th centuries, when cars, electrification and airplanes transformed civilization.

 For early access, feel free to explore it there.

https://www.razibkhan.com/p/sam-hammond-i-for-one-welcome-our 

The full episode is available on: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/14000-years-of-natural-selection

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about what we have learned from a blockbuster new preprint, Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation. Synchronously released was the Ancient Genome Selection browser, which allows you to trace the allele frequency of variants of interest over the last 10,000 years. Razib covers:

• The relationship of selection to adaptation and the Darwinian understanding of evolution

• Non-genetic selection

• Types of biological selection like positive, negative, background and balancing selection

• Hard vs. soft sweeps and their relevance to detecting selection in the genome

• Older forms of natural selection detection between species (dN/dS, Tajima’s D)

• Newer forms of selection detection within species with haplotype structure, outlier SNP analysis and site frequency spectra

• The Generalized Linear Mixed Model used to model allele frequency change over time, and estimates of selection in cases where population structure and drift are not sufficient

• Specific examples of SNPs whose variation can be examined in the browser and are clearly cases of selection

• Survey of traits that were revealed under selection, including blood groups, pigmentation and intelligence

• Critiques of the methods due to not accounting for drift or population structure, and its limitations in relation to the ability to port across populations due to LD structure

On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the genetic and archaeological history of Europe from the arrival of modern humans (permanently) 45,000 years ago, to the end of the Bronze Age in the decades after 1200 BC. He covers these time periods:

• Pre-Aurignacian (before 43 kya) 

• Aurignacian (43-26 kya) 

• Gravettian (33-21 kya) 

• Solutrean (22-17 kya) 

• Magdalenian (17-12 kya) 

• Epigravettian (21-10 kya) 

• Mesolithic (12-7 kya) 

• Neolithic (9-5 kya) 

• Bronze Age (5-3 kya)

The full episode is available for paid subscribers on: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/europe-40000-bc-to-1200-bc

Relevant papers:

• Reconstructing contact and a potential interbreeding geographical zone between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans

• The Persian plateau served as hub for Homo sapiens after the main out of Africa dispersal

• A genome sequence from a modern human skull over 45,000 years old from Zlatý kůň in Czechia

• An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor

• Palaeogenomics of Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherers

• Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula

• A 23,000-year-old southern Iberian individual links human groups that lived in Western Europe before and after the Last Glacial Maximum

• Population genomics of Mesolithic Scandinavia: Investigating early postglacial migration routes and high-latitude adaptation

• Late Pleistocene human genome suggests a local origin for the first farmers of central Anatolia

• Genomic Evidence Establishes Anatolia as the Source of the European Neolithic Gene Pool

• ​​Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

• The genomic ancestry of the Scandinavian Battle Axe Culture people and their relation to the broader Corded Ware horizon

• The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years

• Steppe Ancestry in western Eurasia and the spread of the Germanic Languages

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Misha Saul, the host of the Kvetch Substack. Saul is a first-generation Jewish Australian, born in Georgia (former Soviet republic), who grew up in Adelaide and now lives in Sydney. He graduated from the University of Adelaide with degrees in commerce and law. His day job is in finance, but the Kvetch highlights his interests in history and Jewish culture.

Razib and Saul discuss extensively the differences and similarities between the US and Australia, and how each relates to other Anglophone nations like Canada, New Zealand and of course the UK. Saul asserts though Australia leans into its frontier reputation, in reality it is much more of a bureaucratic-ruled nation than the US, albeit with more of a Scots-Irish flavor than comparatively middle-class New Zealand. He also contrasts the relatively generous welfare-state of Australia and America’s inequality, which he describes by analogy to the film 2013 Elysium, with its contrast between an earth dominated by favelas and a well-manicured low-earth orbit utopia for the super rich. They also discuss the geographical and cultural coherency of a vast nation like Australia, which has a desert at its center. Saul mentions it is often actually cheaper to fly to and vacation in Bali or another Asian locale than going to Perth from Sydney. Despite the reality that Australia has exotic fauna, it is notably an overwhelmingly urban society, where few have any interaction with the “bush.” Though Australians appreciate archetypes like “Crocodile Dundee,” Saul paints a picture of a much more urbane reality. Razib asks about the phenomenon of “white-presenting” Aboriginals, and Saul argues all societies look somewhat crazy from the outside because of their shibboleths, and the debates around Aboriginality are Australia’s.

As an immigrant and first-generation Australian, Saul also discusses Australia’s immigration system, which strictly controls and regulates migration. Saul argues that because of the high educational and skill qualifications most Australian immigrants assimilate well, and he contends that there is a broad consensus to maintain strict limits on inflows. He argues that the Anglo-Australian identity is strong enough that the assimilative process continues to work even with the large number of Asians from China and India, who have triggered nativist worries and political activism.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Cremieux, a Twitter anon who is regularly retweeted by the likes of Paul Graham, Noah Smith and Elon Musk. A data scientist and statistician, Cremieux specializes in visualizations and analyses that cut to the heart of social and cultural dynamics, from economics to behavior genetics. Cremieux and Razib first discuss the polls and demographic results of the 2024 election, in which Donald Trump seems to have made broad-based gains across all demographics. They also discuss the mirage of the “emerging Democratic majority,” and the possibility that Latinos and Asians shifted so much in the last four years that the racial depolarization predicted by analysts like David Shor since 2012 has finally come to pass.

Cremieux also talks about the likely policy outcomes implied by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk’s slated heavy involvement in the next Trump administration, from the exit of Lina Khan to the reversal of numerous Biden executive orders in areas like employment and civil rights. Cremieux argues that there will be a massive house-cleaning in the civil service. Cremieux has talked to Ramaswamy’s people; if Ramaswamy gets a role like chief of staff, they plan to operationalize insights from Richard Hanania’s book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics.

On this episode of "Unsupervised Learning," Razib talks to Rachel Haywire, who writes at Cultural Futurist. Haywire is the author of Acidexia and began her career in futurism as an event planner for the Singularity Institute. She got her start as part of the "right-brain" faction around the Bay Area transhumanist and futurist scene circa 2010. Currently, she is working on starting an art gallery in New York City that serves as an event space for avant-garde creators who are not encumbered by mainstream or "woke" cultural sensibilities.

Haywire recounts her experience as a creator in the early 2010s in the Bay Area and the transition from a socially libertarian milieu where diverse groups mixed freely to one more defined by a progressive cultural script, with the threat of cancel culture beginning to be noticeable. She points to the 2013 cancellation of Pax Dickinson for edgy tweets as a turning point. Razib and Haywire also allude to the role that the reclusive accelerationist philosopher  Nick Land played in seeding certain ideas and influencing movements like the  Dark Enlightenment.

Jumping to the present, Haywire now lives in New York City, and she addresses the Dimes Square scene centered around the neighborhood in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Haywire points out that the actual artistic production from Dimes Square luminaries is quite low, with an almost total lack of music and a focus on online personas. Her goal with her salons and soon-to-open gallery is to put the emphasis on art above politics or e-celebrity culture.

Finally, Razib discusses the impact of AI on creativity and whether it will abolish the artist. Haywire believes that AI is just another tool and has had mixed success leveraging it for her own artistic works in areas like industrial music. She believes that the real use of AI will be to create drafts and prototypes that artists will have to polish and reshape so that they reflect human creativity rather than just some averaged algorithm.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Halie May, the host of the Substack The Sequence, and a genetic counselor at Natera. May has a B.S. in chemical biology from Stevens Institute of Technology and a M.S. in human genetics from Sarah Lawrence. Before working at Natera she was a researcher and instructor at Columbia University and designed testing panels at genetics start-up, Tomorrow’s Health.

Razib and May discuss how much the field has changed even in her short career, in large part because genetic counseling is a 50-year-old profession that has been transformed in the last decade by the introduction of genome-wide datasets. May highlights the changes in the last ten years, and how they have impacted counselors and end users, in particular the ubiquity of noninvasive prenatal screening tests. Here, she mentions that whole-genome analysis isn’t quite where she had expected when she began studying these issues six years ago, and Razib brings up the fact that it’s already a decade ago he had his son whole-genome sequenced. They discuss the hold-ups in the progress of genetic testing and analysis, and May points out that a major issue is likely the utter lack of federal guidelines, with oversight of genetic healthcare mostly being left to the states. This lack of coordination means that there is no top-down signal, and localities and institutions are left to cobble together frameworks in an ad hoc manner. Razib also asks May about how private companies, like Natera, might fill the gap in what hospitals can provide, and the potential pathways and promise of the democratization of genetic results.

On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning Razib talks to native Californian, Inez Stepman. Stepman has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from UC San Diego, and obtained her J.D. from University of Virginia. She is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a contributor to The Federalist. Stepman is also a co-host of the High Noon podcast.

Razib and Stepman first talk about her reaction to Marxist author Malcom Harris’ Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World, exemplified by her piece in First Things, Ambitious Nihilism. A native of Palto Alto who went to high school with Harris in the early 21st century, Stepman believes that the left-wing narrative in Palo Alto is misleading. Though Silicon Valley avows fashionable social liberalism and radicalism, Harris argues that it is actually a seedbed for right-wing neo-Neo-Reaganism and capitalism. Stepman disagrees; though it is true that from a Marxist and explicitly socialist perspective Silicon Valley falls short, the overall political tenor was firmly on the left. She recalls even after 9/11 that her Palo Alto milieu took a dim view of American patriotism. For Stepman, Silicon Valley was more a laboratory of fashionable woke shibboleths, about a decade ahead of its time, as well as being the training ground for conformist grinds who were geared toward jumping over the next academic or professional hurdle.

Stepman sees this narrow and short-sighted ethos throughout Silicon Valley, and the broader sense in American culture that technology will allow us to transcend our limits to humanity. She argues that wealthy tech entrepreneurs who aim to defeat death, like Bryan Johnson, are fundamentally inhuman in their goals and orientation. Razib and Stepman discuss extensively advances in biotechnology and fertility in particular that American society seems to take for granted, like noninvasive prenatal testing and gene editing, which are rolling out without much discussion.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Christina Buttons, who writes at Buttons Lives. A native Californian and erstwhile artist, Buttons switched to journalism two years ago, writing about gender medicine. A contributor to Quillette, The Post-Millennial and The Daily Wire, Buttons is now a freelance journalist living in Nashville, Tennessee.

The first part of the conversation breaks down what “gender medicine” entails in its gory details. In April Razib had a conversation with Colin Wright about the relationship between sex and gender, and the broader philosophical issues entailed by the ideas of gender ideology. But in the discussion with Buttons, Razib asks what it means for a child to transition medically. What are the surgeries that transition a boy to a girl and a girl to a boy? They also discuss different hormone regimes, from those that block normal puberty to those that enhance the secondary sexual characteristics of the target gender to which the individual aims to transition. Buttons discusses why she got interested in the topic, the fraught area of medically transitioning children. She distinguishes her circumspect and focused critiques of gender transition from the catchall broadsides of so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminists and religious conservatives.

Razib asks Buttons about her departure from The Daily Wire due to ideological differences, and what it feels like to be a moderate between militant factions to both her left and right. Though originally on the Left, and even woke, today Buttons identifies as a centrist classical liberal, which naturally means she tends to offend a great variety of factions with her individualistic viewpoints.

Finally, they discuss youth treatment centers, group homes where self-destructive young people are sent to recover and be rehabilitated. Recently these have been in the news, with Paris Hilton claiming that she and others had been subject to abuse at these centers. Buttons herself spent much of her teens in youth treatment centers, and she believes that Hilton’s case is weak, and shutting down these facilities will result in higher rates of self-harm. Buttons plans on moving to this issue as her next project, because she believes people need to know the truth beyond the sensational headlines.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to returning guest, Sarah Haider. Haider is the co-host of the podcast A Special Place in Hell and the Substack Hold That Thought. A native of Houston, graduate of the University of Texas in Austin, Haider is the founder and former executive director of Ex Muslims of North America. Today Razib asks her about her move out of the nonprofit world, and into being a full-time public intellectual, speaking and writing on topics of interest to her beyond that of Muslim-born who become secular. And then, more specifically, Razib probes Haider about her thoughts on gender and politics. He asks her how becoming a mother in the last few years and idiosyncratic aspects of her personality may lend themselves to a comfortable home in the heterodox intellectual space.

They extensively consider the different dynamics of male and female podcasters, and the comparative surfeit of men versus women willing to offer their opinions on all and sundry topics. Haider also contends that women, by their very nature, are going to be perceived differently than men, resulting in a different way of arguing and engaging with audiences, guests and co-hosts. They also discuss the reality that both their podcast audiences have a male tilt, and whether that is a direct outcome of their communication styles. Outside of the realm of podcasting Razib and Haider explore the implications of there being two ways of speaking and thinking when it comes to men and women, and how that shapes how you talk, think and value issues.

Haider also discusses how her pregnancy, and becoming a mother, have changed her politics and social views. When Razib brings up Erik Hoel’s idea of “cultural billionaires,” Haider asks how many women are on the list of such individuals? She argues that becoming a mother is such an all-consuming task that it is no surprise that most of the prominent public women who contribute to opinion and academia are childless; Haider points that Betty Friedan was exceptional among second-wave feminists in having children.

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

Today Razib talks to Aria Babu, a British think-thank professional who is part of the growing number of young men and women who are taking an interest in population decline and promoting pro-natalism. Babu has a degree in chemistry from University College London, and has long worked in areas related to the study of economic growth and entrepreneurship. Prior to her interest in pro-natalism Babu held conventional views about population growth and its ties to environmental alarmism. But she quickly saw that actually fertility is crashing worldwide, and with that there might be dire economic and social consequences. If that trend is left unchecked, she foresees a worst case scenario of massive economic decline and the replacement of our riotously varied modern civilization by a select few narrow subcultures, like the Amish or Somalis, who continue to favor reproduction as a social value. On the state level, declining populations will likely lead to the rise of culturally stagnant and politically authoritarian societies reminiscent of The Children of Men.

Babu and Razib also discuss what it is like living as an urban professional in Britain in 2024. While the fact that the UK has one megacity can lead to disproportionate focus on London, Babu points out that it allows the entire nation’s intellectual and cultural class to be in close proximity, resulting in powerful synergies. She also argues that the problem in the UK is not immigration, but insufficient housing for larger populations and the lack of a system to allow in very skilled and value-add migrants. Rather than integration into the EU or an American-system, Babu favors an approach closer to Singapore, where the UK goes its own way and crafts its policies to take advantage of specific opportunities offered by blindspots in EU or American politics.

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Louise Perry. A British journalist known for her commentary on feminism and gender issues, Perry is the author of the book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. She also contributes to The New Statesman, UnHerd, and The Daily Mail, and has a Substack at Maiden Mother Matriarch. Perry is a graduate of University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, with a degree in anthropology.

Perry and Razib first discuss Britain’s current housing crisis, the reasons and possible solutions. Though the Office for National Statistics estimates the UK’s population at 67.1 million, Perry believes that the true number is likely higher because individuals who are present illegally or have a “gray” status are unlikely to respond. But even this population would make the UK over eight times more densely populated than the US, with England being 13 times denser. In fact, England’s population density is similar to India’s. Perry also brings up the reality of massive immigration flows over the last few years; where before 2020 net migration was around ~200,000 per year, since 2021 the figure has been closer to ~500,000. Additionally, many of these immigrants are placed in “social housing,” subsidized or owned by the government. Perry also points out that the legal regulations in Britain stipulate that about 30% of new developments be allocated for social housing, which incentivizes incumbent homeowners to block construction. Additionally, the rate of population growth is much higher than the British construction industry’s capacity to keep up with the theoretical demand. The UK does not produce enough bricks, nor does it have the labor pool of homebuilders.

The conversation continues to a broader discussion of the ennui in modern British society. Perry asserts that a major problem driving the housing crisis is that the UK has only one major city, London, and any professional who wants to settle in a more affordable region must also take a major salary cut. Setting aside London, and its economic engines of finance and commerce, Perry characterizes the rest of the UK as more akin to a developing Eastern Europe nation. She also believes that the next decade will see a mass flight of the upper-middle-class, the primary tax base of the state. Perry herself has Australian citizenship through her parents (who immigrated from Australia to the UK), while her husband has an American mother. Her situation is common to many upper-middle-class Britons, who have connections to Canada, the US, New Zealand and Australia. Perry believes this is one reason the British political culture is not reforming itself: so many have in the back of their head that they can jump ship if it starts sinking. Ultimately, her thesis is that British openness and intellectual curiosity make the national character a poor seedbed for nationalism, and it may be inevitable that the UK is caught up and tossed about in a vortex of globalization.

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to archeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkins about his 2005 book The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Ward-Perkins was born and grew up in Rome, a son of architectural historian and archaeologist, John Bryan Ward-Perkins. Educated at Oxford University, Ward-Perkins eventually became a fellow of Trinity College at the same university, from which he has since retired. An archaeologist with a deep interest in economic history, Ward-Perkins’ standout book The Fall of Rome was to a great extent a restatement of traditional understandings of the Roman fall in the wake of academic revisions stimulated by Peter Brown’s 1989 World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750. Ward-Perkins scholarship focuses on the outputs of economic production: fine pottery, grand public buildings and copious coinage. In contrast, Brown and his fellow travelers tended to focus on religious innovation and creativity in the centuries coincident with Rome's fall. The Fall of Rome documents in crisp, dense prose the material collapse attendant with the dissolution of the Western Empire in the late 5th and 6th centuries, from the vanishing of pottery in Britain to the cessation of the construction of massive buildings across  the Italian peninsula.

Razib also asks Ward-Perkins his opinions on his colleague Pete Heather’s book The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians.  Ward-Perkins sees Heather’s work as complementary; while Ward-Perkins is interested in the material aspects of everyday Roman life, Heather documents and narrates the diplomatic and military affairs of the Roman elite. Ward-Perkins also comments on Chris Wickham’s work in books like The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000, which outlines how the Roman and post-Roman states differed, in particular, the disappearance in Europe of professional soldiers paid in currency, rather than feudal levies. They also discuss  Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, and whether Roman citizens were actually materially better  off than their medieval successors. Ward-Perkins also gives his estimation of the time measured in centuries until Western Europe reattained Roman levels of social, technological and political complexity.

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back a returning guest, J. P. Mallory, to discuss his reaction to the recent preprint The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans. Mallory is the author of In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World and The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. He is also a retired professor from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. An archaeologist who trained under Marija Gimbutas, Mallory has long used linguistics to complement his disciplinary training in archaeology to understand the origin and location of Indo-European languages.

Though Mallory admires The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans, he still thinks more work needs to be done to pinpoint the original homeland of the Yamnaya or their ancestors. The fact is that the preprint remains somewhat vague in its final conclusion, and more work is needed to make sure the populace acquires the same level of community. Mallory also discusses the challenges inherent in interdisciplinary work, synthesizing archaeology, linguistics and now genetics. He believes that a key to grasping the emergence of pre/proto-Indo-European is tracing lineage groups through their Y chromosomes, as the genetics, mythology and anthropology indicate that pre/proto-Indo-Europeans were quite patriarchal and patrilineal. Though Mallory is hopeful that we are making progress on the topic of Indo-Europeans he worries that the fraught situation of disciplinary rivalries will retard synergy, where archaeogenetics engages in excessive imperialism vis-a-vis archaeology and linguistics.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to professor Sean Anthony about his book Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam. Anthony is a historian in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. with honors in 2009 at the University of Chicago in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and has a mastery of Arabic, Persian, Syriac, French, and German. Anthony’s interests are broadly religion and society in late antiquity and medieval Islam, early canonical literatures of Islam (Koran and Hadith) and statecraft and political thought from the foundational period of Islam down to the Abbasid Caliphate over a century later.

Razib and Anthony discuss the state of the controversial scholarship about the origins of Islam, which often comes to conclusions that challenge the orthodox Muslim narrative. This earlier generation of scholars, like Patricia Crone, challenged the historicity of Muhammad, the centrality of Mecca in early Islam and even the distinctive religious identity of the early 7th century’s Near East's Arab conquerors. This revisionist school serves as the basis for Tom Holland’s 2012 book, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. While Holland’s work was an accurate summary of research before the 2010’s, Anthony argues that since then new findings have updated and revised the revisionism itself. A Koran dating from the mid-7th century seems to confirm the antiquity of this text and traditions around it, while contemporaneous non-Muslim sources refer to Muhammad as an Arabian prophet. While it is true that coinage did not bear the prophet’s name until the end of the 7th century, it may be that earlier generations of scholars were misled by the lack of access to contemporary oral sources themselves necessarily evanescent. Razib and Anthony also discuss whether the first Muslims actually self-identified as Muslims in a way we would understand, as opposed to being a heterodox monotheistic sect that emerged out of Christianity and Judaism. Though classical Islam qua Islam crystallized under the Abbasids after 750 AD, it now seems quite clear that the earlier Umayyads had a distinct identity from the Christians and Jews whom they ruled.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nikolai Yakovenko, a returning guest to the podcast, about his new AI startup, DeepNewz, and the state of the LLM-driven AI landscape circa the summer of 2024, where we are in relation to earlier expectations and where we might be in the next decade. Yakovenko is an AI researcher who has worked at Google, Twitter and Nvidia, and is now a serial entrepreneur. He is also a competitive poker player. He currently lives in Miami, Florida, though he travels frequently to America’s numerous “ideaopolises,” from San Francisco, Austin, Boston to New York City.

Razib and Yakovenko discuss the reality that in the middle of 2024 here they are again, chatting about the world on a podcast, a scenario not everyone anticipated in the heady days of December 2022/January 2023 when the more overheated visiony tech  imaginations swirled with expectations that the advent of artificial general intelligence, the “machine god,” was imminent. Though OpenAI’s GPT 3/3.5 was a leap ahead of GPT 2, GPT 4/4o has been a less spectacular advance. One of the major unforeseen aspects of the LLM-based framework in AI has been the returns to scale in terms of training data, but the last year and a half have not seen any great quantum jumps. The paradigm-shifting revolution that was promised has not arrived. Though AI has increased productivity on the margins, and certain artistic professions and translators have been decimated, overall, it is still a technology with more promise than realized outcomes. Yakovenko points out that AI-driven music creation produces serviceable outputs, but not great masterpieces. To test this, Razib used Suno to create a song “Nikolai’s Dream” within 5 minutesmid-conversation. Though mildly catchy, Suno’s lyrical styling elicited more amusement than awe.

Yakovenko notes the importance of the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard to get a sense of the performance of the various LLM projects. Using the feedback of participants, it produced an updated ranking of chatbot performance. The top ten models are from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and a Chinese vendor. Yakovenko notes the compression, with a very tight distribution of scores at the top. It turns out that OpenAI is not running away from their competition contra  its brand visibility likely being two orders of magnitude greater than Anthropic’s. This brings to the fore the reality that these AI technologies have been viewed as both scientific research projects and potential business and consumer products.

Finally, Yakovenko and Razib talk about DeepNewz. While most LLM-based chatbots tend to exclude very recent data and events, Yakovenko had the idea of creating DeepNewz to aggregate and assemble the breaking news in various categories like science and sports. Instead of a top-down query of news in various categories, the idea behind DeepNewz is to both cater to your preferences in terms of what you might find interesting, but also to surface stories that you might not know you might be interested in, adding more value.

Related: David McKay: AI and the end of the world as we know it and Nick Cassimatis: fear not AI, this too shall pass.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Chad Niederhuth, an erstwhile academic plant geneticist now working in industry. Niederhuth and Razib discuss the reality that in 2024 it is often human genetics that gets the glory, even though experiments on plants go back to the field’s very origins with Gregor Mendel and his peas. Niederhuth’s original training is in molecular genetics, and they discuss the relevance of differences in basic biological machinery between plants and animals, for example the reality that the former have chloroplasts while the latter have mitochondria. They also extensively discuss the flexibility and variation across plants in terms of size and organization of the genome; plants much more often deviate from a diploid two-gene-copy setup than animals, and their range of genome size is enormous. While the smallest plant genome is 61,000,000 bases, the largest is 148,800,000,000 bases (2,400 times larger than the human genome). 

Razib and Niederhuth discuss the flexibility and utility of plants in basic genetic research, but also in the applied agricultural context. Though classic techniques of selection are still relevant, more and more researchers are using genomic methods that look at variation at the DNA level to predict traits in the next generation, and so allow for more robust and productive cultivars. Razib also notes that public queasiness over genetic engineering in animals, let alone humans, does not seem to apply equally to plants, meaning that GMO techniques can be perfected in crops first before transferring to animal or medical contexts.

Finally, Niederhuth talks about his transition from being faculty at a research university to a scientist in the private sector. Overall Niederhuth is happy because his pay is greater, and his responsibilities are narrower and more focused. While as a professor he had to also split his time between teaching and serving extensively on committees, his current position is focused entirely on the research he finds so gratifying. Razib and Niederhuth also discuss the politicization of academic science that has occurred over the last 15 years, and the institution’s future prospects.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jonathan Keeperman, an former lecturer in writing at UC Irvine and proprietor of Passage Press. Keeperman also posts on the internet under what was until recently an anonymous pseudonym, Lomez. Unlike many anonymous accounts on X, “Lomez” developed a decade-long identity, to the point where Keeperman wrote articles under that name for publications like First Things, The Federalist and The American Mind.

Razib and Keeperman talk about what it is like to go from someone with distinct and separate identities, a well-developed online life as well as a fairly conventional offline world, and how to reconcile them when they collide. Keeperman talks about the peculiar and often offensive scripts and modalities of the world of anonymous commentators, whose goals seem to be to have hidden discussions in plain sight, hiding their discourse through shock and obfuscation, and how difficult it can be to communicate this reality to people with more conventional outlooks. 

Keeperman admits that he understood that at some point his anonymity would be stripped away from him, but admits that it is still a difficult path to negotiate. The Lomez identity was unabashedly on the political Right, but as an academic and writing lecturer he was much more discreet about his views, and many of his friends and acquaintances were shocked as to his true politics. Keeperman’s father was a liberal and a Jewish American, so many of his relatives would no doubt have been surprised by his political commitments. 

Razib also asks Keeperman what exactly an MFA means as a credential, and what it teaches you. Though he does not think much of the credential itself, Keeperman explains that the MFA is a terminal degree for many interested in writing and literature, two loves that pulled him away from a life in the corporate world. He explains that one of his goals in entering the writing profession was to bring a masculine sensibility that he feels has been marginalized in the world of creative writing, which is today dominated by women. Razib and Keeperman talk about the marginalization of certain masculine values of vigorous competition and biting debate in many parts of the culture-producing industries, and how Passage Press is an attempt to cultivate voices that otherwise might not find  a platform. In this vein, Keeperman ends by asserting the importance of free speech for all views, from the most offensive to the most anodyne, as an essential part of American culture and the life of the mind. If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about religion with Ryan Burge, professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, and author of The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going and 20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America. Burge also has a Substack, Graphs about Religion, where he posts the latest data on trends in American society.

First, Razib asks Burge to outline the wave of secularization that has impacted American society over the last 25 years, from its causes to its potential end. Burge points out that mainline Protestantism looks to be on the verge of extinction in the 21st century, while evangelical Christianity saw its high point in the 1980s. Then they talk about the nature of religiosity in America, and Burge asserts that in some ways the rise in “religious nones” is probably just social desirability bias. With the fall of Communism, atheism and irreligiosity lost some of their  negative connotations, and more and more people have “come out of the closet” or just accepted their revealed preferences. Razib also asks if Christianity will become a minority religion in the US, and if it is true that people become more religious as they get older. Finally, they discuss extensively the connection between religion and politics and how that drove the rise in defections from Christianity, and Burge talks about how the 21st century will see a normalization of extreme polarization between Christian conservatives and secular Americans. If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the idea of “lost civilizations,” the possibility that there were complex societies during the Pleistocene Ice Age. This topic recently rose to salience after a dialogue between writer Graham Hancock and archaeologist Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Hancock is a longtime guest on Rogan’s show and he promotes a theory that an advanced “lost civilization” during the Ice Age left remnants of its culture across the world, for example the pyramids of both Egypt and the New World. In the exchange, Dibble, a vigorous online critic of pseudo-archaeology came back with scientific orthodoxy; civilization emerged after the end of the Ice Age, and there is no evidence for anything during the Pleistocene.

Razib explains why evidence from biology makes it clear that Hancock is almost certainly wrong. No massively advanced global civilization during the Ice Age left its imprint across the world. Though the archaeological evidence is strong, the data from DNA is even more unambiguously robust and informative. But then Razib steps back and asks what “civilization” is, and presents the possibility that stillborn cultures might have existed during the Ice Age. Civilizations that left no descendants and barely any archaeological footprint. He also argues that the modern conception of civilization starting in Sumer and Egypt 5,000 years ago is simplistic, and American ideas about an arrow of history ascending onward and upward tend to be misleading as a guide to the past. Though the orthodox view is mostly right, there are always gaps in our knowledge and surprises around the corner. Graham Hancock’s enthusiasm for what we can know is commendable, his conclusions long ago outpaced his evidence. In the future, understanding the past will be done with even more powerful tools, but we must proceed with humility upon the foundations of all we know while acknowledging what we don’t.

Related: Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought and Paradise Lost.

