Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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200 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud

1. Cody Moser: the adaptive landscape of cultural evolution

   9 januari 2024 · 1 uur 11 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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 …

2. Katherine Brodsky: After 10/7 in Israel, Europe and the US

   9 januari 2024 · 1 uur 55 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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, hi…

3. Introducing GenRAIT: when technology drives science

   9 januari 2024 · 53 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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.

4. Philippe Lemoine: French food and American immigrants

   14 december 2023 · 1 uur 44 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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 im…

5. Mark Safranski: the 21st-century way of war and the exhaustion of the American Empire

   10 december 2023 · 1 uur 22 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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 comeba…

6. Brent Roberts: let's talk about personality

   5 december 2023 · 53 min

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   Brent W. Roberts Lees meer

   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.

7. Carl Zha: Chimerica to the Thucydides's Trap

   29 november 2023 · 1 uur 26 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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 inw…

8. Nikolai Yakovenko: OpenAI in chaos, the future of artificial intelligence and effective accelerationism

   21 november 2023 · 1 uur 24 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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.

9. Curtis Yarvin: reflections on a life of poetry

   19 november 2023 · 1 uur 7 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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.

10. Michael Muthukrishna: A Theory of Everyone - The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going

    17 november 2023 · 1 uur 40 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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. Ra…

11. Peter Nimitz: the end of the first civilizations 4,300 years ago

    15 november 2023 · 1 uur 22 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 afte…

12. Steinn Sigurðsson: Black Holes, causality and exoplanets

    6 november 2023 · 59 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 …

13. Gregory Clark: what has genetics to do with social status?

    29 oktober 2023 · 1 uur 10 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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.

14. John Logsdon: what has genomics done for evolution?

    20 oktober 2023 · 1 uur 13 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 e…

15. Christopher Rufo - America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.

    15 oktober 2023 · 1 uur 28 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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…

16. IBW Episode #3: The Israel-Palestine conflict

    14 oktober 2023 · 1 uur 29 min

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    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). Lees meer

    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 …

17. Richard Hanania: The Origins of Woke - Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics

    8 oktober 2023 · 48 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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…

18. Sundar Iyer & Sudha Jagannathan: the accused speaks the truth about caste and the "Cisco Case"

    3 oktober 2023 · 1 uur 24 min

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    Related: The Indian caste system: origin, impact and future, The character of caste and Passing the civilizational purity test: India's 3000-year caste straitjacket.

    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 ath…

19. The Indian caste system: origin, impact and future

    2 oktober 2023 · 1 uur 20 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 foundat…

20. David Anthony: when we were Yamnaya

    24 september 2023 · 1 uur 21 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 di…

21. Erik Hoel: The World Behind the World

    15 september 2023 · 1 uur 22 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 principl…

22. Katherine Dee: Is Twitter just our default?

    13 september 2023 · 1 uur 8 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 clon…

23. Inez Stepman: fixing higher education

    12 september 2023 · 1 uur 11 min

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    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: Lees meer

    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 m…

24. Cory Clark: adversarial collaborations in science

    