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Akshar Patel of The Emissary about his recent sojourn in India. Patel began The Emissary because he felt there were many gaps in the media representation of India. Razib asks whether The New York Times’ claim that Modi is a strongman is correct, and whether India is an illiberal democracy. Patel notes that despite a Westernized super-elite embedded in global Left politics, India is fundamentally a conservative society where communal identity and background reign supreme. He observes that this collectivism is recognized in laws and social norms, though urbanized contexts are breaking down traditional barriers.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of modern India is its macroeconomic dynamism; today India is the world’s fifth largest economy, surpassing the United Kingdom. Patel saw widespread optimism about the nation’s economy and citizens’ own futures, bolstering Modi’s broad popularity. Nevertheless, media claims that the Muslim minority is being marginalized does seem to be broadly correct as Indian reaffirms its Hindu identity. Equally as important as religion in India is caste. Though Patel believes that dating apps and day to day interaction are breaking down caste, he observed on the ground the institution’s day to day utility as a way to obtain jobs or foster social welfare. Overall he sees a future India that is economically and geopolitically relevant, but also very distinctive and civilizationally assertive.

10% of pediatric cancer is linked to a single-gene variation. These variants can be detected in embryos before pregnancy begins. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk for cancer by screening for 90+ genetic variants linked to pediatric cancer. Discuss embryo screening and IVF with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jeremy Carl, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, where he focuses on immigration, multiculturalism, and nationalism in America. Previously, Carl was a Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute where he analyzed and wrote about energy policy. He has BA with distinction from Yale University and an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Today Carl talks about his new book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. Though it is in vogue to talk about white supremacy and systemic privilege today, it is notable that in 2024, only 32% of Harvard’s student body is white. Largely due to the opioid crisis there has been a decline in life expectancy among whites, disproportionately shouldered by those without college degrees. In The Unprotected Class Carl narrates how in the 60 years since the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960's, the movement has mutated into a war on the soon-to-be-erstwhile white majority, with anti-white sentiment openly and proudly expressed by cultural elites. He argues that this descent into identitarianism undermines the fabric of American society, and divides our society rather than uniting us. Razib and Carl discuss how racialized insults and attacks on whites, seen by many as innocuous due to the power and privilege of the white majority, actually degrade the public discourse and deplete the common cultural capital of Americans to coexist despite their diversity. They also discuss anti-white racism’s erasure of class differences among white Americans, and the social and economic pathologies afflicting regions like Appalachia. Ultimately, The Unprotected Class shows how denigrating and attacking one group of Americans leaves us all with less dignity and rights.

10% of pediatric cancer is linked to a single-gene variation. These variants can be detected in embryos before pregnancy begins. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk for cancer by screening for 90+ genetic variants linked to pediatric cancer. Discuss embryo screening and IVF with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about the April 2024 preprint The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans. This blockbuster publication introduces nearly 300 new ancient DNA samples, uncovers the origins of the Yamnaya, and delves into how they transformed the genetic and cultural landscape of Eurasia ~5,000 years ago.

Razib addresses:

• The now-identified ancestors of the Yamnaya

• The genetic landscape between the Dnieper, Volga and Caucasus before the Yamnaya and that region’s numerous distinct populations

• When the Yamnaya came into being as a distinct genetic-cultural cluster (after 4000 BC)

• The relationship of the Yamnaya to the Anatolian Hittites and the newly refined idea of an Indo-Anatolian (as opposed to Indo-European) language family

• The region where proto-Indo-Anatolian languages likely flourished, and why they disappeared

• The population-genetic landscape of clines vs. clusters in human genetic structure over historical time

10% of pediatric cancer is linked to a single-gene variation. These variants can be detected in embryos before pregnancy begins. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk for cancer by screening for 90+ genetic variants linked to pediatric cancer. Discuss embryo screening and IVF with a genetics expert.

On this unusual “from the vault” episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to John Massey, a retired Australian engineer who has been a long-time correspondent. Massey and Razib recorded this podcast in the spring of 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, Australia and China were enacting strict lockdowns to halt the spread of the virus, while the US and Europe were already taking a more relaxed approach. Though the conversation is a bit of a temporal rewind, back to a time when Americans were more worried about infection than inflation, the overarching theme is the role of China in the world and its possible future history.

Massey, though an Australian, has married into an ethnic Chinese family, and some of his grandchildren live in China. The current great power tension of the 21st century is clearly China vs. the US, and in this battle Massey takes a broadly pro-Chinese stance. This is obviously a minority view for Westerners, but it is not entirely unheard of, with even voices as prominent as Thomas Friedman, columnist at The New York Times, waxing poetic about Chinese technocratic efficiency. Prior to its recent economic doldrums and fertility problems, the narrative of China ascendant was dominant and overpowering, and Massey reflects a faction of the West that still believes that Asian power’s preeminence is inevitable, given the forces of history. For them, the fundamental question is simply how we in the West will adapt to it.

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Colin Wright, a returning guest, host of the Reality’s Last Stand Substack and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Before digging deep into the biology of sex and the cultural politics of gender ideology, Razib and Wright touch on what’s been happening to Jonathan Pruitt, Wright’s erstwhile advisor. He was accused of academic fraud in 2019, and dozens of papers where Pruitt was the primary contributor of data had to be retracted. Notably, papers where his mentees collected the data did not suffer from the same problems. Evidence quickly mounted that Pruitt’s whole career productivity was built on fraudulent data. As of 2024, Pruitt’s university, McMaster, where he had an endowed chair, found him to be guilty of fraud, while his doctoral dissertation from University of Tennessee was withdrawn. He resigned from his university in 2022, and embarked on a fantasy writing career. Today he is the author of the dark fantasy, The Amber Menhir.

Then Razib and Wright talk about the current state of gender ideology, and the conflicts around trans rights in the US and abroad. Wright, who is working on a book on sex and gender, believes we may have seen the high tide of gender ideology, with the retreat occuring earlier abroad in places like Britain, where youth medical gender transition has been severely curtailed. He also reviews the major terms and concepts, like the difference between sex and gender, and also what exactly is meant by binary sex and why it is so important in our ability to understand biology generally and patterns in human society specifically. Finally, Razib asks Wright to expound on the different factions in the “gender wars,” from gender critical TERFs to social conservatives and queer theorists.

https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content.

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at https://orchidhealth.com.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to George Washington University archaeologist Eric Cline. The author of 1177 B.C. - The Year Civilization Collapsed, Cline has a new book out, After 1177 B.C. - The Survival of Civilizations. While 1177 B.C. closed with the end of the first global civilization, that of the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age, After 1177 B.C. tells the story of those who picked up the pieces. But first Cline and Razib talk about the popular appetite for ancient history, and how 1177 B.C. became a surprise bestseller. Cline’s training is in archaeology and they discuss how new technologies like ancient DNA and isotope analysis are now contributing to transforming our understanding of the past.

Then they turn to he organization of After 1177 B.C., how Cline decided to build on regional geographically focused histories rather than constructing a tightly integrated single narrative thread. This gets to the reality that the period covered in After 1177 B.C. is one of disintegration and isolation, as the networks binding together ancient Near Eastern kingdoms collapsed, with some states like that of the Hittites disappearing, and others like Egypt re-emerging sharply restructured. 

Cline and Razib also discuss the lacunae in our understanding of the past, and the possibility that civilization may have gone through more cycles than we yet understand, with perhaps some social and technological complexity in the Pleistocene that we had not previously anticipated. Cline points out that Göbekli Tepe certainly must have had precursors in the Pleistocene, as local people could not have constructed such a site without skill and know-how accumulated over generations.

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by 2 - 3.5x. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for 200+ genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert. 

Special note: I’ve partnered with Roundtable to create a unique space dedicated to genetics and history enthusiasts. Our exclusive space is going to be organized into small, intimate roundtables of 4-6 people to ensure deep discussions and personal engagement. Every week, I'll provide an agenda for these discussions, and twice a month, I host an AMA for all members. If this opportunity excites you, apply here.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Kristian Kristiansen, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg and affiliate professor at the Lundbech Center for Geogenetics, Copenhagen University. A past guest on this podcast, Kristiansen has recently contributed to an astonishing lineup of landmark papers published in Nature just in the last few months, Population genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia, Elevated genetic risk for multiple sclerosis emerged in steppe pastoralist populations, 100 ancient genomes show repeated population turnovers in Neolithic Denmark and The selection landscape and genetic legacy of ancient Eurasians. They also discuss his chapter in the 2023 book The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited: Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics.

Razib and Kristiansen discuss the state of the emerging synthesis between archaeology, genetics and historical linguistics. Though himself an archaeologist, Kristiansen admits that in many ways historical linguists were correct, with models of mass migration now overturning those of cultural diffusion. He also gives a high-level summary of soon-to-be-published work on the spread of plague in Europe 5,000 years ago, and its role in the collapse of Neolithic civilization and the rise of steppe Indo-Europeans. Kristiansen gives a summary of recent developments in understanding the archaeology of Bronze Age Northern Europe, and in particular the expansion of the Corded Ware people. Razib and Kristiansen also discuss the role of distinct migration streams of the steppe people and their contribution to various Indo-European populations. Is it time to wonder if the Greeks descended from Corded Ware or Yamnaya?

Today on Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to long-time podcast favorite Samo Burja. Burja is the founder of Bismarck Analysis and Bismarck Brief, a Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation and The Foresight Institute. He is also now the chair of the editorial board of Palladium Magazine. Already a four-time guest on Unsupervised Learning (he has previously shared his views on China's future, Russia's present and archaeology's past, his role at Bismarck Analysis and geopolitical uncertainty, reflected on his piece in Palladium on Finding "lost civilizations" and covered his ideas on "social technology," China, and the foreign view of America), the Slovenian-born Burja is one of the most original and incisive public intellectuals writing in America today. His 2021 piece, Why Civilization is Older than We Thought, brings a level of depth and rigor to historical heterodoxy that you rarely find anymore. Burja has also forwarded the “great founder theory” of historical change and formulated the idea of “live players” in social analysis.

In this episode, Razib asks Burja for his sense of the world landscape in early 2024, revisiting conversations that delve into logistical details of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the future of Chinese power. Burja continues to be pessimistic about the long-term prospects of European and Ukrainian resistance to a Russian war-machine that is geared toward grinding its way through lengthy battles of attrition. He also asserts that the current bearish attitude toward Chinese power is short-sighted, arguing that Western media in particular understates the technological and economic achievements of the PRC over the last generation. Burja believes that even if the “China bulls” were overly optimistic, the “China bears” go to excess in the opposite direction. Finally, he touches upon his vision for Palladium Magazine, a publication he has long contributed to, and which he now helms.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Steve Hsu, physicist, entrepreneur and public intellectual. Hsu is an Iowan who earned his undergraduate degree from Caltech and his Ph.D. from Berkeley. Later he was a Harvard Junior Fellow, before moving on to professorships at Yale and the University of Oregon, and finally settling down at Michigan State University in 2012. Hsu is founder of Safeweb and Genomic Prediction, and his current focus is on a new AI startup. Between 2012 and 2020, he was vice president for research and graduate studies at Michigan State. Hsu also has a blog, Information Processing, and a podcast, Manifold.

Razib asks Hsu about where cognitive and behavioral genomics are in 2024, and where they are going. They discuss the reality that while study of educational attainment (EDU) has proceeded relatively far, the study of intelligence itself has been neglected. Hsu outlines the case for why cognitive phenotypes should be studied, even if the topic remains controversial and fraught. They then address the current fad for artificial intelligence, and how emerging companies in the space are going to transform workplace productivity and culture. Hsu contrasts the rapid pace in the advancement in AI with the torpidity of behavioral genomics. Finally, Razib and Hsu discuss changes in academia in the wake of the “Great Awokening” that led to his ouster in 2020 from his role as vice president of research and graduate studies at Michigan State. Hsu talks about how his work in IQ and genetics became weaponized on social media by left-wing graduate students during the George Floyd protests.

Today Razib talks to Murtaza Hussain about the social, cultural and political context of recent fissures in the US around the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept and has his own Substack. They begin their conversation talking about Hussain’s response to the 10/7 Hamas attacks on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Hussain discusses his bewilderment and disappointment at some commentators who he saw being knee-jerk and tribalistic in their response. He also talks about the generational divides on Israel that have become apparent: while American Boomers and Gen-X tend to support the Jewish state overwhelmingly, while Millennials, and especially Zoomers, are more divided, or perhaps even a pro-Palestinian, perspective. Hussain, a Pakistani Canadian Millennial, though now a naturalized US citizen, does not approach the subject of the Israel/Palestine conflict with a reflexive sympathy for any particular side, but does believe that many Americans are unaware of the broad support that Palestinian nationalism attracts worldwide and especially among the youth.

Razib and Hussain then discuss the intellectual history that led up the conflict between Hamas, an Islamist movement, and the state of Israel, and how the Palestinian national struggle is positioned within the global Left. They discuss the various connections between Palestinian nationalism in the 1960’s and 1970’s and the Soviet Bloc and Left-wing national liberation movements like the IRA, and how that might impact sympathies of activists. Hussain contends that in many ways the Palestinian liberation movement is a leftover of 20th-century struggles, with the end of apartheid South Africa and the peace accords in Ireland. He outlines the multi-decade relationship both the Palestinians and Israelis have had with the non-aligned movement and postcolonialism. Though today Israel is coded as a Western nation (they participate in Eurovision), Hussain notes that as Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion attempted to send Israeli delegates to the non-aligned Bandung Conference in 1955, a move that was blocked by Egypt. 

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer. Affiliated with the Natural History Museum in London, Stringer is the author of African Exodus. The Origins of Modern Humanity, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth and  Homo Britannicus - The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain. A proponent since the 1970’s of the recent African origin of modern humans, he has also for decades been at the center of debates around our species’ relationship to Neanderthals. In the 1980’s, with the rise to prominence of the molecular model of “mtDNA Eve,” Stringer came to the fore as a paleoanthropological voice lending support to the genetic insights that pointed to our African origins. Trained as an anatomist, Stringer asserted that the fossil evidence was in alignment with the mtDNA phylogenies, a contention that has been broadly confirmed over the last five decades. 

But in 2010, Stringer and other proponents of an “out of Africa” “with replacement” model of recent human origins began to modify their views in response to the mounting evidence of archaic admixture, the introgression of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes into the modern human genome. On this episode, Razib queries Stringer on the state of human evolution from the fossil’s-eye view in 2024. They discuss “Dragon Man,” and whether this is just a fossil of one of the Denisovan populations. Razib also presss Stringer about the diversity of human species in Southeast Asia, and just how many Denisovan populations or “races” might have existed. They also touch on Homo naledi, and the ensuing controversies around naledi-related publications. Razib seeks Stringer’s opinion on different models of African origins for our lineage, from extensive archaic admixture to “African multi-regionalism.” On a more speculative note, they mull over the possibilities for complex societies in the Pleistocene in light of the finds at Göbekli Tepe. With Stinger’s over five decades in the discipline, very few rival his qualifications or capability to provide a bird’s-eye view of where we are in understanding human evolution in 2024.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Zoe Booth and Iona Italia. Booth is community engagement officer and Italia is managing editor at Quillette. An Australian, Booth has degrees in French, Politics and Law from the University of Newcastle. Italia is an erstwhile academic of British nationality and mixed Parsi and Scottish heritage, with a Ph.D. in English literature from Cambridge University. She is the author of Our Tango World, former editor-in-chief of Areo Magazine and the host of the Two for Tea Podcast. Razib discusses both of their trajectories into the heterodox intellectual sphere, Booth, from her starting point as a younger Millennial and Italia as a member of Generation X. While Booth recounts she had typical generational views on social justice and left-inflected politics, Italia admits despite being very left-wing most of her life she was never very well disposed to the identitarian trend that has crystallized into “woke” politics in the 2020s. Booth also addresses the reality that even if the existence of Quillette, a female-led bastion of free thought, with founding editor Claire Lehmann and now managing editor Italia might seem to suggest otherwise, it is not always easy to be a heterodox woman. Booth and Italia discuss how female personality orientation tends more toward making people feel comfortable and included rather than confrontations over truth claims that might hurt feelings. Italia and Razib also address her unique personality quirk of very high disagreeability, which might explain both her rejection of group-think and her earnest quest for the truth as she understands it.

Booth and Italia talk about how the recent events around the Gaza war between Israel and Hamas, have resulted in changes in their social life due to political polarization. Overall Quillette has taken a pro-Israel position across the editorial staff, which has resulted in some blowback among their readership. Italia also talks about her own change from solidarity to the global left because of their Hamas-friendly stance, and her continued rejection of conservative social movements, including Islam. Booth and Italia also address Quillette’s consistent trend of touching cultural and political third rails, but in the service of classical liberal values. Italia believes any blowback toward her and the magazine comes disproportionately from a small group of malcontents, and that broadly liberal values are much more popular than most people realize.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib  talks to Nick Cassimatis, erstwhile artificial intelligence researcher and currently an entrepreneur. Cassimatis has undergraduate and doctoral degrees in cognitive and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a master’s degree in child psychology from Stanford. He studied for his Ph.D. under Marvin Minsky, arguably the most prominent and influential artificial intelligence researcher of the second half of the 20th century. Later, Cassimatis was a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founder of a successful startup, and a researcher at Yahoo and Samsung.

Because of the explosion of large language models as implemented in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, we are now living through an artificial intelligence “hype cycle.” But Cassimatis observes that this is not the first time this has occurred. The 1960’s saw enthusiasm triggered by the ELIZA therapist chatbot. Then, in the 1990s another wave of interest crested because of the mastery of chess by Deep Blue. Finally, there was a boom of excitement around artificial intelligence after Watson’s victory in Jeopardy in the early 2010s. But these hype cycles also have their equivalent troughs; Cassimatis recounts that when he went to study artificial intelligence in the early 2000s, many people discouraged him because the field’s allure had cooled considerably. And yet, under Minsky he developed an interest in how computers could learn, writing papers like A cognitive substrate for achieve human-level intelligence. This background makes Cassimatis a particularly well-informed and trenchant observer and analyst of the current arguments about the possible emergence of artificial general intelligence in the next decade, and what it means for the future of humanity.

But first, Cassimatis and Razib step back and address some basics. What is machine learning? How does this relate to deep learning and natural language processing? What are transformers and what is a neural network? These are terms that are thrown around casually in the technology press, but these concepts emerge from over fifty years of research in computer science. With those preliminaries out of the way, Razib probes Cassimatis’s opinions about the past and future of large language model-driven artificial intelligence, and the probability of Ray Kurzweil’s “intelligence explosion” soon. Cassimatis believes it is likely that this hype cycle will eventually fade and suspects that large language models may run up against their limits very soon. He suggests that since ChatGPT’s release in the fall of 2022, the massive transformations predicted in our lives have not come to pass more than a year later. It has not, for example, replaced search on the web, nor has it revolutionized software engineering.

And it is the last issue, the impact of artificial intelligence and advances in computing that underpin Cassimatis’ current start-up, Dry.Ai, a platform for developing applications in a no and low-code framework. The enablement of faster and more productive programming frameworks like GitHub Copilot over the last few years has prompted some to wonder if  a crash in demand for engineers is in the offing, with a smaller number of far more productive workers. Cassimatis reminds us that in the early days of high-level programming languages, like Perl, Python or Java, the same argument was mooted. And yet, on the contrary, the demand for developers has remained high. Cassimatis expects  in the near future to see artificial intelligence hitched up to platforms like Dry.Ai which will make programming easier, reducing the time from conception to final release of an application. Overall, he sees a future that is more technologically advanced, but he does not anticipate that the next generation will bring the revolutionary transformation of all life as we know it.

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about AI, the singularity and the post-human future, with James D. Miller, a Smith College economist, host of the podcast Future Strategist and the author of Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World. Miller and Razib first met at 2008’s “Singularity Summit” in San Jose, and though Singularity Rising was published in 2012, some of the ideas were already presented in earlier talks, including at that conference. More than 15 years since Miller began formulating his ideas, Razib asks him how the theses and predictions in his book have held up, and how they compared to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Coming. On this last point, Miller is very bullish on Kurzweil’s prediction that artificial intelligence will surpass that of humans by 2030. He also believes that the “intelligence explosion,” Kurzweil’s “technological singularity” when AI transforms the earth in unimaginable ways through exponential rates of change will in fact come to pass.

But while Kurzweil predicts that the singularity will usher in an era of immortality for our species, Miller has a more measured take. He believes AI will drive massive gains in economic productivity, from cultural creativity to new drug development regimes (one of the original rationales behind IBM’s AI program). But while Kurzweil anticipates exaltation of conscious human life into an almost divine state, Miller suspects that AI may eventually lead to our demise. He estimates a 10% probability that Kurzweil is correct that we will become immortal, and a 90% probability that AI will simply shove us aside on this planet as it begins to consume all available resources.

Overall, Miller is satisfied with the predictions in the first third of Singularity Rising. Computational technology has become far more powerful than it was in the late aughts, with a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket. Though the advances in AI seem to exhibit discontinuities, in particular with the recent seminal inventions of transformers and large language models coming to the fore, the smoothed curve aligns with Kurzweil’s 2030 target for human-level intelligence. On the other hand, where Miller has been disappointed is the merely modest advances in biological human engineering, with far fewer leaps forward than he had anticipated. Razib and Miller discuss whether this is due to limitations in the science, or issues of governance and ethics. Miller closes making the case for a program of cloning the great 20th-century genius John von Nuemann and the statesman Lee Kuan Yew.

While the computational innovation driving AI seems to have advanced on schedule, and the biological revolution has not taken off, the last section of Miller’s book focused on the economic impacts of the impending singularity. He still believes the next 10-20 years will be incredible, as our economy and way of life are both transformed for the good. Until that is, humans become obsolete in the face of the nearly god-like forms of AI that will emerge around 2050. Until then, Miller anticipates the next generation will see rapid changes as people make career shifts every half a decade or so as jobs become redundant or automated. If Singularity Rising proves correct, the next generation will be defined by what the economist Joseph Schumpeter termed “creative destruction.” If Miller is correct, it may be the last human generation.

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Rob Henderson, author of the new book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Henderson is a commentator known for coining the term "luxury beliefs," a tendency among elites to use their beliefs to signal social status, with real-life costs of those beliefs born by non-elites alone. Henderson grew up in California foster homes, before being adopted into a working-class family in Redding, CA. After an academically undistinguished period in high school, he joined the U.S. Air Force straight out of high school, eventually serving a short stint in Germany. While in the military, he was identified as intellectually gifted via standardized tests, and it was during this time that Henderson developed habits that equipped him to become an exemplary airman, and eventually a public intellectual. Along the way, Henderson earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale and a Ph.D. in psychology from Cambridge University. 

Henderson first came to public prominence with his 2018 New York Times op-ed, Why Being a Foster Child Made Me a Conservative. Later he outlined the concept of luxury beliefs in Quillette, and moved his popular newsletter to Substack. 

Troubled fleshes out the working-class life experiences that made Henderson who he is today, and how and what sets him apart from other members of the elite-educated “professional-managerial class.” While he was an indifferent student who barely graduated high school, parental expectations prepped Henderson’s classmates for the Ivy League. At the time Henderson was studying at Yale, the median family income of his fellow students was $192,000. In Redding, CA, where he grew up, the median family income was about $65,000. About ten times as many Yale students hailed from the top 1% (19%) than the bottom 20% (2.1%) of family income. Troubled would shock many of Henderson’s Yale classmates, because the economic, social and cultural deprivation and domestic volatility he describes would be so alien and unrelatable. Among the most striking illustrations of how he grew up was Henderson’s perplexity upon being expected to be excited for his first birthday party in his adoptive home. As a former foster child with a winter-break birthday, not only had he never received presents, had a cake or a party. Henderson had literally never been sung “Happy Birthday.” Troubled beings with Henderson’s primary memories of his Korean immigrant mother when he was a toddler. After she was deported, Henderson’s formative years in childhood were spent as a ward of the state, shuffled from foster placement to placement.

Razib also touches on something that Henderson has discovered in the last few years with consumer genetics. Not knowing who his father was, and clearly not being fully Asian, he had always trusted he was of mixed white and Korean heritage. But a 23andMe test makes it plain that his father was genetically Mexican. Not entirely shocking as Henderson was conceived in Southern California, the genetic test turned him overnight into a “BIPOC” individual, with nearly 20% indigenous American ancestry. For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

In this episode, Razib talks to Wilfred Reilly, political scientist, author and fearless cultural commentator. Reilly holds a Ph.D. in political science from Southern Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Illinois. Raised in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, he discusses his ten-year diversion from academia, including his stints as a canvasser for the gay rights group the Human Rights Campaign and a corporate salesperson. A prolific public intellectual, Reilly is the author of Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me,  Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can't Talk About] and Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War.

Razib asks what it means to be a “black conservative,” and Reilly responds that the term brackets all black intellectuals who dissent from the progressive orthodoxy, ranging from rock-ribbed right-wingers like Thomas Sowell to moderate liberals like John McWhorter. They also discuss the excesses of Civil Rights legislation and Richard Hanania’s thesis in The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics that the legal system is geared toward racial progressivism. Reilly believes that wokeness cannot be rolled back until that institutional and legal framework driving for radicalism is neutered.

Segueing into the domain of political science, Razib and Reilly discuss the difference between avowed preferences and revealed preferences around issues like abortion and pornography. Both agree ordinary Americans strongly disagree with ideologues who hold extreme policies. Reilly also points out the strangeness that many of the most violent and visible activists during the BLM protests were white, and he holds these are the people who are buying books by radical activist professors like Ibram Kendi, who meanwhile has little real influence among black academics.

They also discuss diversity within the black American community, including Laurence Otis Graham’s exploration of socioeconomic status in Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class. Reilly talks about his more upper-class mother’s attempt to inculcate elitism within him, and its failure to stick. Then Razib moots the question of the differences between “American Descendents of Slaves” (ADoS), Africans and Caribbeans, and the fact that Harvard refuses to survey its black students by sub-demographic. Finally, Reilly expounds at length on his “anti-doomer” views, arguing that economic, social and environmental catastrophism is almost always wrong, as well a providing a hearty defense of the cultural richness and economic dynamism of the Midwest.

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

Today Razib talks to geneticist Erich Schwarz, a Research Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University  since 2012. Schwarz has a molecular biology degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Caltech. After working with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in graduate school, he switched to the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, and has continued studying nematodes ever since. After helping to found the C. elegans genome database WormBase (wormbase.org) in the early 2000s, he began sequencing and characterizing the genomes of several nematode worms other than C. elegans, either because they are biologically informative or because they are worldwide parasites. His current work includes using the genome of Ancylostoma ceylanicum to help devise an anti-hookworm vaccine.

Schwarz explains why C. elegans, often called “the worm,” has been so useful in developmental and molecular genetics, and its role in the career of the late Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner. With a simple anatomical structure, every single one of the 1,000 cells of  C. elegans has been mapped and detailed. Despite its small size, this organism has spawned a research community of thousands, documented in Andrew Brown’s In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite. In the age of hundreds of thousands of human genomes, Schwarz explains the decades-long period in the late 20th century when biological research was dominated by “model organisms,” simple and easy-to-experiment-on animals, plants and bacteria that could eloquently and plainly elucidate universal and essential mechanisms of function and structure. 

Razib and Schwarz also discuss the future of model organisms in a genomic future, when high-throughput data analysis can supercharge decades-long experimental projects. Ultimately, the future is not likely to see model organisms set aside, but rather to witness them merged into the broader research community in human and medical genomics which has been driving technological changes in sppedspeed and volume of data collection.

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

Today, Razib talks to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of Who Makes the NBA?: Data-Driven Answers to Basketball's Biggest Questions and Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Stephens-Davidowitz, formerly of Google and The New York Times, is a freelance data scientist and author. He has a degree in philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in economics from Harvard. In this episode, he discusses his process of writing Who Makes the NBA?, which he crafted in a month using ChatGPT’s code interpreter feature, and the biggest insights from his book.

Razib probes Stephens-Davidowitz on the relationship between height and athletic ability, and why success in the NBA has the largest heritable component of any major league sport. They also discuss the finding that children of NBA players enjoy a non-genetic advantage in basketball, and why those who make it into the league and succeed are from higher socioeconomic strata. Stephens-Davidowitz also discusses why international basketball is popular in the former Yugoslavia and Lithuania, and how the popularity of volleyball in Iran and Brazil affects the pipeline of talent from those nations.

The episode concludes with the author’s detailed thoughts about what it was like to write a book assisted by AI, and the feasibility of this sort of content creation over the next decade. Razib and Stephens-Davidowitz discuss the possibility of massive productivity gains from AI over the next few years and the long-term feasibility of writing careers if AI keeps improving at the current rate. Finally, Stephens-Davidowitz lays out his plan to write his next few years’ of books at a far faster clip, relying on AI assistance..

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

Do 20% of the men on dating apps get 80% of the dates? Is the Zoomer generation the sexless generation? What are the best predictors of relationship success? These are some of the questions Razib asks Alex of DatePsychology on this episode of Unsupervised Learning. A psychologist who studied cognitive and behavioral neuroscience in graduate school, Alex explores topics around dating on his YouTube channel and disseminates the latest research via his tweets (you can also subscribe to his newsletter). In a world where the “discourse” is filled with anecdotes and ideology, Alex’s modus operandi is to ask “what does the scientific literature say?”

Razib and Alex talk about various online subcultures, from incels to “pickup artists,” what they get right and wrong about dating culture and the impact of technology on long-standing dynamics, like the art of approaching women in public places like bars. Alex also discusses how the proliferation of dating apps has changed the dynamics of the online dating marketplace over the last 20 years. Razib probes him about the variables correlating with dating and compatibility, from looks to values to personality. Does intelligence matter in partner compatibility? They also discuss cross-cultural differences, and how urban dating markets differ from those in more rural locales. The online discourse is filled with individuals opining about dating and culture, but into this space of vapid assertion, Alex presents study after study of peer-reviewed research.

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to David Lightbringer, a YouTube content creator who focuses on the world of The Game of Thrones and the mythologies of ancient peoples. Though Lightbringer writes essays, and distributes his thoughts via podcast (and you can also read his views in short-form on numerous topics via his tweets on X), his primary platform is his YouTube channel. Lightbringer’s videos, range across topics as diverse as “Harappans, Aryans, and the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex: Indian Origins” to “The Grey King: Secret PreHistory of the Ironborn.” 

Two years ago, journalist and entrepreneur Antonio García Martínez declared that we were entering a new “age of orality.” By this, he meant that the primacy of text was declining in our culture, as younger generations preferentially consumed audio content over magazines. Perhaps Martínez could even have stipulated that this was the age of “audiovisuality.” Anyone producing podcast content knows that the “Zoomer” generation, those born after 1995, prefer not to subscribe to a feed proactively. Instead, they spend their days passively “consuming content” by leaving YouTube in the background at length. Nearly 40% of this generation spends four or more hours a day on social media, and 88% use YouTube. Lightbringer is part of this massive, new world of creators who produce history, literary and cultural commentary content for those who prefer hour-long documentaries or impassioned monologues to short clips of funny cat memes.

Razib and Lightbringer discuss his analytic method for producing secondary commentary on George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. Lightbringer points out that Martin has been explicit and open about his myriad literary influences, so filling in the “backstory” to the history and anthropology of his universe often involves detective work into its cultural roots, which go back to figures as diverse as J. R. R. Tolkien and H. P. Lovecraft, as well as ancient motifs and primal archetypes drawn from the mythologies of varied cultures. The same methodologies we can use to analyze “real” mythology, religion and cultural history, can also be employed for fantastical literary worlds. Razib and Lightbringer also shine the light on the vast world of literature and history on YouTube, which is now the primary mode for many people’s autodidact pursuits. Razib argues for the value of text, while Lightbringer asserts that the visual aspect of YouTube documentaries allows for both greater accessibility and more informational richness.

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to human geneticist Cesar Fortes-Lima about his new paper, The genetic legacy of the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa. Fortes-Lima has a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology and his primary research areas include African genetic diversity, African diaspora, transatlantic slave trade, demographic inference, admixture dynamics and mass migrations. Most recently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Human Evolution at Uppsala University, he has recently taken a position in Ambroise Wonkam Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.

Razib and Fortes-Lima discuss the primary conclusions of his blockbuster paper, which was published in Nature. When did the Bantu people begin their migrations? What were their origins? And what routes did they follow as they expanded to cover a third of the African continent? They also discuss the earlier peoples of East Africa and the relationship of the Bantu to Cushitic pastoralists and Khoisan foragers. Fortes-Lima addresses how the inclusion of 1,763 participants, including 1,526 Bantu speakers from 147 populations across 14 African countries, and whole-genome sequences from 12 Late Iron Age individuals, allowed them to use spatially explicit methods correlating genetic, linguistic and geographical variables. They found support for a serial-founder migration model, and determined population sizes, as well as testing alternative models of migration and admixture. Unlike many historical population genetic analyses, The genetic legacy of the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa explicitly tests competing hypotheses. Finally, Fortes-Lima also discusses the broader necessity for greater diversity in genetic datasets, and how this study advances that project by adding thousands more geographically disparate samples.

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Cody Moser, co-author of a recent paper, Innovation-facilitating networks create inequality. Moser is an evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist at UC Merced, where he is completing his doctorate. A previous guest on the podcast, Moser immediately digs deep into the abstruse and technical model that shows that more is not automatically better when it comes to innovation and discovery. First, he contrasts his results with the Tasmanian cultural evolution model outlined by Joe Henrich nearly 20 years ago. In short, Henrich showed that very small populations tend to lose cultural traits and skills over time. Going through a population bottleneck has a memetic as well as genetic effect. The converse scenario is one where a large population is able to retain and even accumulate more cultural traits and skills.

Moser’s main finding is that some fragmentation of these large populations may in fact foster innovation. On the evolutionary psychological scale, massive groups may tend toward conformity, and disrupting information flows may foster independence of thought. A significant immediate implication is that scholarly thought might benefit from separating into competing schools and departments where distinct groups can develop solutions collectively but retain enough independence to resist being drawn into broader irrational herd behavior. Moser’s results have broader implications for how businesses and corporations should operate, and perhaps quantify why nimble startups often outpace and defeat massive organizations despite the latter having almost infinite resources. Groupthink is powerful. Though small populations will be hit by skill loss with the death of keystone individuals, large populations may ossify, “locking in” regnant ideologies. 

Razib also probes Moser about the rise of agent-based modeling and simulations in social science over the last 20 years, and how they have allowed scholars to circumvent the limitations of relying purely on college students to act as experiment subjects.

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

Katherine Brodsky hosts the Substack Random Minds and is author of the soon-to-be-published book No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage―Lessons for the Silenced Majority. The daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to Israel and then Canada, Brodsky has worked as a photographer, in public relations and as a publisher. A recent visiting fellow of the Danube Institute, she is freshly back in North America in the wake of Israel’s Gaza invasion, following the Hamas attacks of 10/7.

Razib and Brodsky have a wide-ranging conversation about her travels in Europe, her return to North America, her understanding of Israel and what it’s like to be a Jew in the world today. Despite Hungary being ruled by a right-wing government for the past decade, Brodsky observes that it is the European nation where she perceived the least public anti-Semitism, in large part due to government policy suppressing such sentiments. In contrast, she felt very uncomfortable and even afraid in London when she visited during the mass protests in support of the Gazans. Brodsky has also been shocked by the unanimity of the global Left in support of the Palestinians, and the dismissal by many feminist organizations of the reality of sex crimes committed by Hamas on 10/7. A secular Jew, Brodsky has now begun to wear visible signs of her Jewishness as a rebuke to the anti-Semitism she sees all around her.

Razib asks her about her opinions in regard to free speech and the battle between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian factions in the media. Brodsky believes that the topic of her book, No Apologies, is even more relevant after the events of the last few months than it was when she initially wrote the book proposal. They discuss the lack of dialogue, debate and the polarization into strict information tribes. When it comes to information, they touch upon semantic arguments about indigeneity, who is a settler in the context of Israel-Palestine, and how it relates to genetics, history and archaeology.

Today, Razib cross-posts an episode of his other podcast. When not working on this Substack, Razib devotes his time to GenRAIT, a startup accelerating scientific discovery by providing infrastructure and tools to researchers. GenRAIT fosters science and discovery by making biological data accessible, usable, and minable.

Razib and his cofounders, Dr. Santanu Das and Taylor Capito, will talk about what they’ve built at the JPM Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, January 8th-11th, and showcase their products at the Plant and Animal Genomes Conference in San Diego, January 12th-17th.

After an overview of GenRAIT’s business logic with Capito, Razib digs deeper with Dr. Das, a computer scientist by training, and discusses what machine learning is, drilling down into details like the difference between SVM and random forest models. Dr. Das surveys the multi-decade arc of “Artificial intelligence” (AI), predicts its inevitable utility in biology, and makes the broader case for productizing scientific tools to empower bioinformaticians, ML engineers and data scientists as an integral part of the scientific ecosystem.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Philippe Lemoine, a fellow at CSPI, a philosopher of science trained at Cornell. Lemoine often wades into controversial topics, like whether Chinese COVID data is trustworthy, but recently, he posted on Twitter that “Americans *genuinely* believe they have better food than France. They really believe it.” Not only did this trigger a response by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, but the controversy broke out of social media into the international media.

For the first portion of the conversation, Razib and Lemoine reflect on the circus surrounding his tweet, and what he really means. Though Lemoine defends his tweet, he wants to emphasize that while Americans kept pointing to restaurants, he wanted to emphasize how superior French home cooking was over what Americans produce when they eat in (though he will still defend French restaurants as superior, he admits that if you value variation and diversity of cuisine as goods in and of themselves, then “American food” can be counted as superior). Additionally, Lemoine extolls the virtue of French meal-time customs and norms, with their leisurely pace. He asserts, likely plausibly, that Americans with their on-the-go philosophy of life truly don’t enjoy food, they consume it. Razib pushes Lemoine on whether he would genuinely prefer to live in France despite the nation being 33% poorer than the US on a purchasing-power-parity basis, and he sticks to his guns.

Then they move to a topic that unambiguously throws France into a worse light than the US: immigration policy. Lemoine discusses the reality that French immigrants and immigrant-descended populations are not doing very well. Not integrating, committing crime and both economically and socially marginalized. He also claims that the French government actually does have a good breakdown of ethnic groups even though it cannot officially collect such data. Lemoine asserts that America’s positive experience with immigration has little to do with America, and mostly to do with the source and character of immigrants: unlike Europe, the US imposes a strong selective sieve on education and skills. In contrast, European nations often simply receive immigrants from their former colonies or through the asylum process. Razib and Lemoine also discuss French fertility, which remains higher than that of the US.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses war and diplomacy from 9/11 to 10/7 with Mark Safranski. Safranski is a long-time military affairs and foreign policy commentator who ran the popular weblog Zenpundit beginning in 2003. They survey how the 21st century, from the 9/11 attacks down to the Hamas atrocity against Israelis on 10/7, has seen a transformation of war and diplomacy by other means. From an age of flip phones as a luxury item in the early 2000’s to ubiquitous smartphones in the 2020’s, Safranksi and Razib explore how even still in 2023, Russia and Ukraine are engaging in the most significant set-piece battles since War War II, recapitulating some of the worst aspects of stagnant trench warfare more than a century on.

Safranski then explains the theories promoted by military scholars about how warfare has, and should, change in the technological era, particularly William Lind’s ideas of fourth and fifth-generation warfare. He also argues that drone technology in various forms has been around since World War I, though it was perfected in the past twenty years. Considering America’s technological advancements over the 21st century, Safranski alarmingly explains that the gap between us and our nearest competitor, China, is rapidly closing (with the US losing every government-sponsored war game against China in the years around 2020). He believes that the unipolar moment of the late 1990’s is truly ending, and elaborates on the decay that has overtaken some branches of the US military, in particular, what had been the world’s dominant blue-water navy, which is literally rusting away.

They conclude the conversation by reflecting on the changing role of the blogosphere in influencing military and foreign policy thinkers, and how the decade after 9/11 saw a fertile cross-pollination between online discourse and the brain trusts of the military-industrial complex. Finally, Razib asks Safranski if the neoconservative movement is making a comeback in the wake of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, and what has surprised him about American reactions to 10/7.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib discusses personality with Brent Roberts, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. Roberts explains what personality actually is as a psychological construct, and how it differs from personality traits, like extraversion. Razib and Roberts also address the Big Five Personality system, and how it relates to the Myers-Briggs framework. Roberts elucidates what the Big Five’s extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and disagreeability actually mean, and how they correspond to Myers-Briggs dichotomies of extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuitive, thinking/feeling and judging/perceiving. Though Myers-Briggs may have some shortcomings, for example collapsing continuities in discrete categories, Roberts maintains that it still retains some utility, and is not as unscientific as many researchers assert.

Razib then asks about personality’s relationship to behavior genetics. What is the heritability of personality’s subcomponents? How do they interrelate? And what might the evolutionary context of personality variation be? Roberts also addresses the idea that personality traits can change over one’s lifetime, and are unstable from test to test. Razib also wonders how different traits, like agreeability, correlate with life outcomes in income and happiness. Finally, they discuss the nature of psychopaths and sociopaths, and how they relate to the Big Five categories.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Carl Zha. Zha is a Sichuan-born China-commentator who had a long-term professional sojourn in southern California, before settling in Bali, Indonesia. He hosts the Silk and Steel podcast, which covers China, the Silk Road, and more general history, culture and geopolitics. Zha and Razib have known each other since the 2010’s, and often circle back to discussions of China, its history, politics and culture. The course of their conversations has spanned both the close of the “Chimerica” period of trade and political relations, and the more adversarial status that obtains in both the US and in the People’s Republic of China under Xi Jinping.

But first, Razib and Zha discuss what it’s like to live as an ethnic Han Chinese in Indonesia, albeit one who resides in Hindu-majority Bali, where Zha settled after marrying a local woman and becoming a father. Though Indonesia has an economically and politically powerful Chinese minority, it was also the scene of ethnic riots in the 1990’s and a genocide of Han Chinese in the 1960’s. Until recently, the state did not recognize Confucianism as a religion and discouraged Chinese names and Chinese-language schools. Nevertheless, Zha presents a relatively positive picture of relations on the island of Bali, where the Hindu population seems to have had an easier time integrating Han in a more syncretistic culture than in the Muslim-majority islands.

Then they discuss the pivot in US-China relations in the last half a decade, and the possibilities presented by great power rivalry. Razib and Zha address the thorny reality that though China and the US are now embarking on more explicitly adversarial geopolitics, their economic ties remain strong, with Chinese supply chains essential for American firms like Apple and the US consumer demand essential to propping up China’s vast export sector. Zha also offers a defense of Xi Jinping's rule and the prospects for China as it turns inward from the world, focusing on its domestic market and shoring up its geopolitical positions. The discussion turns to the range of likely outcomes in a world where the 21st century is both the American and Chinese century, and the two great powers remain both economically and geopolitically entangled through trade and numerous bilateral relationships with other nations.

Today, Razib interviews Nikolai Yakovenko, already a three-time guest on his podcasts (A Twitter engineer on machine learning and his former company's prospects, GPT-3 and the rise of the thinking machines and AI and Biology). An artificial intelligence researcher based in Miami who has worked at Google and Nvidia, Yakovenko is the founder of DeepNews where he currently works.

Razib and Yakovenko talk about the economic, technological and socio-political implications of the leadership turmoil at OpenAI, the $86 billion dollar company that has supercharged the field of artificial intelligence with their product, ChatGPT. Yakovenko digs deep into the nuts and bolts of how artificial intelligence works today, from transformers to GPUs and different compute needs of training vs. inference. They also discuss the importance of shipping products at a tech company, in contrast to simply publishing papers as the measure of productivity in academic basic science research for example, and how on this count OpenAI succeeded where Google has not. Razib asks Yakovenko if OpenAI might now fall behind Google, whose corporate risk-aversion had squandered it an early lead in technology like transformers. Now that OpenAI is seized by such organizational chaos as to stop development, Google may have time to catch up. Yakovenko also talks about the likelihood of artificial intelligence becoming a corporate oligopoly due to the field's colossal compute needs. Finally, Razib and Yakovenko address the cleavages that arose at OpenAI due to the board’s adherence to effective altruism, while leadership and employees instead charted a shift toward effective accelerationism.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks with Curtis Yarvin. The host of the Grey Mirror Substack, Yarvin is the former Mencius Moldbug, a pseudonym under which he wrote extensively on culture, politics and history. Yarvin’s social and political views have been profiled widely, including by Vanity Fair and Vox. The intellectual father of neo-reactionary thought, Yarvin is also trained as a computer scientist, and in 2010, he released the first version of Urbit, a decentralized personal server platform, which has spawned an entire community and conferences like Urbit Assembly.

Yarvin’s interests extend beyond technology and politics. He is deeply invested in high culture and believes in the importance of the humanities to our civilization. Razib and Yarvin spend most of this episode on the role of poetry in our broader culture, why it is relevant, why it matters, and the works that Yarvin most values. Though his educational background is as a technologist, Yarvin believes that poetry is an essential ingredient in what makes us human. The question of humanity, along with some references to the Dune universe, moves the conversation to Yarvin’s reflections on the rise of A.I. via large language models, and whether it poses an existential threat to the human race (he does not believe it does). Yarvin also offers his opinions on Eliezer Yudkowsky’s trajectory of thought; Yudkowsky has in the last decade become the leader of the “A.I. doomer” faction within the futurist community. Like many observers with a strong computational background, Yarvin does not believe A.I. will lead to the abolition of man, though it may open up new possibilities, extending what humans are capable of in terms of innovation and productivity through cybernetics. Like all technology, its ultimate utility will be contingent on our decisions as humans.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Michael Muthukrishna about his new book, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. Muthukrishna is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics, an affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD and Data Science Institute, Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Technical Director of The Database of Religious History, a fellow at the Charter Cities Institute and board member of the One Pencil Project. Of Sri Lankan extraction, he trained as an engineer in Australia, but later became interested in anthropological and cultural questions. He studied for his Ph.D. under Joe Henrich in Canada. Like his mentor, Muthukrishna cross-applies toolkits from evolutionary biology and population genetics to questions of variation and change in human cultures.

A Theory of Everyone is an ambitious book with arguably galactic ambitions. The chapters jump from topics like the Cambrian Explosion to the ever-increasing amount of energy needed to get at the fossil fuels that power our civilization. But to start off, Razib asks Muthukrishna about his background as a “third culture kid” and how that might have influenced his anthropological interests. Muthukrishna observed firsthand social and political chaos in Papua New Guinea, while his family’s background in Sri Lanka illustrated for him the salience of ethnic tensions, even when differences might seem minimal to outsiders. Then Razib talks about A Theory of Everyone’s fixation on energy and its role in powering organic life, about our technology-driven civilization and about our potential interplanetary future. Here, Muthukrishina thinks like an engineer, albeit with a broad historical and evolutionary perspective. He and Razib also discuss the problems of “degrowth economics” and why it is a dead-end for a dynamic civilization’s flourishing. Razib also probes Muthukrishna for his views on IQ, its utility as a psychological measure, the variation between individuals and groups, and how those might relate to cultural evolutionary frameworks for considering cognitive aptitudes. The conversation concludes with a consideration of future possibilities as we hurtle past our current energy constraints as a civilization (Muthukrishna is bullish on nuclear), and the role of decentralized political experimentation in improving our social technology.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Peter Nimitz about what he memorably calls the crisis of the 23rd century. Most people know of the fall of Rome, and the subsequent European Dark Ages. And because of scholars like Eric Cline, today growing numbers are aware of the civilizational collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, when an incipient global civilization enfolding everything from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to Mesopotamia was torn apart by climate change and invasion. But before Rome, before the Hittites, the third millennium BC saw a climatic shock that seems to have abruptly transformed all Eurasia and Africa. There have long been glimmers of this upheaval; historical texts record chaos in Sumer and Akkad, while in Egypt the Old Kingdom fell. But today the toolkit of archaeology can illuminate far more, and is making clear that a massive climatic shift toppled fragile empires and transformed cultures. Some areas of Eurasia, like China, seem to have experienced massive drought. Others, like Siberia, became even colder, with regions becoming ever more inhospitable to human occupation.

And now Nimitz has reviewed what we know region by region in a magisterial post, Crisis of the 23rd Century: Upheavals from Spain to the Yangtze. Razib presses him about the contrast between the three peninsulas of Southern Europe: the Iberian, Italian and Balkan, and how they each experienced the intrusion of Indo-Europeans during this period (informed by ancient DNA findings). They also discuss the potential divide between Corded Ware and non-Corded Ware Indo-European migrations, and how that shook out across Eurasia. Then they touch upon the civilizational hearths of the Near East, and the wholesale transformation that occurred at this moment culturally and demographically in the Horn of Africa. Finally they sweep eastward, into Siberia, Central Asia and finally China, where new cultures arose and old civilizations collapsed in the centuries after the crisis of the 23rd century.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Penn State astrophysicist, Steinn Sigurdsson. Sigurdsson was a one-time colleague at the ScienceBlogs website in the twenty-aughts with Razib, where he ran the astrophysics-themed Dynamic of the Cats blog. At its peak, ScienceBlogs had nearly 100 writers who commented on topics as diverse as agriculture, Creationism and cosmology. Originally from Iceland, Sigurdsson’s professional accomplishments have been wide-ranging, from serving as scientific director of arXiv to directing an institute focused on exobiology. Razib first asks him about the history of arXiv, which goes back over 30 years. It was the preprint server that blazed the bath for bioRxiv in biology, medRxiv in medicine and PsyArXiv in psychology. Razib asked Sigurdsson if preprint servers lead to open science, and if they will do away with peer preview. Do they affect the winner-take-all dynamics that apply to scientific publications? Razib and Sigurdsson also discuss the threat and promise of papers generated with AI methods like “large language models” pioneered by Google and popularized by OpenAI, and that have finally caught up to human-level fluency within the last 9 months with ChatGPT.

Then Razib queries Sigurdsson on numerous astrophysical topics. Is the universe going to expand forever? (Probably, and that expansion is speeding up.) Do we understand most of the matter and energy in the universe? (No.) Sigurdsson also discusses in detail the fact that now in 2023 we have confirmed black holes empirically in a manner that couldn’t have been imagined a generation ago. Additionally, Razib has to confront the possibility that physics might abandon causality, and even open the door to magic, within the twisted maze of their equations in order to make sense of the universe. Finally, they discuss the probability of other life in the universe if our solar system is representative, the probability of intelligent life, how many planets there are in the universe and the possibility of Dyson (or Musk?) spheres in our solar system in the future.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back Gregory Clark, a past guest on this podcast. When he last talked to him, Clark had just been disinvited from giving a talk whose results he has now turned into a paper, The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022. Until recently an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, Clark is now teaching at the University of Southern Denmark. His previous books include The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility and A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Today Razib and Clark discuss his shocking finding that a simple model predicated on genetic relatedness explains the status distribution across many centuries in England. Clark finds that even where wealth is passed from father to offspring (expected in a patriarchal society), occupational status is inherited equally from mother and father, as expected in a genetic framework rather than cultural framework. Another surprising result from Clark’s dataset is that the rate of social mobility has been unchanged across 400 years in England, despite massive cultural and political shifts. He also finds high rates of inheritance of social status in many other societies, with the highest in the Indian subcontinent.

Razib asks Clark how it could be that the data shows such consistently similar rates of social status mobility across periods as different as Victorian England or post-World-War-II Britain. Clark also addresses why he did not work on a model that integrated cultural inheritance; in short, those models were more complex and seemed far less satisfying than his two-parameter equation. He also addresses the social media furor in response to his paper, and his defense against the charge that he’s a eugenicist.

We’re about a generation into the “age of genomics,” or as it’s sometimes termed the “post-genomic era.” Today Razib talks to John Logsdon, a professor of biology at the University of Iowa, about what genomics has wrought in relation to our understanding of evolution, and what evolution has taught us about the structure and nature of the genome. In 2014, Logdson and Sarah J Hanson contributed a chapter entitled “Genome Evolution” to the Princeton Guide to Evolution. Razib uses this mid-2010s review to scaffold his discussion with Logdson about where we are in 2023. But first, he asks what the exact difference between genetics and genomics is. It is sometimes said that quantity has a quality all its own, and Razib and Logdson discuss the different analytic challenges of analyzing the evolutionary trajectory of a single gene, a task up the alley of classical genetics, and describing the evolution of the whole genome of an organism like a human, with thousands of genes.

They then move on to various issues relating to the architecture and evolution of the genome that are of deep interest and curiosity to researchers but rarely surfaced to the public. Why do bacterial genomes have so much less “junk” than those of complex organisms, like humans? Why is the relationship between organism complexity and genome size still so uncertain? How has evolution impacted the “molecular machinery” of the genome (like promoters)? And what is the difference between those scientists who use genomics to understand evolution and those who attempt to understand the evolutionary forces that shape the nature of the genome?

By inspecting where we are on many specific issues relating to evolution and genomics, Razib and Logdson begin a sketch of how the emergence of genomics has changed evolutionary biology, as the entire genetic maps of vast numbers of species are now at our fingertips. The discussion finally concludes with future possibilities in the next few decades, as the post-genomic era moves from a revolution to a background condition, a  banality.

Note: Logsdon mentioned HHMI molecular genetic videos. Here is an excellent example:

Yesterday, Razib discussed Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics with the author. Today, Unsupervised Learning hosts a wide-ranging discussion with Christopher Rufo on his book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. While Hanania’s focus is law and politics, Rufo looks at intellectual history and culture. If you follow his prolific output on social media or in City Journal, you know Rufo is an indefatigable culture warrior, but in America's Cultural Revolution he outlines in a book-length narrative the ideas and people he believes have driven the “Great Awokening” of the 2010’s and 2020’s.

Though Razib and Rufo first discuss his past life as a filmmaker, and in particular, Diamonds in the Dunes, a 2014 documentary about a baseball team in Xinjiang, most of the conversation revolves around the historical figures of the mid-to late-20th century that set the stage for the rise of woke culture and critical race theory. They begin with the elder statesmen of 1960’s radicalism, Frankfurt School critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. The exposition of Marcuse’s life is Rufo’s entrée into a discussion about “Cultural Marxism” that has defined much of his public profile over the last few years. Rufo elucidates the connection between radical academics and violent activists in the streets in the late 1960’s, and how it connects to protests in the 2010’s. He also traces the genealogy of many modern institutions back to 1960’s radicalism, including Marcuse’s personal connection to the field of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) through his wife, who pioneered its practices and terminology. Razib and Rufo also discuss the checkered life of one of Marcuse’s star students, Professor Angela Davis, whose involvement in violent terrorism in the 1960’s is curiously ignored by her academic supporters. Skipping much closer to the present, Rufo talks about political and social radicalism he witnessed in 2020 in Seattle and the events later in Portland, as the Pacific Northwest came to embrace “America’s Cultural Revolution.”

Finally, Razib asks Rufo for his take on the state of contemporary politics, and the path forward. Though the vast majority of America's Cultural Revolution focuses on the past, Rufo has embraced an active role in current politics, especially the conflict over New College in Florida. Shifting from a Left-Right frame, Rufo reflects on tensions within the ostensibly anti-woke Right, and the future of the American republic and its critics both from on the far Left and far Right.

On the third episode of the Intellectual Brown Web (IBW) Razib, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own Substack), Shadi Hamid of The Washingon Post (plus Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Substack) discuss the effects of the Hamas atrocities and the now impending Israeli invasion of Gaza on both geopolitics and American culture. Haider and Khan address why they are finally discussing the Israeli-Palestine conflict, which both have ‌long avoided. In contrast, Hamid and Hussain who have both long taken a scholarly and journalistic interest in the issue, now find themselves deeply engaged once more. Hamid in particular addresses what he sees as the eliminationist rhetoric coming out of some Israeli and American quarters in reaction to the terrorist actions, while Hussain argues that the coming divide will be between the West and the Global South. All four discuss whether 2023 will be similar to 2001, with a massive pivot in American culture and foreign policy forced by Islamist terrorism (conclusion: probably not, but there will be changes).

They also discuss the massive impact of the conflict in American culture already in just the last few days, in particular its relevance to cancel culture and the strident unapologetic anti-Israel reactions of radical Left activists. Hamid puts the spotlight on billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who is attempting to assemble a list of Harvard students who are members of organizations that backed a pro-Palestinian letter so he can have the option of not hiring them. For the last half a decade Hamid has been a vocal opponent of cancel culture, and he objects to its resurgence in a new form, as well as the turning away from avowed principles by old allies against wokeness. Hussain and Haider respond that most people are truly not principled, and appeal to elevated universal ideals solely it is in their interest.

Khan, Haider, Hamid and Hussain finally discuss the relationship of American Jews with the American Left, and prospects for a coalitional crackup, as well as the future of the relationship between Jews and Muslims in the US. Khan brings up the divergence between academia and the rest of American society, with universities and many faculty members remaining silent in marked contrast to the official response to other recent high-profile political events, while Hollywood and corporations have strongly taken Israel’s side.

They finish the conversation by reasserting the need for open discussion, free speech and an understanding and acceptance of human dignity, no matter one’s ethnicity, religion and nationality. Though these principles are violated on all sides, Haider emphasizes that ‌there still need to be principles, lest every discussion and debate collapse into a power game of all against all.

Related: A Special Place in Hell: Israel at War, Israel, Gaza, and the Double Standard on Cancel Culture, Who is Responsible for the War in Gaza? and Hamas is dragging Israel toward the abyss.

In September 2023, Harper Collins published Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, two months after Christopher Rufo’s America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Both these books tackle the same issue: the US’s Leftist cultural direction, especially since 2015, and what Matthew Yglesias termed the “Great Awokening” in 2019. Razib recently interviewed both authors, and today we release the first of two conversations over consecutive days so listeners can reflect on Hanania and Rufo’s divergent perspectives on one of the major themes of American political culture in the 2020’s.

First, Razib talks to Hanania, who holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from UCLA, about The Origins of Woke. Befitting his legal education, much of the book delves into the knock-on consequences of 1960’s legislation, particularly the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Hanania articulates the view that “wokeness” can be defined by the idea that any variation in outcome between groups must be ascribed to discrimination and that entertainment of alternative views (for example, that groups have different aptitudes and/or preferences for specific fields) is tantamount to racism. The Origins of Woke touches upon sex discrimination and the emergence of queer identity politics, but Hanania believes that the central through-line between the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the modern woke era is the black-white racial division in the US, and the fight for racial equality before the law morphing into a campaign for total equity of outcome in all domains of life. Synthesizing his background in law and political science, Hanania argues that a combination of vague initial legal frameworks and an activist bureaucracy have enabled the sharp detour from the original drafters’ intent with civil rights legislation instead into a total revolution of norms. He also points out that much of the framework for the woke revolution was put in place under the conservative Nixon administration, a pattern observed by Pat Buchanan in his 1975 book Conservative votes, liberal victories: Why the right has failed.

One of the major contentions of The Origins of Woke is that excessive focus on Andrew Breitbart’s assertion that “politics is downstream” of culture has led the Right down the wrong path to de facto defeatism. Hanania discusses how the “marketplace of ideas” model ultimately fails given the Left’s capture of all institutions that would arbitrate issues around the culture war. Rather, Hanania clearly believes that the path to the rollback of woke norms across the broader culture is through politics, and in particular the Republican party fully embracing its role as a reactive force against the American legal regime that was seeded in the 1960’s.

https://razib.substack.com

This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content...

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

Unsupervised Learning tends to steer clear of topics “ripped from the headlines,” but the occasional exception must be made. Today, Razib talks about the intersection of religion, caste and American law and policy with Sundar Iyer and Sudha Jagannathan. Jagannathan, an MBA, is now a board member of the Coalition of Hindus of North America, after working in technology and sales in the Bay Area for 30 years. Iyer is a technology entrepreneur, advisor and angel investor, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science. But this conversation is not about technology. It's about a “current event” that took over Iyer’s life for the better part of the past three years. In the year 2020, California regulators sued Cisco Systems for “for internally enforcing the caste hierarchy.” Iyer was one of two individuals named in that case. For most of the 2020’s so far, Iyer’s life was turned upside down, before the California Civil Rights Department dismissed its case against him (though it continues to pursue Cisco).

When the this issue first emerged in the news, some blogs, group chats and email lists surfaced points that should have made anyone skeptical that Iyer was a casteist: he is an atheist who does not identify as Hindu, and his personal views on social issues are quite liberal. These facts are in the public record because twenty years ago, long before he was in the public eye, Iyer wrote about his perspectives in a blog post expressing his strident atheism and rejection of caste. Now Iyer is speaking out about what he experienced, and how progressive cultural and political institutions are being weaponized by activists pursuing narrow, self-interested aims. As a successful entrepreneur, Iyer has the resources to fight to clear his name, and stand up for the objective truth against what he sees as the manipulations of the media and activists. Jagannathan also offers her own perspective as a devout Hindu who is from a “lower caste” background who takes issue with comments made in the mainstream media about her religion and culture, where the caste system is conflated with Hinduism and Indian identity, and assertions are made that the caste is a fundamental part of her faith.

Though this episode focuses on the institution of caste and the experience of Indian Americans specifically, it is more broadly about the significant tradeoffs of embracing simple solutions in a complex world. The social justice movement and the American elite political class are fundamentally egalitarian, currently ever alert for oppressors and the oppressed. In the process, innocent individuals get swept up in witch hunts, as activists attempt to find causes worthy of their attention and outrage. Iyer’s experience is not unique, insofar as many, many, Americans have fallen under the narrowed eye of crusading Human Resources departments, bent on transforming workplace disputes into socio-political dramas. The ultimate question is whether an exceedingly diverse America can proceed forward as a dynamic economy and culture despite the burden of ever-present litigation and workplace conflict created when our elites fixate on what divides us, rather than what unites us.

In the US, roughly 1 in 33 infants are born with a congenital disability, about 25% of which have an identified genetic cause. For the first time,, parents can use Orchid’s whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for these genetic variants and mitigate their baby’s disease risk. Check out orchidhealth.com, and use code RAZIB when signing up to skip the waitlist.

What is caste? This is a question many Americans have been asking since the publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (an Oprah's Book Club selection). On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks at length about the historical, cultural and genetic aspects of caste. He explains the genetic origins and impacts of the practice in the Indian subcontinent, and how that contrasts with “caste” in other societies like feudal Japan. Razib also explores how caste, a European-origin word, came to bracket a sociological phenomenon that includes two related concepts, varna and jati, and how the former is abstract while the latter is concrete.

Caste in the Indian subcontinent has massive social and political implications. Razib talks about the demographics of caste, and how this is relevant to considerations of equity in a nation-state originally founded on socialistic principles. In the subcontinent, caste is not simply a Hindu phenomenon but extends to Muslims and Christians. And in a subcontinent of nearly 2 billion people, caste expresses itself in varied ways depending on region.

Finally, Razib ponders the future of the institution. If diasporic communities like Mauritius and Guyana are any guide, caste has a dim future. With urban jati exogamy rates increasing constantly over the last generation, Razib predicts that in the 22nd century caste in the subcontinent will be viewed as a outmoded practice continued only by a few communities. Caste is a question that is relevant to both the past and the present, but the forces of modernization will eat away at its foundations going forward.

Today, Razib revisits The Horse, the Wheel, and Language with David Anthony, emeritus professor at Hartwick College and collaborator with David Reich’s ancient DNA research group at Harvard University. Anthony and Razib survey the last two years in terms of questions regarding the domestication of the horse, the spread of the wheel, and Yamnaya steppe herders' language; subjects of his 2007 book. They also discuss the exponential growth in our understanding of the paleodemography of Bronze Age Eurasian nomads since 2015’s publication of Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe, a study for which Anthony provided many of the samples.

Razib asks Anthony how his understanding of the rise of Indo-Europeans has or has not changed, in the wake of new data and novel interpretations over the last two years. Anthony reiterates the broad outlines he has been proposing for decades: the Yamnaya nomads of the Bronze-Age Eurasian steppe were the proto-Indo-Europeans, full stop. He also addresses those who argue for the Corded Ware culture of East-Central Europe being considered a sister, as opposed to a daughter, culture of the Yamnaya. Anthony points out that analysts in Reich’s group have discovered individuals who are apparent relatives between the Yamnaya and Corded Ware, indicative of a close and tight bond. Like the Danish archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen, Anthony believes that the pastoralist people who invaded Northern Europe 5,000 years ago should be thought of as fundamentally Yamnaya. He also addresses those skeptical of Yamnaya origins, positing perhaps some discomfort with the idea that modern people descend from warlike nomadic groups.

Finally, Razib presses Anthony about new theories regarding more detailed structure of early Indo-European migrations. Does he accept the contention that most Indo-European groups descend from the Corded Ware, while Armenians, Greeks, Tocharians and Illyrians descend from the Yamnaya directly? What more elements to the narrative are going to be added beyond the broad assertion that the Yamnaya were the proto-Indo-Europeans?

Related podcasts: David Anthony: the origin of Indo-Europeans, Thomas Olander: the origin and spread of Indo-European languages, James P. Mallory: finding the Indo-Europeans and Kristian Kristiansen: the birth of Northern Europe.

Selected publications:

• The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe

• Population genomics of bronze age Eurasia

• Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

• The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes

• Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages

Today, Razib talks to Erik Hoel, host of the Substack The Intrinsic Perspective and author of The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. An academic neuroscientist by training, in The World Behind the World Hoel outlines the emergence of modern neuroscience, and where it went wrong in terms of the field’s researchers' focus. But first, Hoel discusses human understanding of the mind, and how it has changed over time. He gives his take on Julian Jayne’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and explains that it is unlikely that consciousness emerged after the Bronze Age as posited in the book. Instead, The World Behind the World argues that the differentiation between the inner world and the outer world, the intrinsic perspective of literature and psychology and the extrinsic perspective of physics and biology arose with the Classical Greeks 2,500 years ago. Hoel also observes that a modern perspective on one’s inner world and psychological complexity so evident in Greco-Roman texts rapidly fades again after the fall of Rome and the regression during the Dark Ages, when literacy declined and text became refocused exclusively on the functional external world, whether it be tax records or agronomy manuals.

The World Behind the World is a book-length argument fleshing out Hoel’s contention that understanding consciousness is, and must be, at the heart of neuroscience. Though studies of the biology and chemistry of axons and glial cells make sense from a reductionistic perspective, Hoel makes a convincing case that contemporary neuroscience models fail to understand how the brain works. The World Behind the World suggests modern neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic, like biology before evolution or physics before Newtonian mechanics:  merely a collection of fascinating observations and detailed mechanisms. Hoel maintains that a true neuroscience theory with consciousness as its center and organizing principle is necessary to understand how the intrinsic world emerged and functions.

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to internet commentator formerly known as default friend who is perhaps better known today as the internet culture writer Katherine Dee. Dee is a regular contributor to Retvrn, The Washington Examiner, The American Mind, Tablet Magazine and UnHerd. She has also recently written a piece for Compact: Why You’re Never Leaving Twitter. 

But first, Razib and Dee discuss how they have known each other for nearly a decade, going back to 2015 on the site formerly known as Twitter, and more substantially as residents of Austin in the late teens. Since 2019 Dee's existence has been a peripatetic one; after leaving Texas and first moving to the Bay Area, she then lived in the Pacific Northwest, before finally settling in Chicago. Working in advertising, and then in big tech, Dee has finally settled on a career as a freelancer, with all the freedom and uncertainty that entails.

Razib asks Dee whether there is today, in 2023, any culture that isn’t somehow connected to the internet. She agrees about the pervasive nature of digital and social media, and how thickly it is interleaved into the lives of younger Millennials and Zoomers. And yet as a counterpoint to this conception of a revolution that has transmuted “IRL” life online, Razib argues that ‌social media is just an amplification of “bulletin board system” (BBS) culture which existed as early as the 1980’s. Dee then reflects on her maturation as an observer of all things internet through Twitter and Discord, and the shadow-impact of more obscure platforms like Tumblr and 4chan on our broader culture, beneath the notice of the wider population of “normies,” while Razib reminds her how small Twitter’s user base is compared to platforms like Facebook or YouTube (the latter are measured in billions, while Twitter retains some 450 million active users).

In her piece, Why You’re Never Leaving Twitter, Dee argues that the anemic showing of dozens of Twitter clones and pretenders in the last decade argues that the platform just isn’t going to be dethroned from its central role in the media, and thereby wider American culture. From right-wing to left-wing imitators, or Facebook’s Threads, every challenger has failed to eat into Twitter’s critical position as a nexus in the media ecosystem, a central node in transmitting information throughout diverse subcultures. But Razib plays devil's advocate, musing whether Elon Musk’s erratic tenure since assuming ownership of the platform, his change of its brand to X, his petty beefs with publishers like Substack and ex cathedra pronouncements of major feature changes, might actually spell the end of the platform. Though Dee seems skeptical that even Musk could destroy his new property, not seeing any replacement on the horizon, suggests to her that the age of a single central information switchboard for the internet may be ephemeral and one we look back on as a particular and unique moment in history, just as we do the age of three major television networks in the 20th century.

Today Razib talks to Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, a Lincoln Fellow with the Claremont Institute and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Stepman also hosts two podcasts, High Noon and Clown Car. She and Razib first discuss the current distress, both economic and cultural, in higher education as several decades of bloat, inflation-beating cost increases and political radicalism run up against their natural limits. Stepman’s recent policy report, Taxing Universities, tackles the massive fiscal bill that the American people will face in the next generation as bad loans backed by the federal government finally come due. Razib admits that as a member of “Generation X” he was unaware of the massive change in educational debt since the public sector took over almost all lending after the 2008 financial crisis. A graphic that illustrates the impending crisis comes from The New York Times:

The takeaway is that student loans originated from 2009 onward exhibit a pattern where Latinos, blacks, and nearly half of women, owe more now in 2023 than when they began payments after graduation. Stepman discusses the broader reasons for this dynamic, the expansion of higher education, the rise of credentialing in lower-paying “pink collar” jobs that saddle people with debt they can’t service and an evidence-free elite consensus that more education results in more value and skills. In contrast to the current orthodoxy, Razib argues that the bachelor’s degree is often simply a signaler of intelligence and conscientiousness, and the expansion of this diploma to nearly half the youngest age cohort has diluted its utility.

In the second half of the podcast, Razib probes Stepman on how she arrived at a relatively conservative cultural stance despite being a secular native of Palo Alto, California, and a current resident of Manhattan. Stepman’s starting point is that males and females are fundamentally different because of our biology, and we must organize human societies around this fact, rather than attempting to ignore this reality while striving for an egalitarian utopia. Stepman calls herself an anti-feminist because she believes that this denial of human nature goes back to the beginning of the movement, with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792.

https://razib.substack.com

This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Dr. Cory J. Clark, a behavioral scientist and executive director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania. Clark got her Ph.D. in social psychology at UC Irvine, but her interests have broadened over her career as is clear in a diverse oeuvre.

First, Razib and Clark talk about the culture of self-censorship within science due to politicization and intra-scientific politics. They discuss whether fraud is more damaging to the career of a senior or junior scientist, and the crisis coming for behavioral economics in the wake of the Francesco Gino and Dan Ariely ethics scandals. While Razib offers the prescription of viewpoint diversity, Clark argues that a recommitment to objectivity and truth as the fundamental values of science is needed. They then move on to her major current project on “adversarial collaboration.” Whereas in “normal science” two rival research groups may hold to conflicting hypotheses for decades, with outsiders unable to adjudicate, Clark argues that researchers with differing views should come together to converge upon the truth.

Her interest in the culture of science leads naturally to a broader concern about human cultural equilibria. In The Evolution of Relentless Badassery, Clark argues that a particular personality type is socially and evolutionarily favored. Razib and Clark discuss whether we live in a time of peace so that disagreeable violent characters are at a low ebb in their stature, and perhaps in the face of cultural chaos the “badass,” figures like Michael Corleone in The Godfather films may reemerge to establish order and ruthless justice.

The discussion loops back to a consideration of the values that unite scientists, and the cultural and political winds moving through the profession that might threaten to blow it off course as an enterprise, might leave it more a social club than a venerable institution to generate information. Clark is candid that she is not sure she would recommend heterodox students even attempt to join the academy.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Alex Young of UCLA and James Lee of the University of Minnesota about quantitative genetics and its relationship to complex traits and the genomic revolution. Young, trained as a mathematician, and Lee, trained as a psychologist, have both converged upon research programs exploring the role of genetics in generating variation in human behavior and disease. First, the trio reviews quantitative genetics’ modern basis in R. A. Fisher’s 1918 paper The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance, and how the field emerged from the same intellectual root as population genetics in the first decades of the 20th century. They then discuss phenomena closely associated with quantitative characteristics: polygenicity, heritability and the central limit theorem. Razib also outlines the role of population genetic parameters like mutation, selection and drift in shaping the distribution of any given trait, particularly the characteristic’s variation and median values.

After a deep dive into major concerns like the difference between heritability in the “broad sense” and “narrow sense,” what additive genetic variance is and why it’s so important to evolution and applied breeding and contemporary heritability estimates of traits like height and intelligence using twin studies and family-based genomic analyses, the conversation concludes with a discussion of Gregory Clark’s new PNAS paper, The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022. What are its implications? Why did it ignite a firestorm on social media? Lee in fact contributed a comment on the paper to PNAS, while Young has tackled its methods and conclusions on social media.

In a conversation that stretches on for over two hours, Razib, Lee and Young touch upon many aspects of a discipline that combines the statistical insights of the 20th century with the genomic technologies of the 21st. Lee also expounds on a result from one of his papers that didn’t make it into the final publication due to reviewer skepticism: what he calls a “beer-chugging phenotype” reported from the study of twins.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Aporia Magazine’s Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist who earned her Ph.D. in David Buss’ lab at the University of Texas in Austin. Fleischman discusses the origins of her field, its methodological framework and presuppositions, and why evolutionary psychologists seem obsessed with sex. Razib also brings up the relationship of evolutionary psychology to primatology and the role that behavioral studies of common chimpanzees and bonobos play in understanding what Jared Diamond termed the “third chimpanzee,” humans. They then circle back to the importance of the reality of heritable “hard-wired” behaviors in evolutionary psychology, and its relationship to behavior genetics.

Fleischman and Razib then move on to eugenics and the controversy that ensued after Fleischman’s piece You’re probably a eugenicist. They wonder how narrowly to constrain the term; for example, is the ubiquitous termination of fetuses with Down Syndrome eugenic if those individuals brought to term cannot themselves reproduce? Is selection for intelligence and height in your marriage partner eugenical? Razib and Fleischman also talk about the eugenical impact of abortion, including the decline of crime, and why the Left does not talk extensively about this topic. Fleischman discusses eugenics’ future with the rise of reproductive technology and a more detailed understanding of complex trait architecture. The possibility of embryo selection's rise brings up concrete concerns and resurrects the specter of bottom-up eugenics, despite the abolishment and banning of top-down eugenics. Fleischman and her co-authors tackle ‌‌embryo selection for complex traits in a recent piece in Aporia. 

https://razib.substack.com

This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nicola Buskirk of Elessar Books (see her Substack). A 2022 graduate of Stanford University, Buskirk has already had positions at Substack (she was behind the At Length series), Thiel Foundation, Hoover Institution and now, Protocol Labs. At Elessar she is “putting long out-of-print books back into print so that they may be easily read and studied by a new generation of readers.” 

Before asking about her new project, Razib asks her about Elessar, an alternative name for the character known as Aragorn. They discuss why J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series, written in the first half of the 20th century, appeals to young people born in the 21st century. Buskirk believes that much of the attraction is in Tolkien’s depiction of good and evil in a manner that edifies and educates but with subtlety and complexity. They discuss the differences between Tolkien’s fantasy writing style, and that of his colleague and friend C. S. Lewis, whose Narnia series was far more nakedly allegorical than The Lord of the Rings . Razib and Buskirk also discuss whether Tolkien’s work was fundamentally Roman Catholic, as the author claimed, or whether its purview is broader, explaining its lasting appeal. They also touch upon the relationship of the films to the books, and how Peter Jackson pulled off the sort of adaption that Amazon failed at.

Then the conversation shifts to why Buskirk began Elessar Books, the resurfacing of knowledge and wisdom for a generation weaned on smartphones and addicted to TikTok. She talks about conversations with peers where they were amazed by her insights, even though she freely admitted to them that she simply stood on the shoulders of the ancients, whose ideas are freely available in older books. Razib and Buskirk discuss if what Antonio Garcia Martinez calls the age of orality is a reversion to preliterate and frankly more primitive modalities of thought, and her attempt to resurrect, maintain and perpetuate a culture of deep literacy among her technology-addicted generation.

https://razib.substack.com

This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content.

On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Hannah Frankman about the past, present and future of education. Frankman is a Hazlitt Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education, the founder of Rebel Educator, and the host of an eponymous podcast (Spotify, Apple and YouTube). Education as a discipline has been a human concern since Plato outlined an idealized system of universal pedagogy in The Republic, later to be rejected by his pupil Aristotle's lost treatise On Education in favor of a more targeted and elitist system. 

In the American context, the field has been riven by tensions between the bottom-up forces that encouraged a well-informed citizenry, resulting in New England being the world’s first universally literate society, and top-down political forces that led to the growth of secular and universal public education in the 19th century. Beginning in March 2020 the world of education came into our living rooms as the COVID-19 pandemic sent students out of the classroom into the alternative universe of “zoom school,” bringing parents face to-face with the day-to-day of the current educational framework.

For many Americans, the chaos and trials of the pandemic years have them reconsidering schools and entertaining alternatives to the current system, which seemed so unprepared for the exigencies of the present. Frankman believes her non-traditional background equips her to understand the challenges of our current era, first being homeschooled, and then going straight into the workforce with Praxis, a college alternative that fosters skills that enable entrepreneurship in young people. She explains exactly what homeschooling in the American context means, from those motivated by religious concerns who mimic much of the curriculum of traditional institutions and simply modify or supplement it with Christian materials, all the way to “unschooling,” whereby students are much more self-guided and undirected. Frankman also recounts her own personal experiences with nontraditional education, the pitfalls and benefits, and why she left the traditional path when she was just six years old. They then discuss the reality that the last few years have seen crashing test scores across the countries and a widespread realization that aspects of the traditional system that might have been well geared toward producing factory workers in the 20th century may be ill-suited to the “information economy” of the 21st century. Frankman makes the case for a diversity and pluralism of responses, and she and Razib talk about various paths that other nations have taken, including the more structured systems of East Asia. Finally, they discuss the future of Rebel Educator, and her vision for a future of American education focused on choice, experimentation and flexibility better suited to our current learning options and the needs of a modern economy.

https://razib.substack.com

This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content.

Today Razib talks to Lyman Stone, a demographer and Ph.D. candidate at McGill University, about the fall, rise and fall of religion in America. In 2020, Stone published a report, Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and Its Recent Decline, where he outlined the demographic and religious history of the US, and its possible future. They first cover the historical context of American religion in the 18th century, reviewing the elite rise in secularism, the radicalism of the founding’s Disestablishmentarianism and the early 19th-century legislation against the mixing of church and state. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the early 1800’s that the US combined religious pluralism on a social scale, high levels of personal piety and governmental secularism. This was a sharp break from European traditions, and Stone addresses the thesis whether this explains why America still remains much more religious in terms of observance than nations like England and Germany.

But despite America’s comparative religiosity, it has become much more secular in the last generation. Razib talks to Stone about the rise of the religious “nones” across the  Western world, and the decline of social conservatives within the Republican party. Stone points out that for most, religious identity and level of practice are established during the teen years, with religious education (or lack thereof) being the biggest predictor of religious adherence (or lack thereof). The relative secularism of Zoomers and Millennials, Americans born after 1980, presages a much less Christian America as the 21st century’s first half progresses. But Stone argues that this is not necessarily the final state of American religiosity; secular America in 1800 underwent the Second Great Awakening, which led to a much more evangelical nation by 1900. Rather than a linear progress toward an end state, religious history seems cyclical.

https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib hosts three guests, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own Substack), Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute (and Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Substack), for the second episode of the “Intellectual Brown Web” (here’s episode #1). Razib, Haider, Hamid and Hussain discuss the recent clashes between Muslim Americans and the LBTQIA+ movement. Was it inevitable? Was the “War on Terror” simply a two-decade interregnum interrupting the alignment of Muslims with social conservatives? And what is the place of Muslim intellectuals and politicians in the progressive movement going forward?

Haider has written about how the Muslim-progressive alliance in American politics will unravel, and in this episode, she defends the contention that it naturally falls out of the theological propositions embedded within Islam. Hamid and Hussain in contrast argue that though the tensions are real, there is a possibility of a pluralistic solution, preserving fidelity to Islamic beliefs. All agree that the main issue is the challenge that progressive reworking of gender identity poses to traditional norms and traditional religion and that the Muslim immigrants in places like Hamtramck speak for many Americans in their confusion and sublimated hostility to the changes that they see in American society around them.

Related: ‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags, American Muslims are increasingly ready to find common ground with conservatives against the radical Left and CAIR demands apology from Montgomery County councilwoman over 'offensive' remarks.

In the fall of 2022  Liz Truss was the UK's Prime Minister for 44 days. Her tenure was cut short by turmoil in the financial markets, as her attempts to roll out policies similar to the US’s 1980’s program of “Reaganomics” that combined lower taxes and higher deficits triggered panic and an intervention from the Bank of England. In retrospect, the problem was that the British elite periodically forgets that it’s the not US, it’s not the largest economy in the world and the pound sterling is not the world’s reserve currency. The US, unlike any other nation, can print money to escape its fiscal straijackets. 

History hangs over Britain, and the shadows of the past always impinge upon the present. The UK still sees itself as an imperial nation, but today India has a larger economy than its one-time colonizer. The idea of the British Empire persisted deep into the 20th century, but the US was already the larger economy by the end of the 19th century. With World War I, the UK became a debtor to the US, and the power dynamic of the “special relationship” inverted as the mother country became the junior partner.

Today Razib talks to Samuel Mcilhagga about Britain’s contemporary status as a post-imperial nation-state caught in economic stagnancy. They discuss his piece in Palladium, Britain Is Dead, which is a reflection of the structural and human realities of a fallen empire. Razib and Mcilhagga address the recent divergence between the UK and US from a point of rough parity in 2008, at the peak influence of high finance in developed economies, which placed the City of London in an advantageous position. Economic stagnation and high inflation have afflicted the UK since the great recession, and Britain has lagged niy only the US but fallen behind its continental peers, France and Germany. Mcilhagga attributed some of this to the British elite's inability to move beyond their role as imperial administrators and rentiers; he contrasts the productive and economically innovative American oligarchs to the complacent British upper class. Razib wonders about the strangeness of the difference between the two societies given their shared history, language and culture. Mcilhagga paints a picture of a small and prosperous professional class that benefited from globalization, and a broader populace that has been slowly ground into immiseration over the last two generations.

https://razib.substack.com

This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content.

Mukherjee is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute and a Ph.D. student in American politics at Boston College, where her dissertation will focus on affirmative action. Razib asks Mukherjee to discuss the origin of affirmative action as it is practiced in the US today, starting with the Bakke decision in 1978, and then moving on to Grutter vs. Bollinger in 2003. She then moves to the details of the current cases, in particular Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, where the plaintiffs assert that Harvard University discriminates against Asian Americans in admissions, and engages in “racial balancing.”

Razib and Mukherjee then explore the implications of the decision. Razib wonders about the implication for Harvard in particular, which is, to great extent, the finishing school of the American ruling class. Is Harvard’s mission sustainable if 40% of the student body is Asian American? Mukherjee points out that these demographic trends, the rise of Asian Americans proportionally and the decline of historically represented groups, have been occurring despite affirmative action, for example, the decline of Jewish Americans in the Ivy League over the last generation. Additionally, both Razib and Mukherjee agree universities are certain to engage in both evasion and massive resistance to the ruling. Mukherjee argues that the current moves against standardized testing anticipate the program of evasion that we can expect in the future, where holistic admissions can allow the administrators’ preferences to continue.

In June 1991, The New York Times published a piece titled “Scientists Study Ancient DNA for Glimpses of Past Worlds.” Published a year after Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park, on which the 1993 blockbuster would be based, the article opens “Will it one day become possible to breed a living dinosaur from genes preserved in fossils?” More than 30 years on, we obviously have not bred a living dinosaur, nor come even close. But the early 1990’s kicked off the first age of ancient DNA with massive optimism, stimulated by the spread of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology, which allowed the amplification of minute amounts of genetic material. I  remember this particular article because an extract was passed around my 8th-grade science class. Today I talk to Dr. Elizabeth Jones, author of Ancient DNA: The Making of a Celebrity Science, about the excitement in paleogenetics in the 1990s, its subsequent retrenchment as a field, and the prompt renaissance in the late 2000’s under the leadership of Svante Pääbo and Eske Willerslev. 

Jones first articulates her idea of what “celebrity science” is. Rather than science being driven by an individual, like Albert Einstein or James Watson, she argues that fields of science itself can become a celebrity due to strong public interest. This was clearly true in the 1990’s, with the frequent popular press stories about dinosaur DNA and the tie-in to Jurassic Park, and in the late 2000’s and down to the present, culminating in Pääbo being awarded a Nobel Prize. In her book, Jones views celebrity science as a wholly positive development, allowing for a full exploration of the possibilities of a field, and putting the spotlight on possible problems so that science’s self-correction mechanisms can kick-in. This was certainly true with the first “hype cycle” of ancient DNA, when it turned out that many of the specific results were actually the result of modern contamination. Jones outlines how in fact it was Pääbo and his collaborators who were the skeptics demanding stricter methods and frameworks before publication. Ancient DNA then recounts how a second hype cycle was triggered by genomic sequencing’s integration into paleogenetics, opening up an avenue to obtain the whole genomes of Neanderthals and other species.

Jones’ Ph.D. work, which led to Ancient DNA, was just concluded in 2015. But she recalls the mad last-second scramble to update the manuscript at the last second because of this last half a decade’s flood of results. They consider the field’s future possibilities, and finally the prospects for genuine retrieval of biological material from actual dinosaurs, the original ambition in the 1990’s

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to journalist Lee Fang. Formerly an investigative reporter at The Intercept and a contributing writer at The Nation, Fang began his journalism career at ThinkProgress. As an undergraduate, Fang was president of the University of Maryland College Democrats, and interned for Democratic representatives Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Steny Hoyer. He was also the first intern for the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America. Today Fang publishes his findings on his eponymous Substack.

Razib asks Fang what it’s like to do investigative journalism without institutional support. A common assertion in relation to the decline of the mainstream media is that only organizations with deep pockets and long time horizons can fund such work, but Fang has already exposed Pierre Omidyar’s support for defunding the police while personally investing in private security companies, discovered that a major California diversity consultant was defrauding the state and found that tech companies put in mass applications for lower-paid H1-B hires after mass layoffs of mostly Americans. Fang attests to there being a surfeit of public documents there for the taking; what's needed is just the will and determination to dig.

Razib and Fang also discuss what it’s like to start out in progressive journalism, but now find yourself in an ideological space without a clear partisan valence. Though Fang clearly comes out of the Left, some of his findings, like that Pfizer funded lobbying groups who pushed vaccine mandates, are now more palatable to the Right. He is also unafraid to take on establishment progressive pundits, like Mehdi Hassan, whom Fang systematically exposed as having a history of engaging in personal attacks based on accusations of racism as well as engaging in plagiarism.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib hosts Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery and The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. A columnist at The New York Times, often on political and social topics, Douthat also reviews movies for National Review. Today Razib talks to him about a topic that is a bit off the beaten path: why is genre fiction, and fantasy literature, still relevant today, and how, in the last generation, did it break out of its cultural ghetto?

First, Douthat addresses the massive role that J. R. R. Tolkien’s works have had on the field, how most of modern fantasy is either an imitation of his works or a response to them, and the creative limitations that that circumstance imposes. Razib and Douthat then discuss the various shifts in the genre style over the last 20 years, toward a more gritty and morally ambiguous style exemplified by George R. R. Martin, and the cultural breakthrough of Game of Thrones in the 2010’s. Douthat avers that in some ways genre has come into its own, with the decline in the cultural status of realistic fiction and drama, and the ascension of “comic book movies.” While Razib believes that Marvel films are arguably fantasy, Douthat disagrees, believing their contemporary settings disqualify them. They also address whether fantasy is actually simply the channeling of premodern narrative styles that go back to the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Iliad. They address the somewhat exceptional success of Game of Thrones on television and the failure of Amazon’s Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time. Finally, Douthat talks about his unpublished fantasy novel, The Falcon’s Children. 

On this week’s Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back a favorite repeat guest, Samo Burja, to discuss matters future, present and past. Burja founded the consulting firm Bismarck Analysis and developed the “great founder theory.” He contributes to Palladium Magazine, Asia Times, City Journal, and The National Interest. Burja’s first appearance on the podcast, recorded in the fall of 2020, spiraled into a long discussion on the Chinese past and future, and Razib follows up to find out where he thinks the Peoples’ Republic is in 2023 and where it will go in the near future. Though Burja acknowledges that bullishness on Chinese power has abated, and Xi’s leadership has left much to be desired in its outcomes during the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic, he asserts that China’s capacity as a manufacturing power cannot be underestimated. Even if the vision of a Chinese hyperpower that prevailed at the end of the 2010’s has receded, Bujra foresees a multipolar world. Jumping to the present, Razib also revisits the Russia-Ukraine war, a topic they discussed in a subsequent podcast last year. Burja notes that the rise of Ukrainian nationalism over the last few years is a somewhat unexpected and novel development, and Putin clearly made a misstep. That being said, Razib and Burja agree that the war seems likely to drag on indefinitely as neither participant has a plausible clean exit strategy.

Finally, the second half of the conversation jumps back to the past, as they discuss a piece Burja co-authored for Palladium two years ago, Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought. Here Burja believes he is now on firmer ground than in 2021, as new findings even more ancient than Göbekli Tepe have since been uncovered. Razib and Burja discuss the difficulty of navigating between the excessive conservatism of archaeological science and the flights of fantasy that some popularizers like Graham Hancock indulge in when it comes to the idea of “Ice Age civilizations.” All that being said, Burja believes it is not outside of the realm of possibility that a civilization as complex as ancient Egypt may have existed during the Ice Age.

A few years ago now, Razib talked to Tim Lee about his new Substack Full Stack Economics, which featured deep dives into economic issues (as well as some on-the-ground-reporting, like when he drove Lyft to get a feel for its economics). But recently, Lee decided to put Full Stack Economics on pause to focus on a new Substack: Understanding AI. Artificial intelligence is hot right now, but Lee covered tech for a decade for Washington Post, Ars Technica, and Vox.com, and has a master’s degree in computer science from Princeton, so Razib was curious about what he’s learned. Recently two pieces seem to illustrate the alternative faces of generative AI and LLMs, I cloned my voice with AI and my mother couldn’t tell the difference and Why I'm not worried about AI causing mass unemployment.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib and Lee discuss the impact of artificial intelligence, the good, bad and trivial. Lee makes the case that AI might be like the internet, transforming narrow aspects of knowledge-work and enabling a richer culture, but without clear revolutionary implications for the economy. His thesis hinges on the fact that AI cannot operate in the material world due to the primitive state of robotics, though Razib wonders if this barrier too might fall in the near future. Overall, Lee suggests that the AI “hype machine” is being driven by the fact that information workers who set the terms of public discussion are the ones likely to be most impacted; waiters, plumbers and nurses, in contrast, will be just fine.

Razib and Lee also discuss the field of existential risk analysis. Lee found Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies unimpressive due to the fiat assumption that fields like nanotechnology could be manipulated by AI when nanotechnology itself is in quite a primitive state. Overall, Lee’s perception is that the “doomers” in the AI punditry field tend to be science fiction writers who are better at spinning narratives than doing analysis.

Recently, scientists discovered that a two-year mega-drought beginning in 1198 BC hastened the Hittite Empire’s collapse. The finding sheds new light on the history of the decades around 1200 BC, adding specificity to the timing and cause for the period’s social and political chaos. Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib discusses the “Bronze Age Collapse,” the end of the first globalized world.

This collapse marked the end of a multi-century period when the Near East’s empires and states had matured to the point where a common system of diplomacy and trade could emerge, centering on the three major foci of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Anatolia, but including smaller states like the kingdoms of Greece and the Levant. The end of this world was so sharp and abrupt that many regions, like Greece, lost their memory of these centuries, plunging into a “Dark Age,” when urban life disappeared and life regressed back to a Neolithic scale. The Hittites were entirely forgotten, recalled only in a few mentions in the Bible.

Razib discusses whether these sorts of shifts are inevitable in any sufficiently complex social system, or whether external shocks like climate change are necessary. What can the end of the Bronze Age tell us about other civilizational collapses?

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Peter Nimitz, the author behind the Nemets Substack, which explores topics as diverse as the 2014 Donbass War and the likelihood of Eurasian migration into Chad thousands of years ago. Razib and Nimitz walk through his recent post, the Seven Ages of Western Eurasia: A brief outline of the 11,700 years from the Anatolian Farmers to the Present. In the piece, he explores the changes that Europe and West Asia have undergone since the end of the last Ice Age, including the rise and fall of pre-literate civilizations before written history, and the recurrent social and economic collapses from which humans have had to rebuild. Razib and Nimitz have similar interests, but where Razib focuses more on genetic relationships, Nimitz tends to dive deep into archaeology, supplementing his understanding of the migration of peoples with paleogenetics. They also discuss the proto-civilizations of the Ice Age, including nascent farming communities that might date to over 20,000 years ago. The conversation repeatedly circles back to the theme that paleogenetics has had a transformative effect on interpreting archaeological sites and our understanding of the migrations of past peoples. https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content.

Alex Feinberg is anything but your typical trainer. An economics graduate from Vanderbilt, Feinberg willed himself to become a professional baseball player through focus and hard work and then talked his way into a sales and business development job at Google. In the late 2010’s Feinberg moved into the crypto space, but found that one precondition to success was having a large Twitter following. So he pivoted and focused on growing his Twitter following, and noticed that his lifestyle tweets, and images of him highlighting his fitness and dietary regime, were the ones that gained traction and got him followers.

Today Razib talks to Feinberg about how he helps people optimize their health, and how that might apply to other aspects of their life, like getting a raise at work through changing your presentation and delivery. Feinberg explains his methods rely on intuition and try to leverage your cognitive biases, as opposed to working against them. Razib probes whether these methods are appropriate for everyone; perhaps there are cognitive and physical parameters that help in terms of optimization. Feinberg admits his techniques are more effective for males than females. For example, it is much easier to gain muscle mass by simply changing nutrition and lifting if you have high testosterone. The Feinberg phenotype is not accessible to all.

Feinberg and Razib also talk about his experiences in the corporate world, in particular at Google. Feinberg claims that in 2011 Google was a much more libertarian company than it was by the time he left in 2018. In particular, Feinberg noticed that many executives and senior managers began to lie and willfully mislead employees in order to scale the corporate ladder. These experiences helped convince him that the corporate world was not for him, and over the last five years, his focus has been on developing independent revenue streams through his coaching, training and books.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Adam Mastroianni, who runs the Experimental History Substack. Mastroianni was the inaugural guest on the Intrinsic Perspective podcast, hosted by Erik Hoel, where they discussed his post, The rise and fall of peer review - Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing (see also his follow-up, The dance of the naked emperors). Mastroianni opened a can of worms; the post has more than 800 likes and more than 330 comments. Razib asks Mastroianni about the fiercely positive and negative reactions to his contention that modern peer review has outlived its utility. They also unveil the historically contingent origins of the practice in the mid-20th century, and how it came to be seen as a holy enterprise necessary to science. Both agree that scientific publishing needs a paradigm shift; a topic that Razib tackled in 2014 with the Genome Biology comment Dragging a scientific publishing into the 21st century.

Razib and Mastroianni then discuss Experimental History, a Substack devoted to social psychology and meta-science. Why has Mastroianni decided to devote a substantial amount of energy to this project, as opposed to just publishing in journals?  Experimental History touches on some of the experimental social psychology research Mastroianni has been involved in, but it also focuses on some of the generally understood findings in psychology and neuroscience, and why they’re true or false. In a world of academic science saturated with Ph.D. level researchers, Razib and Mastroianni explore the communication possibilities inherent in the Substack model.

Finally, Mastroianni unpacks his opinion that even many of the robust statistically significant findings in social psychology don’t matter. He believes that the lack of a single theory blocks proper understanding in psychology, and many of the results in his field are both uninteresting and fail to lead to a nontrivial increase in knowledge.

This week on Unsupervised Learning, Razib and his guest, David McKay, of the Standing on the Shoulders of Giants podcast (Razib was an early guest), discuss the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the prospects for artificial general intelligence (AGI). This discussion arose after Razib heard McKay’s explainer, Zen and the Art of ChatGPT, a 30-minute layman’s intro to the topic, where he breaks down the technical elements that come together to allow for AI. In this episode, McKay, a Cambridge University-trained computer scientist who has worked at Hotmail and Google, digs deeper into the nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) and how they give rise to probabilistic generative AI like ChatGPT and whether we should be worried.

Razib’s conversation with McKay follows another recent episode on AI. I  the earlier podcast, Nikolai Yakovenko: GPT-3 and the rise of the thinking machines, the interviewee, a computer scientist, was relatively sanguine about the world-ending possibilities of AGI. McKay generally takes the same position, highlighting the reality that most computer scientists and AI researchers are less worried about science-fictional apocalyptic scenarios than the general public or AI-skeptics like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom (the author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies) are. And yet the reason that AI is so topical is it seems that the development of the technology is proceeding along an exponential path; ChatGPT 4 was released months after ChatGPT 3. McKay and Razib also discuss the release of Bard, Google’s chatbot, and the offering from Microsoft’s Bing, and how they are similar and different from ChatGPT. 

While McKay is optimistic about the possibilities of AI as a tool, ultimately, he is in the camp that believes it really isn’t intelligent in the same way as a human. Because it relies on the corpus from the internet, ChatGPT cannot really do math. It lacks true conceptual understanding that would allow it to grasp truth beyond what the internet might tell it. Razib and McKay also talk about the energetic resources that LLMs consume (Microsoft had to reallocate compute resources after the release of Bing’s chatbot), and how that might be a limitation on their scalability.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks about the rise of modern humans, from their beginning as just one population among a diverse set of human species, to the dominant and only remaining lineage of hominids in the present. His reflections are colored by paleontological findings and begin with the evolution of modern humans and their distinctive physical characteristics in Africa more than 200,000 years ago, then moving on to their breakout from the ancestral continent and the disappearance of Neanderthals. It is at this point that, 50,000 years ago, ancient DNA findings and statistical genomics shape the rest of the story, as the net of modern human expansion pushes to every corner of Eurasia, and eventually makes the leap to Oceania and the New World. 

Razib discusses the human phylogenetic tree, and how different populations relate to each other, but also explores the graph of relationships that illustrate how they have mixed. He also discusses the impact of the arrival of modern humans on local ecologies, as megafauna extinctions seem to correspond with the appearance of our species in Australia and the New World. Finally, he relates diverse contemporary populations to their prehistoric antecedents, outlining how the people we know today arrived at their current locations and who their ancestors were.

Twenty-one years ago, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was published. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, The Blank Slate firmly established Pinker as one of the major public intellectuals in 21st-century America; it followed earlier works more narrowly focused on his discipline of psycholinguistics, The Language Instinct, Words and Rules and How the Mind Works. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss stated in a 2003 review that The Blank Slate “may be the most important book so far published in the 21st century.” Still Pinker’s third most cited publication after The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate shaped a generation of scholars and public intellectuals and influenced 21st-century public discourse to take a more scientifically informed view of both human nature’s biological basis and the inborn psychological traits that undergird the organization of society.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Pinker about where we are today vis-a-vis the book's three major themes:

• The blank slate or tabula rasa view of the mind as having no innate traits

• The noble savage view of human nature where society corrupts individuals

• The ghost in the machine, particularly as repurposed today in service of gender ideology

More than two decades after The Blank Slate debuted, the cultural status of these three touchstones has shifted; the blank slate, noble savage and ghost in the machine are all ascendant concepts. In the blank slate, social and individual outcomes are seen purely as pure products of systemic environmental forces. The idea of the noble savage, that humans are born naturally good, and only the corrupting influence of problematic institutions turns them into selfish and exclusionary people, has made a massive comeback as social justice culture attempts to perfect individuals into paragons of equity and inclusion. And though the ghost in the machine in the form of a supernatural soul is falling out of fashion, it has been replaced with the concept of deep-seated identities like gender being present innately at birth (or even in utero), entirely divorced from our material self. 

Despite extraordinary advances in genome-wide association analysis and the application of cutting-edge computational biological techniques to understand how the brain and behavior work at the scale of DNA, much of American society remains wedded to the blank slate, and indeed widely applied policies have taken the implications of the assumption still further than a generation ago. Pinker points out that arguments for cultural variation driving group differences are now taboo, on top of the earlier wariness around exploring any genetic basis of these differences. Not only has the blank slate come back with force, it is more expansive than ever, rejecting even innate differences between the sexes. Razib addresses the decoupling of sex from gender and the reemergence of a ghost in the machine theory. Though traditional ideas of souls have faded, new concepts relating identity to a non-material sense of self have emerged. Pinker and Razib also discuss the collapse of organized religion, the rise of secularism in American culture and the attendant implications for how we view human nature and the good society. Finally, Razib argues that racial and cultural identitarianism often forward theories clearly rooted in the idea of a noble savage: that non-European peoples were corrupted by contact with Europeans.

Dr. David Sloan Wilson is a Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. Co-founder of the Evolution Institute and Prosocial World, Wilson is the author of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior,  Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution and  Atlas Hugged: The Autobiography of John Galt III. A self-described evolutionist, Wilson is perhaps best known in the scholarly world as the champion of multi-level selection theory.

In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Wilson about where multi-level selection theory is in 2023 and the progress made in the last five decades in understanding evolutionary processes through this pluralistic framework. This discussion is a sequel; in 2010, they discussed multi-level selection theory for bloggingheads.tv.

Right off the bat, Wilson outlines his view that evolutionary theory has been too narrowly constrained within the straitjacket of the gene-centric view, which violates the spirit of Charles Darwin’s more expansive original vision, where adaptation driven by selection was inclusive of both culture and biology. Razib and Wilson also observe the growth of the field of cultural evolution that applies a Darwinian framework to understanding the variation across human societies and discuss Wilson’s early work on the adaptive value of religion in human societies. Wilson touches on the numerous fields in which he has been involved over the past few decades, from evolutionary psychology to revisionist economics. In keeping with attempting to apply his scholarship to the real world, Wilson’s latest project is ProSocial World, a nonprofit that aims to “facilitate and inspire positive cultural change using evolutionary and behavioral science.” 

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib hosts three guests, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell, Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept. Razib, Haider, Hamid and Hussain discuss the current state of the culture from the perspective of “brown” observers of the public sphere dominated by woke vs. anti-woke factions. Despite ideological differences, all four are skeptical of the ideological orthodoxies regnant in American culture, even though one, Hamid, identifies strongly as a partisan Democrat who is liberal.

In a wide-ranging conversation (which begins with a review of how to pronounce each other’s names), they discuss the case of Raquel Evita Saraswati, a woman Haider knew casually from the social activism sphere, who represented herself as a queer Muslim of Arab, Latino and South-Asian background. Saraswati, a Muslim who somewhat perplexingly co-opted the name of a Hindu goddess as her surname, was born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel and is of British, German and Italian ancestry. Due to her fifteen years of lying about her ethnic background, she was recently forced out of a position as chief equity and inclusion officer for the American Friends Service Committee. Haider and Hamid, in particular, discuss the pressure felt in some social justice movements for people to present incongruous backgrounds, like being a “queer Muslim,” and how it has created a demand that is being satisfied by grifters like Saraswati.

Saraswati highlights the role of religion and how it is inextricably connected to brown identity in the US, whether it is coded Muslim or Hindu. Razib and Haider, both atheists from a Muslim background, and Hamid and Hussain, both believing Muslims, discuss the American religious scene in the wake of New Atheism and the social and functional value of religion in an age where moral frameworks have been overthrown and updated. Hamid questions Haider on her views on the value of religious wisdom in maintaining and perpetuating social norms that she supports, like the idea that there are two sexes and her deemphasis on the importance of “gender identity.” Hussain explains that religion, in a philosophical sense, should be considered distinctively from a more primal and animistic set of intuitions. All four meditate on the fact that they are outsiders not by dint of their race or immigrant background (or parental immigrant background), but their dissent from the dominant social norms of the ascendant professional-managerial class.

This monologue is incomplete, for the complete monologue, checkout: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning Podcast Substack

Why does human skin color vary so much? And what is the relationship between hair color, eye color and overall pigmentation? What genes control pigmentation in humans and other animals? Razib addresses all these questions in this episode of Unsupervised Learning, as he discusses the genetic basis and evolutionary origins of variation on this trait that has held such importance in our natural, social and cultural history. He notes that today we understand the genetic basis of pigmentation in terms of what variants control skin, hair and eye colors and how they relate to other traits, as well as their evolutionary trajectory over the past 100,000 years. Forensic pigmentation prediction tools in Europeans in particular are now excellent.

But Razib notes that it remains a mystery exactly how natural and sexual selection relate to variation in human pigmentation. In Descent of Man, Charles Darwin proposed that racial differences were driven by sexual selection, and this framework has been picked up by later scholars and often emerges as an almost deus ex machina when it comes to explaining variation in pigmentation. The tempting explanation of Vitamin-D synthesis at high latitudes suffers from the reality that light skin has evolved recently in much of Europe, and many northern peoples like the Inuit remain comparatively dark.

Today on the podcast Razib talks to Dr. Glenn Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University. Loury also has a Substack that grew out of his conversations with John McWhorter on bloggingheads.tv starting in 2008. He is the author of One by One from the Inside Out, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality and Race, Incarceration, and American Values. An erstwhile progressive, Loury was a neoconservative in the 1980’s before his gradual shift to back the political right in the 2010’s. 

Loury has been in public life for more than 25 years, but today’s discussion begins with his scholarship in the 1970’s as a young MIT economist. Razib goes back to Loury’s 1976 paper, A dynamic theory of racial income differences, and still his most cited publication. In many ways, the argument within the paper anticipated “wokeness” and theories of systemic racial privilege. Loury broadly agrees but emphasizes that it’s been nearly 40 years since he began writing that paper, and much has changed, including his judgment of the state of American society. A dynamic theory of racial income differences argues that inter-generational differences in human capital accumulation cannot be abolished simply through repealing discriminatory laws or norms. In other words, where you start in life matters, and centuries of oppression would have long-lasting effects. But the paper was written at a very different time in a very different America, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and before an America reshaped by immigration.

Razib and Loury also touch on his ideological and personal evolution and how he views the last few decades, going from conservative to liberal to conservative again. Loury speculates on the possible trajectories of different futures in the United States. He emphasizes that we live in a global world and that the choices we make now in terms of how we leverage our human capital matter greatly in the context of international competition. They also discuss the academy's state, its role in the culture wars, and Loury’s rejection of progressive ideological conformity that he believes threatens the foundation of the scholarly enterprise. 

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Virginia Postrel, the author of The Fabric of Civilization, The Power of Glamour, The Substance of Style and The Future and its Enemies. Formerly a columnist at The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg View, and the former editor of Reason, she is now a fellow at Chapman University’s Smith Institute.

First, Razib and Postrel discuss her recently reported piece for The Wall Street Journal, Synthetic Meat Will Change the Ethics of Eating. In the wake of the stagnation in the plant-based meat market the eyes of many futurists are turning to the technically difficult task of growing real cells and eventually tissue in the laboratory, basically detaching the production of meat from living animals. Postrel notes that the price for some synthetic meats are now starting to be competitive with the higher-end fare. She discusses in her piece eating synthetic salmon in sushi. The salmon’s appearance was a bit artificial in its geometrical regularity despite its entirely natural taste and texture. To her surprise, she observed on her Substack that some of the strongest reactions to the idea of synthetic meat came from conservatives, as many evinced horror and disgust. Though the companies that create synthetic meat are generally focused on critiques from the “crunchy” anti-GMO Left, Postrel wonders if perhaps a more robust reaction might not be from the populist Right which perceives these new technologies through a tribal and politically polarized lens as many of these entrepreneurs sell their value-proposition as furthering the rise of a green carbon-neutral economy.

Razib and Postrel also discuss her 2020 book The Fabric of Civilization, a cultural and economic history that spans the Pleistocene to the age of “fast fashion.” In addition to unpacking the fortuitous genetics of cotton (of course), Postrel also explains how clothing today is so much cheaper than in the 1970s. Razib also asks her about the rise, fall, and now rise again of synthetics and the various fortunes of linen, cotton, hemp, and wool.

https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. In April of 2021, this Substack published a piece, The ultimate price of costless gestures, that anticipated a spate of articles in the second half of the year in the mainstream media reporting on the rise of murders in 2020. Compare the figure from the Substack piece with one in The New York Times published in November of 2021:

The similarity is simply a function of the fact that the graphs draw upon the same underlying data, aggregated reports by the FBI from local police departments. This underscores that the data is out there if people choose to analyze and talk about it, something that did not occur for much of 2020.

Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at The Manhattan Institute who works on the Policing and Public Safety initiative and is also a contributing editor of City Journal (here are two articles Razib has contributed to the publication). Lehman, who has a background in data analysis and was previously a writer for The Washington Free Beacon, where he wrote Why Can’t We Talk About the Murder Wave? In contrast to many journalists and analysts, he does not fear talking about crime, and he and Razib discuss the magnitude of the current murder spike (modest) and its possible abatement and the strange decoupling of homicide rates from other forms of violent crime. Lehman also explains that localities over the last few years have begun to hold back their traditional data reporting from the FBI, making more recent analyses very difficult. Razib also reflects on his memories of the late 20th-century crime wave that peaked in 1990, four years before Lehman was born.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib explores the history of China through the lens of genetics and ancient DNA. This podcast is a companion to the recent two pieces, Genetic history with Chinese characteristics and Venerable Ancestors: untangling the Chinese people's hybrid Pleistocene origins. Today 92% of the citizens of the People’s Republic of China are ethnic Han, accounting for 16% of humanity. With China’s new prominence in genomics over the last decade, the genetic structure and relatedness of the Han and other ethnic groups in modern China have been extensively mapped. While India is fractured into thousands of endogamous groups, the Han Chinese are surprisingly homogeneous, with most variation dividing the North Chinese from the South Chinese. 

Though the Chinese claim “5,000 years of history,” Razib probes deeper, back to the arrival of modern humans to East Asia more than 40,000 years ago, perhaps as early as 50,000 years ago. The monologue recounts the discovery and implications of the first modern human genome from East Asia, Tianyun Man, and how he relates to the region's peoples today and their Pleistocene diversification and Holocene homogenization. Finally, Razib reflects on how science differs from the narrative the modern Chinese tell about their origins and how they relate to their neighboring nations.

For the complete version of this podcast check out razib.substack.com

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the origins of the people of Madagascar in a companion podcast to his two-part series on the genetics and history of the island. An ecologically unique island off Africa’s southeast coast, for tens of millions of years Madagascar forged its own evolutionary path, distinct from Africa to the west and unconnected to the world of the Indian Ocean coastlines to the north and east. All this changed more than 1,000 years ago when the ancestors of the Malagasy voyaged westward from southern Borneo, crossing the Indian Ocean,  and began clearing the forests of the highlands of Madagascar. This resulted in a mass extinction event that transformed Madagascar’s unique fauna into something poorer and less diverse, with the disappearance of, among others, hulking, flightless birds and giant lemurs. But the arrival of the Magalasy also connected the island to Africa, as Bantu pastoralists joined the rice farmers from Borneo, fusing into one people, a unique mix unseen elsewhere.

On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Jonathan Anomaly, author of Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement. Anomaly is currently the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at La Universidad de las Americas, Ecuador. He has been a lecturer at Duke and the University of Pennsylvania and holds a philosophy Ph.D. from Tulane University.  Anomaly has been thinking and publishing on the implications of the intersection between ethics and biology for the last fifteen years, from the moral case for synthetic meat to the necessity for a global regulatory regime for antibiotics. Anomaly maintains that modern technology can drive humans to greater excellence and virtuosity, his views explicitly influenced by ancient Greek aesthetics and modern utilitarianism. In Creating Future People he applies these values to the context of 21st-century biotechnologyś possibilities, making the case that we now have the tools to improve and perfect ourselves as a species.

Creating Future People is a controversial book, and Anomaly is swimming against current cultural trends in the West that are highly skeptical of biotechnology, whether it be vaccines or genetically modified organisms. But, if our technological capabilities are any indication, the debate is only in its infancy and Creating Future People lays down essential markers and sets some helpful terms for the debate.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Bryan Caplan about Caplan’s new book, Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice. Despite what the narrow purview  the title might suggest, Don't Be a Feminist is a wide-ranging book that contains essays on IQ, immigration and identity politics, among other things (in addition, yes, to women’s rights). Caplan is the editor and chief writer for Bet On It, the blog hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas, and a professor of economics at George Mason. His previous books were The Myth of the Rational Voter,  Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders, Labor Econ Versus the World, and How Evil Are Politicians?

Razib and Caplan also discuss his colleague Garrett Jones’ new book The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, the case for open borders, the cultural tenor of academia and its future prospects

https://razib.substack.com

This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib reviews the year in paleoanthropology and previews the year to come with John Hawks. First, they tackle the latest discoveries regarding Homo naledi, in particular, the finding that they likely used fires deep in the caves where they buried their dead. Hawks reflects on the implications of Homo naledi, a very small-brained hominin that mastered several elements of human culture, for our understanding of hominin evolution and the expected trajectory of the evolution of these groups of species. Razib and Hawks also discuss Denisovans and the profusion of human lineages discovered in Southeast Asia over the last few years.

Finally, the discussion moves to the possibilities of ancient DNA and even ancient protein analysis. Hawks reports that soon there will be publications that push protein analysis back to the Miocene, more than 5 million years ago, with speculation about future discoveries that could go as far back as 20 million years.

What is a democracy? Is American democracy in danger? And should we care about the possibilities for democracy in the Middle East? On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at Brookings, an assistant professor at Fuller Seminary, a contributor to The Atlantic, co-host of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast and website, and now the author of his own Substack and a recent book, The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. Before getting into the meat of the discussion, Hamid and Razib reflect on the meaning and importance of the Christmas season, the very positive opinion of Jesus held by Muslims, and Hamid’s views about the secularization of the United States over his lifetime.

They then dig into the view from political science over the last decade about the decline of faith in American democracy and the crisis of confidence in the institution in both the Middle East and the US. Hamid reflects on his experience observing the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of democracy in Egypt and how it might offer lessons on a polarized America. Next, they talk about The Problem of Democracy and how liberalism and democracy are assumed to be necessary twins in the modern Western political system but are indeed not in the Middle East and may not be in America’s future.

Finally, Hamid discusses what it is like to be an anti-woke brown American liberal and what it’s like to so often be on the receiving end of censure and opprobrium from his own political camp. He muses on the future of liberalism and how things look from the viewpoint of a Muslim American in an age when the War on Terror is truly in the rearview mirror.

As 2022 draws to a close, the chat AI based on GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) has been taking the internet by storm, with millions of users beginning to ask it questions. Is humanity on the way to birthing a true artificial general intelligence (AGI)? I asked GPT-3 that particular question, and this was the answer:

It is difficult to say for certain whether or not humanity is on the way to creating a true artificial general intelligence, as there is no clear consensus on what exactly a true AGI would be or what it would be capable of. However, it is clear that significant progress has been made in the field of artificial intelligence, and many experts believe that it is only a matter of time before we see AGI-level capabilities in machines. That being said, it is also important to note that the development of AGI is a highly complex and uncertain field, and it is impossible to predict exactly when, or even if, it will be achieved.

Whether GPT-3 is truly intelligent, it’s clearly just the beginning. At least according to this week’s returning guest on Unsupervised Learning, Nikolai Yakovenko of Deep NFT Value, a machine-learning engineer who just last month took time to discuss what was going on at his old employer, Twitter. Yakovenko is not entirely surprised by GPT-3’s abilities, though he admits progress is faster than expected. He tells Razib that there are more advanced versions of GPT-3, and Americans must brace themselves for a new technological revolution. He believes Westerners, in particular, due to their religious and metaphysical frame are unprepared for the changes that AI may produce in our society. Yakovenko rejects the most dystopian and negative predictions of hostile AI and singularity and argues that the Japanese are a model of a culture that is more sanguine about the emergence of human-like machine intelligence.

Razib and Yakovenko also discuss the utility of AI-generated art and how it might replace or complement human artists.

On this very special episode of Unsupervised Learning I talk to three guests, Josh Lipson, Aric Lomes and Leo Cooper, about their contribution to a new paper, Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century. Given that a month earlier, Genomes from a medieval mass burial show Ashkenazi-associated hereditary diseases pre-date the 12th century was also published, 2022 has seen a massive growth in our ancient-DNA-informed understanding of the origins of the Ashkenazim. Last year Lipson and I talked about the genetics of the Jews in what would prove the waning days of the pre-ancient-DNA era for this population. This was in the wake of my post, Ashkenazi Jewish genetics: a match made in the Mediterranean.

The broad outlines of earlier work have not been overturned with these papers, but Lipson, Lomes and Cooper shed light on numerous details relating to the relationship of the early Ashkenazim and the Sephardim of Spain, the division of the early Jews of Germany into two genetic clusters, and the possible relationship of the Ashkenazim to groups further to the east, including the Khazars. The discussion also touches on the nature of the bottleneck that the Ashkenazim weathered, their possible origins among southern Italians, and the deep roots of many of the recessive diseases that they carry today.

Most Americans are vaguely aware of a few rulers of ancient Achaemenid Persia: Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, whether from the Bible, from historically grounded films like 300, or in the rare case, from reading Herodotus’ The Histories. More recently, Iran has loomed large due to its geopolitical significance, and for Americans of a certain age, the Shah Reza Pahlavi and his successor Ayatollah Khomeini loom large as figures who for a time monopolized television screens and front pages of news magazines. But these are drops in a bucket; the history of Persia or Iran, the two being synonymous, spans nearly 3,000 years. The Farsi language in modern Iran is directly descended from Old Persian, the language of Cyrus the Great, the Persian Empire’s founder.

Directly in the middle of Persia’s millennia of history are the Sassanids, who ruled Iran for four centuries after the fall of the Parthians and made appearances in Roman histories, playing an instrumental role in the deaths of Emperors Valerian and Julian. Most Westerners will know the Sassanids only as the name of the last pre-Islamic dynasty of Iran, the last guardians of Zoroastrian Iran, fated to be washed away by history. But according to Michael Bonner’s The Last Empire of Iran, they served as a critical prelude to the emergence of Islamic and modern Iran. 

In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib discusses with Bonner the role of religion and ethnicity in Sassanid Iran, how they relate to what came after during the Islamic period, and how they shape Iran’s civilization today. Bonner also covers the role of the Sassanids in the “world war” of Late Antiquity between Rome and Persia, as the last great Shah of the Sassanids almost completed the conquest left unfinished by the Achaemenids. Though the Sassanids and their civilization were overthrown by Islam, Razib and Bonner entertain the idea that Islam, as it developed after the Abbassid Caliphate in the 9th century AD, cannot be understood without the key of Zoroastrian Persian influence.

https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack, https://razib.substack.com, and original video content. What does it mean to be Eurocentric? What does it mean to be a white supremacist? What does the term ”the West” mean, and how is it different from simply the geographical designation Europe? On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib discusses the cultural and genetic origins of Europeans, how they have been viewed over the last few thousand years and how they have viewed themselves. Starting around 3000 BC, when the first Yamnaya men were expanding out of the Pontic steppe and assimilating the Neolithic Globular Amphora culture of eastern Poland, and going down to the 20th century when the nations of the world were cleaved between those aligned with the Soviet Union versus those aligned with the USA, Razib addresses when conceptions of European, Western and white self-identity could have emerged, and indeed did emerge. Were the Classical Greeks white supremacists? Did the Spaniards impose European hegemony on the New World? And when did the West outpace the rest?

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the new book, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, with author Garett Jones. Jones is a professor of economics at George Mason University, and The Culture Transplant is the third book in what he likes of think of as his “Singapore trilogy,” beginning with Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, and then moving to 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less. Jones explains how cultural assimilation and acculturation is actually not nearly as powerful as we might think and that ancestral folkways and norms persist for centuries, transforming nations like the US and Argentina over time as migration streams alter their demographic makeup. He argues that this is important because some nations are highly productive and innovative, and their cultural frameworks are necessary to foster their economic role in the global system. The Culture Transplant takes a contrarian position, going against the stance of mainstream economics, whereby every individual is an interchangeable “homo economicus.”

https://razib.substack.com

This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack, https://razib.substack.com, and original video content.

How is it that babies across entirely different cultures seemingly elicit one single sort of “baby talk” from adults? To answer this question, Razib talks to Cody Moser, coauthor of a recent paper on the topic, and an evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist at UC Merced. Moser first discusses what cultural evolution today means in the context of American anthropology, and how it relates to the new field of evolutionary psychology. He observes that some of the conceptual ideas that underpin modern cultural evolution actually have roots in naturalistic frameworks dating back decades, though out of fashion in American cultural anthropology since just after World War II. Razib and Moser compare and contrast the descriptive and interpretive methods of most cultural anthropology, and the formalistic evolutionary paradigm of cultural evolution.

Then Moser gets to the meat of the paper on which he was the second author. He points out that humans have noted the similarities across cultures for decades, with evolutionary psychologists concluding this is a human universal. But it takes evolutionary and cognitive frameworks to understand how this phenomenon emerges naturally out of the common biological heritage of our species. Moser outlines the structural conditions that result in the universality of baby talk across cultures, and what benefits this universality might confer upon us as a species.

When Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO last year, I wondered what we could expect from the new leader, Parag Agrawal. Luckily, I knew Nikolai Yakovenko, who worked at Twitter on deep neural networks in the mid-teens. Yakovenko told me Agrawal was not a rock-the-boat kind of guy, and perhaps that’s why Dorsey tapped him to head Twitter after some tumultuous years. Now that Twitter and its leadership is in the news again, due to Elon Musk’s status as “chief twit,” I wanted to talk to Yakovenko about his time at Twitter, discuss the application's upsides and downsides, and get his take on what we can expect going forward.

Yakovenko is now the CEO of Deep NFT Value, and has extensive experience in crypto, machine learning and deep learning. We discussed the nitty-gritty of how Twitter’s algorithm works to prioritize and deprioritize certain types of content, what precisely deep neural networks are, and how they are relevant to what Twitter does. More generally, we discussed why machine learning has become so important in the technology space over the last decade, and why a company like Twitter has become heavily invested in the field. Finally, Yakovenko talks about the general prospects of Twitter going forward under the new Musk regime.

Note: the archive of podcasts (2 weeks delayed) now also resides on YouTube as well as Apple, Stitcher and Spotify (though my “monologues” will not be posted in full ungated).

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib discusses the history and genetics of Anatolia, from the first farmers to the Ottoman conquest of the peninsula. He focuses on the underappreciated reality that prehistoric Anatolia was the font of the first wave of farmers that built the majestic Neolithic societies of Europe, from arid Iberia north to the shores of the Baltic. These people left the vast stoneworks that dot Europe’s Atlantic coasts to this day, beginning with the megaliths of Brittany and culminating in the enigmatic site of Stonehenge.

Razib also points out the role of Anatolia in the emergence of historical states, like the nearly forgotten ancient empire of the Hittites, plus the storied Byzantines, who held the armies of Islam at bay for nearly 1,000 years. Finally, he addresses the ethnogenesis of the Turkish-speaking population in Anatolia and its transformation from the eastern frontier of Greek speech to the western edge of the Turkic world.

Today, on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to Erik Hoel, author of the novel The Revelations, and host of  The Intrinsic Perspective Substack. Hoel is a neuroscientist at Tufts who is interested in the problem of consciousness. Hoel admits right off that the questions and answers around consciousness motivate neuroscience in the first place, but throughout the conversation, he also points out that the discipline has a long way to go before it uncovers deep and insightful counterintuitive findings. In the early years of the 21st century, neuroscience was driven forward by amazing new technologies like functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) that seemed to offer a window onto the brain’s activity, but over the last few years, most researchers agree that many of these papers did not live up to the hype (getting caught up in the replication crisis and underpowered studies). 

Razib also talks to Hoel about his recent paper, The overfitted brain: dreams evolve to assist generalization, which argues that by “hallucinating out-of-distribution sensory stimulation every night, the brain is able to rescue the generalizability of its perceptual and cognitive abilities and increase task performance.” In plainer English, dreams allow the brain to experiment with novel possibilities outside of the range of experience and let it be more flexible and well-prepared in the face of surprising stimuli.

Razib and Hoel also discuss his unique perspective as a humanist and a scientist. Hoel’s mother owned an independent bookstore, and he spent most of his childhood exploring its shelves. He reflects on how his Substack has grown (his piece The gossip trap won Scott Alexander’s book review contest), to the point where he wonders if perhaps in the next decade he will be more a writer who does some neuroscience than a neuroscientist who does some writing.

Share

Jonathan Haidt is the author of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. One of the pioneers of Moral Foundations Theory and a founder of Heterodox Academy, over the last few years Haidt has been focused on the impact of social media on our politics and culture (he is writing two books on the topic).

Razib and Haidt begin their discussion with the blockbuster piece in The Atlantic, Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid. They both agree that in many ways the 1990’s and 2000’s were an information utopia, where the mind-opening possibilities of the internet were being realized. But Haidt lays out the case for social media, and more precisely functionalities like Twitter’s “quote-tweet” feature, having degraded online discourse, and driven offline polarization. He also argues that government and tech have to protect children from social media, making a case for enforced age restrictions on access.

Razib presses Haidt on his theory about the “moral foundations” that differentiate liberals from conservatives. They discuss the possibility that ideological orientations may have been scrambled by the same processes that drove polarization in society more broadly with social media. Haidt also discusses his resignation from an academic society and the climate of intellectual conformity that is now seeping into every corner of the scholarly world.

On this monologue episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib considers the different roles religion plays in various world civilizations. To explore this topic, he contrasts religion in the West (which includes Christendom and the Dar-al-Islam), on the Indian subcontinent and in China. Depending on which characteristics you focus on, these societies deploy and understand religion quite differently, even though religion as a cultural phenomenon is easily recognizable to all humans.

Razib argues that in India religious identity is important both to the individual and essential to civilizational identity. In China, usually, a specific religious identity is neither essential to individual self-conception nor is a specific religion critical to civilizational identity. Finally, in European Christendom and Middle Eastern Dar-al-Islam religious identity holds importance for both the individual and society as in India. Still, that religious identity has a proselytizing aspect that imposes uniformity (unlike in India).

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses approaching politics through philosophy, political philosophy, and what it’s like being an excessively online academic in 2022 with Oliver Traldi. Currently working on a book on understanding politics through a philosophical lens, Traldi explains the relevance of epistemology to the project, while Razib queries the role that deductive, abductive and inductive reasoning might play in political views. Both also consider that political orientation is just a form of tribalism, as made clear when individuals chart a wholesale shift in a cluster of “beliefs” on topics as diverse as abortion and trade within just a few years.

Traldi and Razib also discuss ancient political philosophy and its relevance to the modern era, as well as John Rawls and Robert Nozick, the two political philosophers most prominent in late 20th-century America. Traldi also mentions that American academia has developed a recent interest in Chinese and Indian philosophy, both of which have extensive areas of focus on politics. They cap their discussion of politics by discussing the role of intellectual movements like libertarianism on mainstream political parties like the American Republicans.

Finally, Razib discusses Traldi’s experience of being a “very online” academic philosopher early in his career, and his contributions to various online publications, and how they relate to his scholarship.

Evolutionary psychology is a field that has made headlines ever since its inception as a distinct discipline in the 1980’s. In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Dr. Tania Reynolds of the University of New Mexico, who researches intrasexual competition and cooperation, as well as sexual and social selection. Reynolds outlines what evolutionary psychology means for her and explains why she thinks it is helpful in our quest to understand human behavior. In particular, her field of research aims to understand how human females compete and cooperate, the psychological mechanisms driving their behavior, and how our overall evolutionary history informs this behavior (why is this behavior adaptive?). Razib and Reynolds then discuss how men and women have quite different psychologies on average and how that plays out in things as universal and important as friendships.

Razib also asks whether it is essential to contextualize evolutionary tendencies within their broader social background. Suppose human males tend to compete through physical aggression. How does it play out in a society like ancient China, which denigrated martial values, as opposed to a post-Roman Europe ruled by illiterate warriors?

How do we know when to trust the experts? On January 23rd, 2020, Vox published a piece titled The evidence on travel bans for diseases like coronavirus is clear: They don’t work. Journalists are largely limited to reporting what experts tell them, and in this case, it seems Vox's experts misled them. By December 2020 The New York Times could reflect that “interviews with more than two dozen experts show the policy of unobstructed travel was never based on hard science. It was a political decision, recast as health advice, which emerged after a plague outbreak in India in the 1990s.” The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted for many that expertise and specialized knowledge are not so straightforward, and “trusting the science” isn’t always straightforward, and hasty decisions can have global consequences. More narrowly, the political scientist Philip Tetlock’s 2005 Expert Political Judgment: How Good is it? How can We Know? reported that the most confident pundits often prove the least accurate.

To get around the biases and limitations of individuals, there has been a recent vogue for “prediction markets” using distributed knowledge and baking “skin in the game” into the process. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Richard Hanania joins Razib to discuss his think tank’s collaboration with UT Austin’s Salem Center for Policy and Manifold Markets on a forecasting tournament. What’s their goal? What are the limitations of these sorts of markets? Why do they not care about the contestants’ credentials? Razib pushes Hanania on the idea there is no expertise, and they discuss domains where the application of specialized knowledge has concrete consequences (civil engineering) as opposed to those where it does not (political and foreign policy forecasting).

Hanania also addresses his decision to leave Twitter after his latest banning.

“Yankee go home!” has often been hurled at Americans indiscriminately. But the reality is that Yankee as a category initially meant the people of New England and its colonies across the northern fringe United States, from upstate New York to Minnesota. Yankees were a minority of Northerners during the American Civil War. Nevertheless, Yankee spearheading the Northern cause meant that Southerners disparaged all their occupiers with that label. This reflects the core insight that Yankees were, and arguably still are, far more influential in American culture and history than the raw weight of their numbers would indicate. 

On this episode of The Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Kerry of the Mary Lincolniana Substack about the role New England culture has played in shaping America and the world. A native New Englander, she does not flinch from asserting that in many fundamental ways, being American is a product of the norms and values of New England culture. Kerry argues the formative history of the colony of Massachusetts set the template for the later United States of America. Razib and Kerry discuss the possibility that the rise of a Southern elite counterculture was mainly a reaction to the preeminence of New England as an intellectual superpower in the early 19th century. They also explore the idea that America’s middle-class egalitarianism today reflects the aspirations of the founders of the New England colonies specifically, where the early focus was on literacy, communal debate, respect and rank accrued by those who attained erudition and learning. Kerry believes that the New England model of acculturating immigrants through a path of ascendance up the class hierarchy, starting with the Irish of the 1830’s, informed America’s later success with the mass migration of the late 19th and early 20th century. She also argues that 21st-century America could still learn much from the New England model of a well-educated and socially engaged populace.

Three blockbuster papers on ancient DNA just landed in Science Magazine: The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe, A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia, and, Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia (ungated copies available at the Reich lab website). Why three papers in one issue of Science? The authors claim there was too much data to pack into one publication, which feels right to me. So what do these publications mean for human history and human evolution? Do we now know where the Indo-Europeans were originally from? Were the ancient Classical Greeks blonde? How did farming emerge in Anatolia? What is the relationship of Armenians to other Indo-European-speaking people? These papers tackle a staggering number of questions.

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib weighs in and guides us through what the papers mean for our understanding of human genetics and population history and where we go from here. This monologue complements the August 2022 episode where he surveys the great ancient human DNA Diasporas.

Katherine Brodsky is today a freelance writer who in the early 2000’s was the founder and editor-in-chief of an online culture magazine that was registering 600,000 pageviews a month while herself still an undergrad. In this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib explores a life lived online, from the dot-com bubble to the social media era. Brodsky, whose Substack is Random Minds, is an observer of culture from a peripatetic vantage point, a Canadian working in the American film industry, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants watching her parents’ homeland ravaged by war, and a public relations professional who moonlights as a commentator and photographer.

Though an early adopter of internet technology who became a “content creator” before that was even the phrase, Brodsky over the last few years has been hitting the shoals of social media culture as her classical free speech-oriented liberalism and journalistic devotion to a bare modicum of objectivity run up against the realities of 2020’s “moral clarity” where strident viewpoints are prized. Razib and Brodsky agree that Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book The Shallows already has the character of a Cassandra-like prophecy, as the internet has become a tool not for mental liberation but for enslavement to impulse and the mob. Brodsky outlines her polestar when observing and commenting on the culture, which emphasizes a level of detachment or sympathy for the “other” that is sorely lacking in much of mainstream 2020’s discourse.

This week takes The Unsupervised Learning podcast in a somewhat different direction. In response to a common listener request, Razib takes on his first “one-man-show,” digging into his stores of knowledge of the population genetics of ancient peoples and tribes, delving into the significance of abstrusely labeled clusters like “Ancient North Eurasian” (ANE) over 60 minutes. But as anyone following this substack will anticipate, first a caveat: in these heady days of endless ancient DNA discoveries and attendant revisions to long-standing convention: everything is provisional. Razib notes that his assertions are not written in stone, as new work from researchers like Laurent Excoffier adds fresh nuance and intriguing detail to the broader evolutionary picture every few months.

This podcast takes a geographical approach, surveying Eurasian, African, Oceanian and New World populations over the last 20,000 years since the Last Glacial Maximum. Razib covers not just how populations interrelate and how they emerged, but he also touches on unique aspects of physical appearance, adaptations and natural history.

• Spanish hunter-gatherer had blue eyes and dark skin

• Cheddar Man: Mesolithic Britain's blue-eyed boy

• Population genomics of Mesolithic Scandinavia: Investigating early postglacial migration routes and high-latitude adaptation

• Ancient human genome-wide data from a 3000-year interval in the Caucasus corresponds with eco-geographic regions

• The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia

• Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

• Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans

• Mysterious East Asians vanished during the ice age. This group replaced them

• Earliest Americans Arrived in Waves, DNA Study Finds

• Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East

• Divided by DNA: The uneasy relationship between archaeology and ancient genomics

• Ancient DNA and deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers

• Ancient Admixture in Human History

The recent killing by Ayman al-Zawahiri, erstwhile leader of al-Qaeda, brought many Americans back to awareness of an era that has been fading, the decade of the “War on Terror” that dominated geopolitics after the 9/11 terrorism attack. The World Trade Center bombings galvanized Americans, setting the stage for our disastrous invasion of Iraq and American meddling in Muslim nations worldwide. But while 9/11 drove a closing of ranks against radicalism across much of the West, a small minority drew different lessons. A radical faction of European and American Muslims, converts and those raised in the faith, instead made common cause with al-Qaeda, and its later offshoot, ISIS.

Jason Walters is one of those young men who reacted to 9/11 very differently from the rest of us. Raised in the Dutch Bible Belt by a Netherlands-born mother and an African American father, Walters was raised nominally Christian but later converted to Islam. Sixteen years old when 9/11 occurred, Walter’s faith moved in a radical direction, and in November of 2004 he was involved in a terror attack in The Hague. Imprisoned shortly after that, Walters emerged a free man in 2013, having shed his Muslim identity.

In this episode, Walters joins Razib to discuss his cultural and racial background and how that might have fueled his radicalization. Though Walters avers that racial issues had little importance to him growing up, it is clear his mixed and cosmopolitan origins left him more attracted to an ideology that eventually alienated him from the rest of Dutch society. He talks about his discovery of Nietzsche, Plato and Heidegger in prison and how philosophy brought him out of Islam, giving him a new understanding of himself and his place in the universe. Razib and Walters also probe the importance of ‘system thinking’ and ‘rationality’ in the religious orientation of Salafist converts in the West.

Despite the fundamental reality that the US exists thanks to a rebellion against the power of the British Crown in the 1700's, for the last century, the two dominant English-speaking powers have enjoyed a relatively positive geopolitical relationship. Whereas the US is younger, Britain has settled into the role of junior partner, as the daughter nation outstrips the parent in economic, military and cultural reach.

And yet despite the commonalities between these two Anglo-Atlantic polities, there are also profound differences rooted in history. Chief among them, Britain, particularly England, has vastly more history than the US. The oldest church still in use in England, St. Martin’s, dates to the last quarter of the 6th century AD, whereas the oldest building still in use in the continental US dates to 1610 AD, Santa Fe, NM's Palace of the Governors.

In this podcast episode, Razib discusses the history and culture of England with Ed West, author of the Wrong Side of History, an eminently writerly Substack that is ideal for a connoisseur of all things ancient (or at least medieval) and English. West, the author of many books on English history, expands on the importance of figures like Alfred the Great, Athelstan, the forgotten first true king of all England, and the Magna Carta, the document that set the template for later English political history, and possibly set the course toward the liberal democracy that dominates the world today. West also argues that Britain today has lost much of its distinctiveness as it becomes swallowed by America's cultural and political currents. He also contends that Britain is now importing subcontinental Hindu-Muslim rivalries into the British political system, as Hindus and Sikhs vote Conservative, while Muslims are aligned with Labour.

Spectator sports are a massive cross-cultural phenomenon in the modern world, from cricket in India to football in Europe and American football in the US. In the middle of the 20th century, commentary on sports was generally found in newspapers that also reported results from the previous day’s games. By the end of the century, many sports television channels arose that provided new venues for commentary and analysis, and the vocation of “sports commentator” exploded beyond simply analyzing the scores. As professional sports leagues became culturally influential, the job of a sports journalist expanded to reporting on what occurred “outside the lines” of the playing field.

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Ethan Strauss, a writer who has covered sports and culture for the past decade, including penning the book The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty. More recently his writing is to be found at his Substack, House of Strauss, which is notable for offering a candid take on the cross-pollination between the broader culture and athletics, notably in the piece Nike's End of Men: Why Nike no longer wants us to Be Like Mike.

The conversation takes some strange turns because Razib has consciously avoided following spectator sports since 2004 when he reflected on how much of his life was wrapped up in tracking his favorite teams. This was before the period that athletes became culturally influential and polarizing, as they transformed themselves into “social media influencers.” Rather than relying on reporters to engage in hagiography, Razib and Strauss discuss a figure like Lebron James, who can alter the tenor of cultural conversation simply through his Twitter account or his feigned reading in the locker room. They also tackle the stillborn globalization of sports, the NBA’s failures in China, and China’s failure to produce top-notch basketball talent in quantity (as well as India’s failure to punch at its weight in world-class athletics). 

About a month ago, during a COVID-19 wave, I saw a Substack post, How to Get Paxlovid Quickly, If You Get Covid - How to get the 89%-effective Covid cure called Paxlovid, despite government red tape, shared across various group chats. For non-Americans, the utility of such a post and the question of why the government couldn’t distribute this drug and communicate its utility might require some explanation. If you are an American, you probably don’t need an explanation. The post's author, Maxim Lott, is behind the Substack Maximum Truth, where, in his words, he “uses data to answer important questions that the shallow media ignore.” Lott is also the force behind Election Betting Odds. There are two kinds of punditry. There are the pundits who when posed questions reflect and then hold forth. Then, there are pundits who when confronted with a question search for data and analyze what they find to generate results and then produce an informed opinion. Lott is in the second category.

In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib and Lott discuss “where we are” more than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of data. They reflect on their expectations in February 2020 and how things have panned out. They also discuss the politicization of COVID-19 and being caught in the middle of ideological arguments inadvertently, as attitudes toward issues like masks and border controls seem to chart flips in tribal valence in the blink of an eye. Finally, Razib and Lott also discuss the utility of instruments like betting markets to gauge the strength of opinions and judgments. This allows us to go into the future with more tools to understand the world with our heads rather than our hearts.

What if everything you learned about anthropology turned out to be wrong? Well, OK, maybe not everything, but some very important things. Today Razib talks to Manvir Singh about primitive communism and misconceptions about hunter-gatherers, what anthropology got wrong in the past and how it has continued to confuse us into the present. Singh is a scholar at The Institute of Advanced Study in Toulouse, as well as an artist and essayist. His academic interests lie in explaining why most human societies, from preliterate foragers to urbanites, develop cultural phenomena like “witchcraft, origin myths, property rights, sharing norms, lullabies, dance music, and gods.”

This episode of Unsupervised Learning hinges on two essays by Singh, Primitive communism: Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong and Beyond the !Kung: A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale. Razib and Singh discuss the primitive communism of the Ache people of South America, how rare it is and its horrific consequences like obligate murder of orphans. Though the Ache do practice radical communism in the distribution of resources, they also follow the Biblical maxim “that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” And it turns out that they’re not a template, but one end of the extreme among contemporary “small-scale societies.” 

The “initial-study-population” problem crops up again elsewhere in the misleading representations of prehistoric societies that come out of studying the rare marginalized foragers of the modern world, pushed as they often are into desolate lands, eking out an existence on the Malthusian margin. Singh argues that for too long anthropologists and the public have back-projected into the past based on unrepresentative modern people like the !Kung, when the past was actually filled with a diversity of human lifestyles. One takeaway is that we can’t expect to reconstruct prehistory by cobbling together unrepresentative fragments of the present.

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Dr. Judge Glock about the case for optimism in America in 2022. An economic historian by training, Glock is a Chief Policy Officer at the Cicero Institute. Though public polling shows that 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the nation, Glock really doesn’t share the sentiment, and he puts forward a case for sunny optimism in the historical and geographical context.

In short, it turns out that for the vast majority of human history our species was living at the Malthusian level, and today Americans pursuing the consumer lifestyle never consider simple subsistence sufficient. Glock’s contention is that we live like kings, and we should appreciate this. In fact, the poorest Americans have access to miraculous technologies that would have amazed Henry VIII. Glock also points out that China, and much of the developed world, has lower fertility than the US, and we are the world’s number one magnet for skilled immigrants. In the great positional game of power, Glock reckons that the US has a good shot purely due to its demographic profile.

Moving beyond economics and onto culture, Razib and Glock discuss the differences between the present and past of American society and argue about whether the US is quite as decadent as many argue. After all, rates of teen pregnancy are down, and crime is nothing like it was in the 1970’s, so perhaps our best days aren’t behind us?

Dr. Iona Italia’s name often perplexes the public, but it’s entirely explicable considering her background. Her late father was from the Parsi community of the Indian subcontinent. Descendants of Persians who continued to adhere to the Zoroastrian religion of their ancestors, the Parsis migrated to northwestern India about 1,000 years ago. Remaining predominantly endogamous, they nevertheless developed a synthetic culture, adopting the Gujarati language, Indian dress, as well as some very idiosyncratic surnames, including Italiya. As far as her first name, Iona is very common in Scotland, her mother’s homeland.

Though raised in Karachi, Pakistan, as a child, Italia was orphaned at ten and grew up in Britain, under the supervision of her half-sister (on her mother’s side), who was nearly twenty years older. Razib and Italia discuss the complexities of her personal history and racial identity in the context of an essay posted at her Substack, The Skin I'm In. Her story, that of a mixed-race person who “presents as white” and grew up detached from her subcontinental heritage, is especially interesting in light of the new identitarian regime that has arisen on the political Left in the last few years. Razib also asks Italia about the possible future of the more old-fashioned liberalism she espouses forthrightly on her podcast, Two for Tea, as well as what distinguishes the magazine she edits, Areo, from similar publications.

How do we make science in the 21st century better? Stuart Buck, Executive Director of the Good Science Project has some ideas. More concretely, Buck is part of a broader movement of researchers, activists and philanthropists reimagining how science can be done in the wake of the replication crisis. Between 2010 and 2015 many fields of science relying on statistical methods from the 20th century were found to be plagued by methodological errors that produced the ‘sexy’ results the breathless media loves, but that turned out to be totally unfounded. Not replicable. Though the problem was especially rife in psychology, it applied to many fields that use statistics, even including biomedical science.

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Buck about the problems that plagued science in the last few decades, and how science has become an overly professionalized quest for publications, rather than a method to uncover the truth. They explore the various planks of the Good Science Funding Manifesto. How do you get rid of the bureaucracy that interferes with scientists in their day to day? How do you get scientists to think boldly and take risks? And how do you enforce standards of open data access? Buck believes that with 21st-century information technology there are wide open possibilities to speed up knowledge production and dissemination.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to his friend Claire Lehmann, founder and editor-in-chief of Quillette magazine, and columnist for The Australian. Though Lehmann’s initial public prominence involved her key role in the “intellectual dark web,” publishing thinkers critical of identity politics like Coleman Hughes, John Wood Jr. and John McWhorter, Razib was especially interested in the fact that over the last few years she has gotten involved in various online discussions centered around cultural differences between her home nation of Australia, and the US, where the majority of Quillette’s readers live. Razib draws Lehmann out about the fact that few Americans grasp what different views  Australians usually hold about the balance between values of liberty and equality. This gap has resulted in several clashes online fueled more by ignorance than disagreement.

Lehmann also discusses the disintegration of the intellectual dark web itself, and the future directions that Quillette will take. She notes that one of the major fissures between her own views and those of many intellectual dark web luminaries is that many of them, like Bret Weinstein, are more reflexive dissenters. Outside of a few topics, like racial essentialism, Lehmann observes that the intellectual dark web was never a coherent movement. Finally, she reflects on the positives and negatives of social media, and how it has changed over the last five years of her editorship of Quillette.

A bit over one percent of Americans are of Filipino ancestry, making them one of the largest Asian American subgroups. Unlike Chinese, Mexicans or Europeans, Filipino immigrants are unique in that their homeland, the Philippines, was actually an American colony for five decades, between 1898 and 1946. This is one reason that the level of English fluency in the Phillippines is very high, a factor in very strong economic integration with the US through outsourcing. And yet despite the historically close ties between the US and the Philippines, most Americans are unaware that as many as one million Filipinos died in a rebellion against the US army 120 years ago. From the perspective of many Americans, the Philippines is just another Pacific nation with more American entanglements than most.

Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Manuel L. Quezon III, columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and grandson of Philippine President Manuel L. Quezon. Razib tells Quezon that his first awareness of the Philippines came with the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, and they discuss the fact that the late dictator’s son is now President-Elect and what means for politics in the island nation. Quezon addresses how Filipinos view themselves, whether as Southeast Asian, Pacific or Latin? He also notes that the global rise of populism has arrived in the Philippines, and predicts that Americans may not recognize much of its politics in the near future.

In 1973 the eminent evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote an essay  entitled “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Presumably, that would include molecular biology, and as Dobzhanksy was writing, the field of molecular evolution was bearing fruit that would revolutionize our understanding of Darwinian evolutionary biology. Or, perhaps more precisely, it would extend and move beyond a purely Darwinian understanding of changes in the DNA sequence on the molecular level. In the 1970’s, the idea that evolution at the scale of DNA and proteins was “neutral” in relation to adaptive fitness came to the fore through the work of both population geneticists and molecular biologists. This is in contrast to the emphasis placed on natural selection and adaptation in Darwin’s original theory, and pushed forward by Dobzhansky and his colleagues in the mid-20th century with the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis. Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to Alex Palazzo, a molecular biologist who has also thought deeply about the relationship between his field and evolution, and where we are 40 years after the neutralist revolution.

The conversation covers the issues brought up in Palazzo’s paper Non-Darwinian Molecular Biology. Was Charles Darwin wrong? Well, his ideas and theory were clearly incomplete in various ways. Palazzo argues for the importance of the mechanistic and structural details of genes and DNA that go into explaining why evolution produces the diverse traits and characteristics we see all around us. He also discusses why complex lifeforms exist due to the built-in tolerance of sloppiness in DNA replication, and addresses questions such as why genomes vary in size so greatly (did you know that the wheat genome is forty times larger than the rice genome?).

Who was the smartest human of the 20th century? Though intellectual celebrity probably dictates that the majority would answer Albert Einstein, another candidate is the mathematician John von Neumann. Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to science journalist Ananyo Bhattacharya, author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann, and erstwhile physicist and editor at Nature. They discuss the life and science of a scholar whose mental acuity was so preternatural that he was affectionately labeled a “Martian” by his colleagues.

Razib and Bhattacharya discuss the social context of von Neumann’s upbringing in the haute bourgeoisie of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire (his family was elevated to the nobility when von Neumann was ten), a milieu that facilitated his insatiable intellectual appetites and provided him an incomparable set of peers that would ensure he never became complacent. Then, Bhattacharya notes that Von Neumann was not exceptional at every intellectual endeavor. He may have made original contributions to mathematics, physics, economics, statistics and computing, but non-polymath mortals may take comfort that he was known to be a mediocre chess player and a life-threatening driver. To sum up, they consider some of the aforementioned contributions that the “Martian” made to human knowledge before dying prematurely from cancer at the age of 53.

In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Stuart Ritchie joins Razib., Ritchie is the author of Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth and Intelligence: All that Matters. Ritchie is also a lecturer at King’s College London and the author of the new Substack Science Fictions. Razib and Ritchie first discuss why he has a Substack considering all the different projects he’s already juggling, and what value he sees coming out of it (beyond the remunerative one). They also rewind the clock and discuss Ritchie’s involvement in the replication crisis a decade ago, where he judges we are today in terms of the awareness of pitfalls in science and best practices, and the path forward. Razib also wonders how debunked findings like “implicit bias” still continue to percolate through the popular culture and policy forums despite scant scientific support for their validity.

Eventually Razib and Ritchie pivot to his professional bread and butter, behavior genetics, and the social and scientific debates around its relevance and abuses. Razib wonders if the cultural chasm between behavior genetics and other genetics fields can ever be bridged, while Ritchie makes the case for his chosen field as an important human endeavor. Finally, they discuss the controversy around Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery and his defense of her work at his Substack. 

Last month Razib talked to Alex Nowrestah of the Cato Institute about the state of migration and policy in the US in 2022. An enthusiast for immigration, Nowrestah expressed some chagrin that the issue has fallen off the American public’s radar, at least judging by the sharp dropoff in media inquiries to his office. And yet there remains a whole policy class in Washington D.C. that is still attending to the complex and fraught topics in and around migration that shape the future trajectory of American demographics. While Nowrestah definitely leans toward opening up the borders, today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to Jason Richwine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies, who comes at the question from the opposite viewpoint. While much of the American elite, from the conservative pro-business chamber of commerce to liberal human-rights activists, aim to increase the stream of migration, Richwine and his colleagues at CIS argue that not only should America take back control of its borders, a serious case can be made for restricting and reducing immigration.

Over the course of their discussion, they touch on the relevance of economics, culture and politics to the immigration question. In a 2022 America of full employment, Richwine is not persuaded of the economic case for more labor supply.  He makes the argument that full employment is a feature, not a bug, of the low-migration scenario imposed by the recent pandemic. And full employment is good for America’s working class in particular. Rather than economics, Richwine seems more concerned about the cultural impact of immigration, as newcomers transform the character and values of American society bit by bit. Where many analysts are focused on the macroeconomic impacts of migration, Razib and Richwine probe the deep roots of 17th-century American culture in different streams of Anglo migration, and consider what that can tell us about cultural differences in the 21st-century.

Three of R.A. Fisher’s  Ph.D. students remain active today, C. R Rao at age 101 and A. W. F. Edwards, and W. F. Bodmer, both 86. Bodmer was not only a student of Fisher, the cofounder of both population genetics and modern statistics, he was also mentored by Joshua Lederberg, the 1958 winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in bacterial genetics. With more than 60 years in science, Bodmer joins Razib on this episode of Unsupervised Learning to discuss everything from his recollections of Fisher, Lederberg and Cavalli-Sforza, to the recent cancellation controversy around his Ph.D. advisor.

Over the course of the hour, they go on to discuss what has surprised Bodmer about the trajectory of genetics over the past few decades (he thinks the recent “completion of the human genome” is a bit overhyped), his continuing passion for the HLA loci (which are notably difficult to map genomically), the People of the British Isles Project, as well as his current interest in cancer genomics. Bodmer’s massive public record spans the history of much of modern genomics, from work on linkage and recombination in the 1960s to being part of the 1000 Genomes Project in the 2010’s.

The official conversion of the nation of Lithuania to Christianity was in 1387. This means officially Lithuanians have been Christian for 635 years, and did not adopt the religion until more than 1,000 years after Constantine the Great accepted Christianity and set the Roman Empire on its way to becoming synonymous with the faith. But Francis Young, a historian of religion, is here to tell you there’s more to this story. His new book, Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic: Sixteenth-Century Ethnographic Accounts of Baltic Paganism, is an account of the practices and persistence of Baltic paganism down to the 16th-century, the age of the Renaissance and Reformation.

Over the course of their conversation, Razib asks Young the reasons Lithuania came to Christianity so late (in the 1500’s, 30-40% of Lithuanians were pagan in their practice and belief), and how late did Lithuanian folk paganism persist? Debates still rage in the history of religion about the persistence of heterodox religious views and practices in Europe after Christianization, but Young makes a convincing case that in the instance of Lithuania there were historical and cultural reasons why a critical mass of the rural peasantry remained staunchly pagan down to early modernity, in contrast to the case in Western and Southern Europe, where Christianity’s roots ran deeper.

Rand Simberg is the author of 2014's Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space, and a space business consultant, as well as a longtime blogger and commentator. Today, on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Simberg about SpaceX’s ambitiously named vessel, Starship, and what it means for the space business. In the process, Simberg outlines just how much of a lead SpaceX has over its competitors, and how it has transformed the game over the last decade, lapping the private-sector competition and putting pressure on national space programs.

Razib asks Simberg about the long-term prospects for manned spaceflight, and what’s stopping us from reaching Mars and beyond. Simberg revisits some of the ideas that he presented almost a decade ago in Safe Is Not An Option, and argues that many of the hurdles are cultural and regulatory, not technological.

If Amazon has brought supply-chain scale to the US economy, America’s partnership with China has taken the concept of scale to a whole new level. Razib asks about Hart’s experience as a businessman in China ten years ago in the border area between Manchuria and North Korea. Hart recounts several major things he learned about the contrast between the US and China. For example, while Americans focus on fairness and rule of law, the Chinese have no such expectations and are very pragmatic (“don’t argue, pay the bribe!”). Second, the Chinese plan fast and make immediate decisions, and then pivot rapidly off mistakes, while Americans tend to over plan. Though China in the early 2010s was very corrupt, Hart feels the last decade has seen a shift away from those practices.

Another thing that has changed over the last decade has been an awareness that American and Chinese supply chains need to become decoupled to some extent due to both geopolitical and economic considerations. The COVID-19 interruptions in particular have made many Americans aware of how entangled how our own production processes are with China. But changing the current economic relationships may not be so easy. In the mid-2010’s Hart shifted some of his purchasing to Vietnam. Though the Vietnamese are hungrier and cheaper, they naturally lack the scale, efficiency and specialization of their Chinese competitors. Hart also observes that it is clear that the Chinese workers are among the hardest working and most skilled in the world, so they will not be easy to replace. His contacts in the Pacific Rim believe that only India would ever be able to truly substitute for China because of its size and diversity.

Hart notes that one peculiarity of China is that it operates as a large market economy that is culturally less aware of the US than other Asian trading partners. In particular, Chinese English fluency is much lower than that of Indian and Vietnamese. Hart wonders if this state might never change given that the Chinese society and economy are just large enough that they can ignore America more than smaller and less developed nations.

Pivoting back to the US, Razib and Hart discuss the “easy money” policies that have dominated American economic policies over the last few years. Hart argues that the ability of Americans to take on debt enables bad policies, from foreign policy adventures to bailouts of firms that should be allowed to fail. Additionally, he argues that inflation reduces the value of American money and the appeal of investing in US “cash” as the safest investment. 

They end the discussion with Hart’s bullishness on East Asian economies, despite the demographic and political headwinds. He also believes that the US has a bright future, but we need to accept that we’ll never have 1990’s hyperpower again.

In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Alex Nowrasteh, the director of economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute. Alex is also the author of Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions. His beat at Cato is immigration, and he has been keeping a close watch on the transition between the Biden and Trump administrations. The first issue Razib and Nowrasteh address is the reality that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a massive crash in immigration to the US due to Donald J. Trump’s executive orders. Curiously, Trump justified the border closures, not on public health grounds, but to safeguard American jobs. Additionally, Nowrasteh claims that Joe Biden’s administration has been “Trump’s second term” when it comes to immigration levels, as the migration rates have not reached the levels before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though Democratic activists have argued for very liberal immigration policies, Nowrasteh observes that Biden’s 2020 campaign was only marginally more conservative. Contrary to expectations, immigration has been sidelined as a major issue despite Democrats controlling the Presidency and Congress. Nowrasteh asserts there has been “no interest in liberalizing immigration” within the administration, as they fear the political consequences.

Pivoting to the international stage, Razib wonders about the exodus of Ukrainians due to the Russian invasion. Nowrasteh commends European generosity in taking in refugees, but he believes that ultimately most of the migrants will remain in Europe due to simple economics. Ukraine was the poorest nation in Europe, and Razib and Nowrasteh wonder if a post-war Ukraine will be filled with the old, the very young and those with few prospects, as the productive working-age population permanently decamps to Western Europe.

Next, they discuss the global landscape of demographic transition and the reality that only Sub-Saharan Africa has high fertility rates. Nowrasteh observes that in fact, the Middle East might be the major destination for African migrants due to the collapsing population and the demand for workers in the region. Another obvious target to African migration will be Europe, but it is clear that the US is likely to be a destination when the immigration system relaxes and opens up. 

Nowrasteh pivots back the US, and argues that despite all the rhetorical excesses that veer to open borders in the Democratic party, operationally the party hierarchy is much more conservative in terms of policy implementation. Razib points out that some elements of the Left associated with environmentalism, in particular the Sierra Club, have been associated with immigration restrictionism. Nowrasteh then observes that many conservative immigration restriction groups actually have pasts where they were founded by and associated with liberal population control environmentalists in the 1970’s. For example, the current website of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) declares that “America’s immigration and border controls have fallen apart due to ineffective leadership from Washington. We face a true national emergency!” Paul Erhlich, Stanford ecologist and environmentalist author of the The Population Bomb (for which the first director of the Sierra Club wrote a foreword), was on the board of FAIR until the mid-2000’s.

They close the conversation by reflecting on the global “birth dearth” and the possibility of how many Americans there might be at the end of the 21st-century (sorry Matt Yglesias, a few fewer than 1 billion).

In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to James Lee, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. Lee is a co-author of a new paper in Nature, Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals. A landmark in the field of cognitive genomics, this publication is the result of years of collaboration between two dozen researchers. 

Over the course of the episode, they deep dive into the results from the publication that Lee in particular finds fascinating. But first, Razib brings up a recent controversy related to Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery and the science that undergirds its thesis. Evolutionary geneticists Graham Coop and Molly Prezworski recently wrote a review of Harden’s book in Evolution, Lottery, luck, or legacy. A review of “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA matters for social equality”. They argue that Harden overplays her hand in terms of what “polygenic risk scores” can tell us about our future life trajectory (and in particular her focus on education outcomes), as well as their social utility. Harden responds with a piece titled Forests and Trees, contending that Coop and Prezworski mischaracterize her position and seem to hold behavior genetics to an unreasonably high standard of evidentiary validity. In buttressing the science in The Genetic Lottery, Lee expounds on the importance of the finding that genetic positions associated with something like higher educational attainment seem highly correlated with regions of the genome associated with neurological development in particular.

Next, Razib asks what aspect of the new paper Lee found most interesting, and he points to the section on the nature of dominance, the characteristic whereby certain genetic variants express a trait when present in a single copy, as opposed to two copies (recessive traits). These arguments go back to Sewall Wright and R. A. Fisher’s debates about the nature of dominance from a century ago, a divergence in viewpoints at the very founding of population genetics as a field. Lee favor’s Wright’s view that dominance is a function of the physiological mechanism of gene expression; a gene that produces proteins will still produce sufficient quantities in even a single copy. In contrast, most of the authors of  Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals favored Fisher’s idea that dominantly expressed genes sweep to selection faster, and so that view is tacitly supported in their conclusions.

During the rest of the discussion, Lee expounds on a wide range of topics that touch on behavior genomics, from whether rare variants of large effect will come to be seen as important, to why heritability estimates using family-based designs are so much lower for educational attainment than conventional population-wide statistics, and the relevance of the results from this latest work for evolutionary genetics. Lee makes the case that the synthesis of genomics and behavior genetics makes for a fascinating story of scientific discovery that will help illuminate our understanding of human nature in the 21st-century, far beyond the field’s utility in predicting individual traits.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Josiah Neeley, Senior Fellow in Energy at the R Street Institute and co-host of the Urbane Cowboys podcast. They discuss the past, present and future of the energy markets, and how best to understand the workings of the global energy ecosystem. Considering geopolitical events in Europe, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they dive right into how distribution differences between oil and gas will conspire to keep Europeans dependent on Russia for energy for the foreseeable future, blocked from immediately switching to other options. They also address the fact that Russia’s leverage as a petrostate has been diminished by a revolution in oil extraction technology that has at the same time made the US a net exporter of crude.

Neeley says it’s critical we acknowledge how disaggregated the energy markets are. While crude oil is a global market defined by a single price that is highly responsive to international events, natural gas prices are very localized. Unlike oil, natural gas is not easy to transport, so there is no pooled market. Energy policy is not singular because energy is defined by diverse technologies with specific constraints and demands. Constant innovation means that in the near future advances in liquifying natural gas (LNG) may make it a more global commodity.

Then they discuss what it means to be a renewable energy, the dependence of wind and solar on battery technology, and the fact that, depending on how you think about it, most of our energy is ultimately solar (fossil fuels deriving from organisms whose original energy input was from the sun). Neeley points out that while solar and wind are highly variable inputs, fossil fuels and nuclear energy are relatively constant, resulting in the vastly greater necessity for battery technology in the former two. Meanwhile, because immediate solar technology is arguably the most visible form of energy production (since you probably know exactly how many houses on your block have solar panels, but probably zero run a backyard coal-fired plant) Neeley notes this means Americans often overestimate the relative importance of solar compared to other sources.

Finally, they explore the geopolitical dependencies that plague the various energy sources and the peculiar relative stagnation of nuclear technology. Neeley observes that, unlike most innovations, thanks to an accumulation of safety regulations, nuclear power plants have actually become more, not less, expensive, over the last fifty years, resulting in some unfavorable economics. Additionally, nuclear energy requires a high human capital input from engineers and technicians. This may explain why heavy reliance on nuclear power is limited mostly to medium-sized European countries, and it has gained little traction in the developing world.

Razib next asks Shapiro for his take on globalization in the context of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Shapiro argues that we are truly moving into a multipolar world that is more similar to what occurred in the 1890’s when there was a balance of power in Europe. Shapiro points out that that too was a time of economic and cultural tumult and creativity, Europe’s “Belle Epoque.” For him, this earlier period of globalization illustrates both the promise and peril of a geopolitically balanced world where fates were interlaced by complex networks of free trade. Shapiro’s main worry is a “Black Swan” event with the power to trigger a global conflict, a freak event analogous to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian radical that ignited World War I. He cautions that a world with more balance of power between nations and leaders, unpredictable decisions grow more likely.

Shapiro also argues strongly that the US is under a misimpression in terms of its power and influence in a world where other powers are rising. He also greets the idea that demographics is destiny with skepticism, pointing out that in the 1930’s Germany’s demographic profile did not indicate youthful bellicosity. Though Shapiro acknowledges the headwinds that demographics will present to both China and Europe, he argues we shouldn’t underestimate their future possibilities.

The conversation closes with the possibility that instability and reorganization will result in a ferment of cultural creativity that might match the decades around 1900. Though we are in for a great geopolitical shift, Shapiro sees opportunities and promise in the US, which still remains a dynamic society and a magnet for talent. Finally, he tells us to keep an eye on Central Asia as a locus for instability and change due to both location and authoritarian governments.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back Samo Burja, a guest who needs no introduction for long-time listeners. Burja is the podcast’s first third-time guest, and with good reason. Previously, he came on to discuss social technology and China and lost civilizations, plumbing the depths of the human past for insights about the present and future. Today Burja spotlights a timely new venture of his firm, Bismark Analysis: the Bismarck Brief newsletter, which provides a taste of the sort of “deep-dive” analyses Bujra provides clients (Drone Adoption Favors Quantity Over Quality In Warfare, The German Retreat From Nuclear Power and Modern Russia Can Fight And Win Land Wars). 

He discusses the analytic model undergirding the Bismarck Brief, the idea of “live players,” individuals and institutions that can innovate and direct actions in surprising and novel ways, and “dead players,” who tend to operate in a rote manner following predictable scripts, and struggle to meet new challenges. A new start-up in a phase of expansion is a live player, disrupting the marketplace and transforming the notion of what is possible, like Google in 2000. In contrast, Google in 2022 is arguably a dead player, squeezing massive profits out of its capture of online advertising via search, but no longer transforming any sector of the economy.

The remainder of the episode shifts to the details of Burja’s analytic process, and his thoughts at the time in February 2022 (when the episode was pre-recorded) on the impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as the earlier performance of Russian military forces in Syria and elsewhere. Razib and Samo touch on the geopolitical consequences of Europe’s energy dependence upon Russia, and its distortionary impact on German foreign policy.

Because this episode was recorded before the Russian invasion that began on February 24th, 2022, Razib has circled back with Burja to record a bonus mini-episode tackling recent developments. That episode covers what the Russian invasion and the Western response might mean for the global order in the 21st century.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Zack Stentz, a screenwriter and producer in Hollywood, and a former journalist. His credits include 2011 films X-Men: First Class and Thor, as well as the television shows Andromeda, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous.

Considering that working in Hollywood as a writer is a “dream job” for many, Razib and Stentz discuss how to break in and succeed in show business. Like most people, Stentz wrote in his spare time while pursuing a career as a journalist for many years. His trajectory shifted when he was added to an early-aughts science fiction series, Andromeda (Razib was among its fans). As in many fields, one success can open doors as you become a known quantity and Stentz also developed a partnership with another writer, Ashley E Miller, for over a decade.

Unlike what would have been true if Stentz had begun his career a few decades earlier, the 21st-century has seen massive changes in film and television. Early in Stentz’s career, there were still prominent independent films that both made a great deal of money and had a cultural impact, like 2003’s Lost in Translation or 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Today the film landscape is dominated by a few tentpoles inspired by comic-book movies. Stentz argues that the future of more creative work is probably going to be streaming platforms, with the big screen dominated by the PG-13 “shared universe” series. He also admits that there have been massive changes in the public’s attention span, with a fracturing of the entertainment landscape between clips, series, films and video games. Though there are still opportunities, the changes over the last twenty years have been massive. On the business end, Stentz argues that eventually, movie theaters will also have to be more aggressive about flexible pricing.

Then Razib asks Stentz about his opinions on the new Amazon series based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s work that will debut in the fall, The Rings of Power. Stentz looks back to an interview with Peter Jackson from his journalist days in the late 1990’s, and the reverence that he brought to that assignment, and worries that Jeff Bezos and Amazon do not understand they cannot just buy creative excellence. Apparently, Bezos pushed for the purchase of the rights from the Tolkien estate after seeing the success of Game of Thrones, and that prompts Razib to recount his internet interactions with the author of the novels, George R. R. Martin, in the late 1990’s. Stentz notes that Martin left a career as a television writer to write novels because he wanted more freedom, so it was somewhat ironic that he became involved in television again fifteen years after he left due to the popularity of his novels.

Finally, Stentz addresses the cultural changes in media, Hollywood and the new focus on representation. Stentz takes a moderate stance on the changes, neither promoting them with full force nor resisting inevitable change. He argues that people have to focus on building their own brand and uniqueness, as providing genuine value is the best job protection.

Razib and Sarah first discuss where the Ex-Muslim community is in 2022, especially after a few years of COVID-19 that dampened face-to-face meetups. Sarah argues that there has been a massive change in the acceptance and visibility of Ex-Muslims over the past decade. To a great extent the community has taken on a life of its own, and the shepherding role of  Ex-Muslims of North America is not nearly as essential as it was when it was founded in 2013. It should be noted here that public apostasy in Islam is traditionally a capital crime, so people who are skeptical of religion from a Muslim background have often been wary of being open and honest about their views.

Sarah also observes that Ex-Muslims have weathered the cultural changes on the social Left better than the broader atheist and secular community over the last few years, which has been fractured by the rise of the “woke” faction. Razib asks if this is possibly due to a high degree of disagreeability among Ex-Muslims, who are often strongly selected for nonconformity in order to be willing to go against the grain, even at great personal and social cost. Sarah agrees and offers that this is in contrast to what she terms the “evangelical to woke” pipeline, where conservative Protestants leave their religion behind only to adopt an entirely new set of strident beliefs (on her Substack Sarah has a post Is Wokism uniquely Christian?). Razib questions Sarah as to whether the decline of religion over the last generation that New Atheists were cheering for in the aughts was really a force for good.

While they were discussing various heresies, Sarah offered that she was a “gender atheist.” She takes a highly critical view of what she calls “gender ideology,” asserting the primacy of biological sex. Razib and Sarah then mull over whether this is truly the current age’s biggest third rail, and why that might be.

Eventually, Razib stumbles on the fact that Sarah is a “Rogan-bro” (she listens semi-regularly to the podcast). She discusses why people listen, Joe Rogan’s relationship to his audience, and explains how she came to be a listener and why she continues to tune in. She also discusses her piece Why Deplatforming Joe Rogan Will Backfire.

Finally, Sarah talks about what it’s like to be a young woman who has a public online presence, from excessive attention to harassment from conservative Muslims. They close out with a discussion about future directions in her career and activism. Sarah talks about why she started the Substack and why she is now pursuing writing and thinking on topics outside her secular/Ex-Muslim bailiwick.

Though HAF’s purview is America, it often gets dragged into Indian cultural politics. Suhag addresses accusations that HAF gives comfort to Hindu nationalists and Hindutva, and outlines for American listeners what these ideologies actually are. Indian politics and society are complex topics, and Suhag and Razib barely scratch the surface, but they do touch specifically on the issue of caste and how it is now becoming a live issue in the US. Over the past year, activists have been demanding that caste be included as a protected class, due to allegations of discrimination in the US. Suhag and Razib both agree that at 1% of America’s population it is unlikely that American Hindus are recreating the same stratified social system that obtains in India. Additionally, Razib points out that while white American Hindus are never going to be asked about caste, brown-skinned non-Hindus like himself will be, because the average American tends to racialize Hindu identity.

They close out the discussion by tackling whether Hinduism can adapt to the American landscape, where conversion and fluidity are the norms. Suhag is optimistic about the future of Hinduism and points to the fact that the data show high retention rates of people raised as Hindus in the US to the religion as adults. She also offers evidence that Indian Americans raised in a more assimilated environment often come back to their ancestral traditions later in life, and that includes their religion.

Over the past generation, China has gone from a developing nation of bicycles and Volkswagens to a global economic juggernaut that is Mercedes-Benz’s single biggest market. You can track this transformation in charts or follow it in dispatches from foreign correspondents, but this week’s guest on the podcast has seen it up close and personal. Colin is a black American who works in the corporate technology sector and has lived in and visited China on and off since the late 1990’s. He is also a genetic genealogy enthusiast, so he and Razib have known each other for over ten years as the field of DNA-informed family and ancestral personal history has grown to become ubiquitous. 

First, Colin talks about the changes he’s seen first hand, in particular in Shanghai. What today is a gleaming international capital of finance and commerce, just a generation ago it was a parochial burg, where many residents still spoke the local dialect in public and walked the flooded streets in their pajamas. Colin contrasts the sheer rapidity of change in and around Shanghai, with his experiences traveling to Europe: while he does not have to update his “mental map” of Paris or London when years pass between visits, Chinese cities are constantly shifting, transmuting and growing. He notes that while the Chinese of a generation ago were curious and diffident, today they tend to be self-assured and confident about their place in the world.

Then they discuss the peculiarity of Colin’s position of being both a Westerner and black, and how reactions to this juxtaposition have changed over the last generation. Whereas in the 1990’s, being Western and white were seen as proxies for each other, and his black racial identity presented his interlocutors with a conundrum, today’s Chinese are much more aware and sophisticated about the world beyond their borders. Colin also addresses the idea that the Chinese are prejudiced against darker-skinned people. Though this is true, he attributes this as much to their ideas of class as to anything biological. Colin points out that the Chinese perceive majority-white Western nations to be developed and orderly, while South Asia and Africa are perceived to be undeveloped and chaotic. The national associations transfer over to race and easily map onto traditional Chinese notions, where uneducated rural peasants who spend their days laboring outside are darker-skinned, as opposed to fair-skinned scholars. 

For a nominally “Communist” nation, Colin argues that China is riven by massive visible class divisions. Until the late crackdown by Xi Jinping, the Chinese nouveaux riches flaunted their wealth in a gaudy manner that would take most Westerners by surprise. While some of the wealthy living in Western nations are relatively understated in their consumption, the Chinese rich display their material riches so as to signal their success and status.

Finally, Razib and Colin discuss the place of religion in the People’s Republic of China today. This seems a case where everything new is old, as the traditional Chinese suspicion of “foreign religions,” in this case, Islam and Christianity, is contrasted with the relative indulgence shown to native religious practices, including Buddhism and Daoism. While the Western press is often fixated on the vocal and well-connected Christian minority, Colin’s experience is that the average Chinese is very weakly engaged with organized religion, if at all, as the nation’s history would lead you to expect.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Caleb Watney is the co-president of The Institute for Progress (along with Alec Stapp), which exists to foster innovation and technological advancement through public policy levers. Founded in January of 2021, The Institute for Progress declares itself a “think tank for accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress.” 

Razib’s first major question is why such a think tank even needs to exist. Isn’t there a huge complex of research universities in the US? Caleb outlines many problems with academic science in the US, with 40-45% of primary investigators’ (lab heads’) time being spent on writing grant applications to fund their labs. The preferences of the funding institutions and the size of the grants, determine the course and scope of research. With this in mind, rather than targeting interesting questions, many academics target questions that are fundable. 

As for why he needed to found a new think tank as opposed to expanding out of an established one like Niskanen or Brookings, Caleb argues that fresh institutions are often necessary for innovation, and it was important to start something without legacy baggage so they could talk to both Republicans and Democrats. The Institute for Progress is an attempt by public policy entrepreneurs like Caleb to break out of Washington D.C.’s paralyzed and polarized two-party dynamic.

The Institute for Progress also has a broad scope, targeting topics as diverse as security, space, and life science. Razib and Caleb talk about the miracle of mRNA vaccines in tackling COVID-19 (a sharp contrast with the health establishment’s numerous failures in confronting the pandemic), and the incredible possibilities for future vaccine development, from rapid targeted development to general-purpose vaccines. They also tackle how and why SpaceX happened, and what it means for spaceflight in the 21st century and beyond. Then they address the differences between the effective altruism movement and the progress studies movement, and the relationship between them. Whatever differences exist, both movements channel the spirit of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.

They conclude the conversation talking about China, its promise and peril, and US immigration policy. Caleb argues that the challenge of China is fundamentally different from that of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet Union had roughly the US’s population, China is a far larger nation-state in terms of raw numbers, so it presents a much more formidable economic opponent. The US’s advantage over the Soviet Union was its capitalist framework, but it does not have this edge over a nominally Communist China. One of the ways Caleb argues we can forestall being superseded by China is to allow for more immigration, specifically high-skill immigration. A major project of The Institute for Progress is to help fix our broken immigration system, and so rebuild America’s stock of human capital in the coming rivalry with China.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Chad Orzel is a physicist and science writer who has been blogging for twenty years. He’s the author of four books, Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog and Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist. On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Chad about his newest book, A Brief History of Timekeeping, a mix of cultural and engineering history, archeology and physics.

It is a wide-ranging book, jumping all the way from the calendrical functions of Neolithic megaliths to the future of quantum clocks. Since much of the work covers history and archeology, Razib and Chad discuss the cultural and historical context of Neolithic Europe, and in particular historical genetic findings about the builders of Newgrange, one of the “astronomical calendars” featured in A Brief History of Timekeeping. Chad also outlines the cultural, historical, and engineering aspects of astronomical calendars, and the quirks in the Maya system that made 2012 so important. Then Razib asks about water clocks and other physical-based instruments that measure time, items that often feature in period pieces, but have long been superseded by modern technologies. 

One of the aspects of A Brief History of Timekeeping that makes it different from Chad’s earlier works in physics is that there are so many concrete everyday facts of life he explores with surprising historical origins. For example, he discusses how Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) became a de facto standard (and no, it does not have to do with Britain’s imperial preeminence over a century ago), as well as the cultural changes wrought by standardized time in the late 19th century, as our work and life clocks started to come into sync across time zones.

Going back to physics, the conversation eventually addresses how Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity changed our perception of fixed and invariant time. Finally, Chad and Razib talk about futuristic methods of time measurement, like nuclear and quantum clocks. Though the human fixation with time has deep roots, it is clear its importance in technology means that we will keep improving.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Have you ever wondered how academic publishing works? If you’re not in academia, probably not, but you might be surprised by how much intrigue and politics it entails. If you are an academic, you probably don’t want to think about it any more than you have to because it’s a mess. Nearly a decade ago, Razib co-authored a paper, Dragging scientific publishing into the 21st century, that sketched out a map of a possible future. That future isn’t here yet, but things are changing with the emergence of preprint culture.

In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Dr. William Gunn, Head of Communications at Quora. Before Quora, William worked in communications at the massive publishing house Elsevier, which purchased Mendeley, a reference management startup where he had a senior position. Despite his current roles, William’s original training was at Tulane in molecular biology. William and Razib talk about how he navigated the career path that took him from academic science to tech and publishing (or, more precisely, how he stumbled onto a career transition). They also address the contingent role of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, a storm that scattered the laboratory where he was conducting his research.

Then they discuss the current state of academic publishing and its path forward. Though many academics have ideas about how platforms can drive change, William points out that these endeavors consistently flail and fade due to the natural conservatism of science and scientists. He argues that though scientists often demonize Elsevier and the publishing houses, the role of editors in shaping peer review is often underappreciated.

William addresses the future of online information exchange more generally, focusing on Quora. They then discuss the peculiarity that for Indians, Quora has become a social media platform, while Americans continue to use it as a Q & A clearinghouse. Willam recalls his involvement in metascience, open science, and the reproducibility crisis during his time at Elsevier. He argues that institutional resistance to improving the methods within science is due to fear that admitting room for improvement feeds skepticism of science.

Transcript

Finally, they close by reviewing how COVID-19 has illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of the American information ecosystem, in particular the positive and negative role of preprints.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Razib first lays his cards on the table and admits that he has no firsthand knowledge of psychedelics and no personal interest or understanding of mysticism. And yet, he acknowledges that discussion of drugs like psilocybin is pervasive across society. Rav disabuses Razib of the idea that psilocybin and other psychedelics are dangerous, a case where Generation-Z has to enlighten a member of Generation-X who was inculcated with the “Just Say No To Drugs” message of the 1980’s. For Rav, psychedelics are a means to an end, a tool like any other.

But much of the discussion goes deeper into issues of metaphysics. What is spirituality, and what does Rav say to people who express no interest in mysticism or religion? Rav contends that the utility of psychedelics for spirituality doesn’t have anything to do with religion, making the point that the atheist Sam Harris has long been intrigued by the potential of psychedelics in bringing about heightened mental awareness. Though Razib remains skeptical, it’s clear that this decade will see more discussion of this topic, and Rav also notes the extensive research in psychotherapy showing that psychedelics are proving effective in treating mental illness.

The substack is The Noble Truths with Rav Arora, where he posts essays on the science of mystical experience and psychedelics. Paid subscribers can also get Rav’s post-psychedelic trip audio recordings and FaceTime podcasts with ‘IDW’ figures.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Today’s podcast guest, erstwhile scientist and bond-trader Chris Arnade is a cultural commentator, photographer and novelist. Arnade’s father was a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an academic and settled his family in a conservative, working-class Gulf-Coast Florida town. This gives Arnade a personal understanding of America outside of the cosmopolitan coastal cities. He notes that, whereas he left Florida and completed a physics Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, the vast majority of his high school classmates did not go to college. Eventually, he exited academia for a 20-year stint on Wall Street, before ultimately settling into a life of photography and writing. 

He talks about how he was always out of place in the world of high finance due to his socialist politics, continuing a lifelong pattern of being an outsider. In 2013, Andrade began to explore the poor and working-class neighborhoods of New York City on a lark, photographing sex workers and drug addicts. Arnade’s subjects eventually expanded to include the poor and working-class more generally across the US. In particular, he began a project where he photographed people at McDonald’s all across the country, a portrait of what he termed “Back Row America” (as opposed to upper-middle-class “Front Row America”).

Arnade and I talk about his peculiar position of being the target of progressive animus due to his prediction in 2016 that Donald Trump could actually win the election, based on his interaction with working-class Americans. Despite his socialist bona fides, he believes that his critics will never forgive him for being right about Trump’s popularity among the working class. 

Today Arnade has a new project, walking across cities, both photographing what he sees, and writing up his impressions, back on his Substack. 

This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, R. Taylor Raborn, a genomicist and associate bioinformatics principal investigator at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) joins Razib to discuss his current and former research interests, touching on the unpredictable path a career in science can take. 

Taylor was drawn to biology at a young age due to his naturalist bent. Eventually, as a graduate student, he became particularly interested in the topics of gene-promoter evolution and cis-regulatory differences in populations among eukaryotes. These are keys to gene regulation, the process that massages the raw read-out of DNA sequence so that it can be tapped to produce the wide array of proteins and structures that contribute to an organism’s phenotypic variation. 

The conversation also veers into evolutionary topics, considering why species across millions of years and thousands of taxa all utilize meiosis, despite the two-fold cost of maintaining dimorphism between sexes. After some technical deep-dive into the particularities of the subject, Razib and Taylor are left reflecting on the staggering amount of data geneticists have in 2021.

Finally, they reflect on the past two years of COVID-19, and the role it has played in Taylor's new position at the NBACC. After years as an evolutionary geneticist in academia pondering basic science questions, he is now planning for and responding to real-world biological threats to the United States. 

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Give a gift subscription

Share

The day after Christmas 2021, the great entomologist and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson died at the age of 92. Carl Zimmer in The New York Times wrote an obituary that highlighted his seminal early contributions to science, as well as his role as a public intellectual after the publication of 1975’s Sociobiology. Wilson also wrote an autobiography, Naturalist, telling the story of his life in science from his own perspective.

In the days after his passing, I wanted to touch base with those who knew him, collaborated with him, and even had disputes with him. The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson (no genetic relation) has talked in his books about how he was influenced by the elder Wilson early in his career, and also how they eventually became colleagues and allies in scientific debates. Recently he published The Six Legacies of Edward O. Wilson as a reflection on E. O. Wilson’s career and influence. These six were his contributions to evolutionary biology, biodiversity, human sociobiology, the unification of knowledge, his encouraging stance toward young scientists and other learners, and finally, the frontier of ecosystems studies (his very last project).

I’ve talked to David before about his work on multi-level selection as well as his ambition toward utilizing evolutionary biological frameworks in the context of social science and policy, so I reached out to discuss the piece he wrote about E. O. Wilson’s life. Knowing that the elder Wilson had encouraged David's interest in group selection as a graduate student, I expected to focus on the late scientist’s great contributions. But in fact, we addressed the reality that the elder Wilson often had greater aspirations than concrete paths of execution. No one can deny E. O. Wilson’s original contributions to ecology and his mastery of entomology, but David Sloan Wilson points out that some of his recent books sketch out grand plans, but do not deliver any roadmap on how to achieve those ends. Rather than a hagiography, the conversation emphasizes that we shouldn’t make icons out of scientists, that science is a collective enterprise, and that too often it is depicted as the products of singular “Great Men.” Nevertheless, over the course of the discussion, David Sloan Wilson and I do discuss the late Wilson’s positive and important contributions to entomology and mentorship, as well as his last forays into scientific debates when he became involved in a controversy around the utility of W. D. Hamilton’s inclusive fitness framework in 2010, and their collaboration in the 2000’s on multi-level selection theory.

One of the things about E. O. Wilson’s life that many have observed was his great range. In addition to his contributions to evolutionary biology, over the last few decades of his life, Wilson became a promoter of conservation and biodiversity (a term he helped popularize in the late 1980’s). But his activism was not without controversy. In the last third of the podcast, I talk to the science writer Charles C. Mann about his run-ins with Wilson in relation to environmentalism, where the scientist’s love of nature seems to have driven him beyond what conservation biology may have entailed. Mann also recounts Wilson’s dismissals of his pointed questions in relation to predictions made by his scientific theories about island biodiversity, reiterating that even the greatest of scientists are not necessarily dispassionate when it comes to their own scholarship. 

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Eric Kaufmann, political scientist and demographer, and the author of The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. During the course of their conversation, Razib and Eric focus on the thesis at the center of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, the prediction that due to the higher reproductive rates of religious groups compared to the secular population, the future is going to be more religious than the present. Eric’s thesis is that aspects of religious belief, for example, the divine commandment in the Hebrew Bible to be “fruitful and multiply,” result in differential fertility on the individual level. On the group level, he notes that poorer societies are more religious, and these societies also are driving migration and demographic change in secular developed countries (for example, London is more church-going than the rest of England, due to large immigrant congregations).

Before digging into the possibilities for future demographics, Razib gets Eric’s opinions and views on the secularization evident across much of the world over the last few centuries. How does this align with the idea that the future will be religious, especially when worries about differential fertility have been mooted as far back as early 19th-century France? At the time, secular French intellectuals worried about the immigration and reproductive rates of highly religious Catholics from Poland and elsewhere. And yet today France is even more secular than it was 200 years ago. Much of the subsequent discussion revolves around the idea that social and cultural change is impacted by alternative forces acting in balance.

Transcript

Eric emphasizes that the core of his argument does not rely upon the idea of large prominent religious groups expanding through mass conversion. Rather, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? argues that fertility differences in the liberal secular societies are going to be impacted in the long-term by small strict endogamous groups, like ultra-Orthodox Jews in England and Israel, or Laestadian Lutherans in Finland. Eric makes the case that these fundamentalist groups benefit from the spread of secular liberalism, as they are more inoculated from the anti-natal currents in the broader populace, driving large differential fertility differences.

Finally, they also touch on what is driving secularism in America, the demographic problems facing Mormons in America, and how secularism might play out differently in South and East Asian societies dominated by non-Abrahamic religions. 

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib catches up with Leighton Woodhouse, a documentarian and journalist (with a Substack!), to discuss the rise of political polarization and the disintegration of traditional parties and coalitions on both the left and the right. Leighton, whose activism began in 1999 at the WTO protests in Seattle, reflects on the financial, geopolitical and social shocks of the last twenty years, how they’ve transformed the movements he came up in, and the new elitist vs. populist dichotomy he sees developing around him.

Originally a labor organizer and Marxist, he argues that the decline in rigorous debate in favor of moralistic platitudes and ideological conformity is both a symptom and cause of America’s current listless cultural malaise. As someone with an academic background, Leighton also bemoans universities now sacrificing difficult intellectual discourse on the altar of easy performativity.  

The conversation confronts the reality that in 2021 heterodox thinkers who refuse to perform are often pilloried. They observe how Glenn Greenwald, once lionized by the left for his courageous exposés and uncompromising defenses of civil liberties, is now demonized as a right-wing shill. Liberals even accuse Greenwald of undermining the security state, as if that’s a bad thing. Equally detrimental from Leighton’s viewpoint is the reduction of issues that should be nonpolitical, like humane treatment of animals, into political football games where there’s only one winner. 

Despite starting from very different political positions Razib and Leighton find common ground in critiquing a cultural moment in which appearance and outrage have taken center stage, and those claiming the mantle of leadership make only token changes while making sure to keep a grip on their power and privilege.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Dr. Xiaotong Yao, a computational biologist specializing in cancer research at Cornell’s Weill Institute, joins Razib.  

 They first dig deep into genomics, considering the efficacy and costs of expanding whole-genome sequencing to assemble massive population-sized datasets. Not a thousand people, but a billion. Next, they probe the implications of wide-scale sequencing as it becomes integral to clinical diagnosis and treatment. As for treatment specifically, they flesh out CRISPR/Cas9’s exciting possibilities for curing Mendelian diseases. 

Razib also asks Xiaotong about his experience as a millennial growing up in China, and his impressions of the current state of affairs between the United States, where he lives, and his homeland. They discuss ways in which the development of the Chinese government’s proactive role in education and economic development over the last 30 years has resulted in increased GDP, and how this has created a dynamic between the two global superpowers that has been mutually beneficial. US intellectual property and Chinese manufacturing have operated synergistically to make technological wonders like the smartphone globally accessible. 

Transcript

They finally touch on the reality that over the last few years tensions between China and the US have greatly increased, and nascent rivalry between what are now the world’s two great economic superpowers may lead to a Cold War redux. Razib remains hopeful that science and the pursuit of understanding can continue to provide a common ground to facilitate cross-cultural dialogue in pursuit of a better future for humanity, no matter the geopolitical winds.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

This week on Unsupervised Learning author and Washington Post columnist (and former blogger) Megan McArdle join Razib for a  wide-ranging conversation reflecting on our reemergence after the year and a half ordeal of COVID lockdowns, rising violent crime rates, defunding policing, and the preposterous genetic distribution on Trantor, capital of Isaac Asimov’s Galactic Empire.  

An urbanite who has spent her life in the US’s own imperial capital cities - New York City, where she grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, and Washington D.C., where she now lives - Megan sees a functional law enforcement system as being a prerequisite to urban living. She, like Razib, is old enough to remember when crime and cities were synonymous, and they reflect on the murder spike of the last few years and how it might drive changes to the current pattern of gentrification.

Transcript

Throughout the conversation, they come back to the theme of generational reference points bracketing our experience and expectations – whether in young children for whom COVID lockdowns represent the majority of their remembered experience or Zoomers who can’t recall a time where network television created a shared narrative reality.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

This week on Unsupervised Learning Charles C. Mann, author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet joins Razib, to delve into the history of the Americas, and a broader theme that runs through Mann’s work – how human societies and their environment are inseparably intertwined.   

Mann’s work goes a long way towards dispelling the myth that the Americas were an untamed wilderness before the arrival of Europeans, scarcely populated and unshaped by the hand of man prior to Christopher Columbus. He describes a New World then peopled by complex societies with huge populations, possessing a well-developed toolkit of biological technologies for engineering the natural world, managing ecological succession, and diversifying food production strategy, all arguably superior to that of their European conquerors.  

Ultimately, when the Old and New Worlds collided, it was the calamitous impact of disease, rather than a significant technological advantage in weaponry, that eased the European conquest of the Americas. Through highlighting the fall of the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco, and Tlacopan, which comprised the Aztec Empire, and the Wars of Succession of the Inca, Mann also provides insight into human choices that also contributed to the end of these societies. 

During this pivotal period, for the first time, a global exchange of subsistence crops, slaves and luxury goods circulated throughout the whole world. The effects of the discovery of the New World were felt on every continent, as new crops were adopted in regions where they alleviated local food security issues and reshaped the local ecology (often increasing pressure on the landscape and further degrading it over time).

As the world transitioned to the 20th century it was a precarious landscape of food insecurity that motivated William Vogt, whom Mann styles as “the Prophet,” to preach on the importance of environmental carrying capacity and overpopulation. In contrast, Mann’s “Wizard,” agronomist Norman Borlaug, a pioneer of the technological techniques underpinning the Green Revolution, came to prominence applying science to enable our adaptive ingenuity in the face of ecological constraints.  For his part, Mann does not take sides or offer us a clear winner – but believes the discussion between these two intellectual strands to be of utmost importance when considering how we interpret our past and consider our future. 

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

This week on Unsupervised Learning, Razib is joined by Tim Lee, a former columnist at the Washington Post, Ars Technica, and Vox.com, to discuss his new project, Full Stack Economics, a newsletter on economics, technology, and public policy.

The conversation jumps directly into a major issue facing many Americans today: the cost of housing. In many US cities, access to affordable housing is the most economically important issue facing individuals and families. While nearly everyone agrees that working-class Americans should be able to afford rent or a mortgage, sharp differences in public policy positions like rent controls and freezes on property tax rates can create major distortions in the supply of housing and the incentives to build and maintain units. Numerous interests are at play between those who already own property in a neighborhood, whose property value often benefits from a housing crunch, those who want to purchase or rent in a new neighborhood, and developers who wish to increase supply but have to deal with established stakeholders. Though homeowners often make arguments about the character and aesthetics of their neighborhoods, the reality that their home values increase when they limit building has a major impact on their incentives from a purely economic perspective.

Though these issues are widely discussed in an ad hoc fashion every day in this country, Tim and his co-author, Alan Cole, attempt to highlight and flesh out the issue in a more explicit manner at Full Stack Economics, bringing both economic analysis and the public policy context to the fore.

Then Razib and Tim switch to discussing how the erosion of public trust in media organizations, particularly those that are principally funded by ad revenue, has created a market for subscription-based email newsletters. Tim’s goal with Full Stack Economics is to bring highly researched and deeply reported pieces directly to subscribers without the pressure of having to fulfill a weekly quota of copy or to be pressured by click-bait advertising incentives. Though his audience is smaller, he hopes it is more willing to be patient as well as more deeply.

They conclude their conversation by discussing a variety of technologies in the pipeline that might be potential economic and social game changers, including artificial meat, genetically modified mosquitoes, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, self-driving cars, and green energy.  Due to our leadership in science and technology, Tim remains bullish on the American economy and its potential in the coming decade, while being concerned by the political polarization and American culture’s social ills.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

This week on Unsupervised Learning, researcher, blogger, and essayist Tanner Greer joins Razib to consider the challenges facing conservatism in America today, the future of China and its relationship to the US. Much of Tanner’s extensive research and analysis are featured on his excellent weblog, The Scholar’s Stage, and the conversation also touches on the current state of blogging (and its past). 

Razib and Tanner first tackle the evolution of a new strand of modern conservative thought that has labeled itself the ‘New Right’ which, despite the recycled name, was not intended to suggest any relationship to the previous ‘New Right’ of the 1960’s through the 1980’s – that culminated in Reaganite conservatism. Apparently, the 25-year-old staffers and writers who are promoting the New Right have no clear memory, let alone awareness of the movement of the same name that dominated the last third of 20th-century politics in America. Either that or they lack the creativity to come up with something original. 

Rather than being a reaction to a movement that young conservatives don’t remember, the 2020’s New Right grows out of a rejection of the Neoconservatism of the turn of the millennium and the libertarianism that failed to meet the challenges of the 2008 financial crisis. Tanner and Razib draw on the works of historians David Walker Howe and David Hackett Fischer to examine how the constitution of the New Right may have its roots in American history. But the New Right is less a grassroots movement than a collection of intellectuals gathering around journals and think tanks. It takes a suspicious view of the valorization of individualism that typified 20th-century conservatism, but its relevance to populist mass politics remains to be seen.

Tanner believes that the New Right is a positive development. He argues that different generations may require different means to tackle disparate problems and that the lack of political and economic power enjoyed by the young often leads to a tyranny of orthodoxy that eventually fades and disappears. Reaganism will only exhaust itself when the generations that remember Reagan retire from the scene.

Eventually, the conversation forays across the Atlantic for a brief look at China’s current prospects.. That nation faces its own set of challenges due in no small part to its own generational divide and disparities between rural and urban demographics.  Razib asks Tanner why everyone in DC suddenly seems to be a China hawk and whether we are headed into a new Cold War. Though today Tanner is writing about the American political scene, he was until recently more well known as a China watcher and observer.

Finally, they wrap up the conversation by discussing blogging, and the indispensability of a private and informal intellectual space for exploring ideas and interacting in some depth.  

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib turns his gaze to space with Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica and author of Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX.

They ask who is Elon Musk anyway, and how did SpaceX come to win the early race to dominate private spaceflight? What does the privatization of the space fleet mean for the prospects and goals of NASA? How has NASA’s mission evolved, and how does the privatization of spaceflight complement NASA’s competencies? Eric shares his in-depth research and direct experience interviewing pivotal early members of SpaceX’s team to answer these questions. He also outlines Musk’s vision for the future of space travel and the prospects of a human colony on Mars. 

As the conversation rocks on, Razib and Eric go beyond the Kuiper belt and straight into a “science fiction” world that may be on an accelerated path to becoming “science fact” thanks to SpaceX’s early efforts pushing the envelope. They discuss why Jupiter’s moon Europa is so interesting to space-nuts, and when asteroid mining might become economically feasible.  Eric talks about how long we might have to wait for orbital power-generating stations and Dyson spheres. 

Finally, the discussion comes back to earth as they take a look at some of the problems and limitations that the space industry is currently trying to overcome in its efforts to make the “final frontier” something more than a television catchphrase. Eric talks about how the complementary strategies of competing billionaires, Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, are setting the stage for what may be the next exciting chapter in the human epoch.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Harvard professor Carole Hooven joins Razib to discuss her new book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. Though they do talk about the science of testosterone, Razib and Carole end up exploring the public reaction to her writing a book on sex and biology in 2021, as well the culture of censorship and shunning that has become the norm in much of academia. Hooven’s recent experience is in the context of backlash to her brief appearance on Fox News.

Hooven recounts in detail the repercussions she’s weathered for defending the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ as being real, concrete and meaningful descriptors of observable phenomena associated with reproductive organs and the particular set of gametes one possesses. She stresses that these terms should in no way diminish any individual’s struggles with identity, sexuality and belonging - but that they are necessary to have accurate descriptors for the dimorphic nature of humans and other species, which begins in utero and is largely determined by prenatal hormonal balance affecting the physical development of both body and brain.

Transcript

They both talk about their disappointment with institutions and the erosion of academic vigor in favor of creating an environment that is supposedly ‘inclusive’ – an ironic assertion since inclusion seems to involve creating a climate that has a chilling, exclusionary effect on opinions that are not de rigueur.  

Eventually, the conversation circles around to the hormonal differences in the development of gendered traits, noting that some traits – such as play fighting – seem to be highly segregated between the sexes, in ways that are observably echoed across many species. Despite the reality of human culture and the complexity of individuals, they agree that some patterns and differences in distributions are real, robust and have to be addressed and acknowledged.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Subscribe no

Give a gift subscription

Share

This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast, Razib gets into the genetics weeds again with Alex Young of the Social Sciences Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC). They discuss the heritability of complex traits and how the SSGAC develops predictive models using genetics to tackle questions that have traditionally been the purview of social sciences (and why that’s controversial, but shouldn’t be). 

Alex explains how large datasets where many individuals’ whole genomes are sampled at high coverage (meaning the genome is sequenced over and over to get an accurate read) are necessary to develop the most effective complex models. This is due to the reality that most complex traits are very polygenic – controlled by numerous genes, thousands in the case of intelligence.  

Then they discuss the weaknesses in traditional twin studies, and Alex outlines why looking at family pedigrees more generally, particularly parents and siblings work out to be a natural controlled experiment. He foresees this as the future of complex trait analysis. Alex also discusses the statistical methods he has developed for analyzing genomes for heritability and complex traits, especially as they relate to “genetic nurture”. 

Transcript

Razib then asks a series of clarifying questions about the nature of the research on the heritability of educational attainment based on Alex’s extensive work on the subject in Iceland. They talk about how Iceland is perhaps the ideal place to perform an experiment attempting to distinguish sociological explanations from biological ones due to its isolation and homogeneity.  

They conclude their conversation about genetic nurture by clearly stating that there are complex interactions between societal structures and heritable traits, but emphasize that it is becoming apparent that there is significant evidence that characteristics such as educational attainment are mediated to a large extent by genes inherited from one’s parents. While ethical, social and cultural implications are unavoidable, fearmongering about racism, eugenics and the specter of a dystopian GATTACA-like future are unhelpful and uninformed. 

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib is joined by genetic genealogist Josh Lipson for a deep dive into the history and genetics of the Ashkenazi Jewish population in Europe.  

They review the historical demographics of the Jews of both Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as the possible founding source populations from the Levant (Palestine) and Mesopotamia (Babylon). They discuss the cultural and genetic differences between the Sephardim and Ashkenazim and consider whether the preponderance of evidence suggests a continuity of European Jews with Classical Antiquity or a more recent migration in the early Middle Ages. Josh believes that the recent genetic research indicating a more recent migration is probably wrong and that Y-chromosomal evidence implies Jews were present in the Western Mediterranean 2,000 years ago.

Josh brings a comprehensive understanding of historical, textual, linguistic and onomastic evidence to the table in explaining how dialect differences and family names can be used to tease out distinctions within the Ashkenazim, with clear regional identities in the Rhineland, Galicia (Southwest Poland), and the Baltic already being evident during the Middle Ages. He also argues that there is good evidence Rhineland Jews are subtly different from Central/Eastern European groups who presumably descend from them.

Finally, Razib discusses some of the finer points of genetic testing, statistical inferences, and how genetic models continue to improve over time, as well as where flaws in the testing algorithms might gloss over minute details. These details often provide subtle clues that might offer deeper insight if carefully analyzed by a human expert. 

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share

Recently Yale Law School (YLS) student Trent Colbert wrote Why I Didn’t Apologize For That Yale Law School Email: We must end the culture of performative repentance for Persuasion. I was broadly familiar with the culture-war saga that Colbert was caught up in, having read a piece a few weeks ago in The Washington Post describing how a seemingly innocent and jocular email triggered accusations of racism at YLS (as well as Aaron Sibarium’s piece in The Washington Free Beacon). Colbert’s in Persuasion made me curious about him, and I reached out to talk about what he had seen, and the lessons that we as a society and individuals might take from it.

First, Colbert gives us his own perspective of what transpired at YLS to make him a “trending topic” on social media. Perhaps to the surprise of Millennials, the 23-year-old Zoomer seemed not entirely familiar with the well-known podcast Chapo Trap House. As a member of Gen X, I have to admit it's a little unnerving to hear Millennials viewed as geriatric elders. But Colbert grew up in a world of super-charged cultural change and perhaps perceives the passage of time differently than those of us who came into adulthood before smartphones. He contended that some of the offense others perceived might be a matter of cohort differences and even just his casual Zoomer manner. Even a few years' difference today might mean an entirely alternative landscape of memes and sensibilities, so a subtle and wry reference among his age-mates could strike an individual only a few years older as offensive, opaque and “tone-deaf.”

With that in mind, I was curious about his background, and where he got the strength to stand up to the YLS administrative bureaucracy. We explored his relationship to his Cherokee background, as well as growing up in a moderately conservative household where religion was important. Colbert takes the idea of right and wrong seriously, and he felt that his own conscience would not allow him to agree to an apology that was premised on lies. Importantly, he also had a supportive group of friends at YLS and a wider circle of backers in the community.

Eventually, we moved to broader social forces, and how his individual choices and decisions might impact others. By doing the right thing, rather than the easy thing, Colbert hopes to show that it is possible to defeat the kind of bureaucratic machine that was unleashed upon him and trigger a preference cascade that changes the culture on campus. And doing the right thing has not been entirely easy, as Colbert admits to being uncomfortable with realizing how others at YLS viewed him purely through a racial lens, as well as the fact that many prominent organizations accused him of being a racist.

Overall, perhaps the take-home lesson is that it doesn’t take an exceptional person to take on the system. Just someone who has a core set of principles and friends and family who support them when they might have to make decisions that lead to socially unpopular outcomes.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Share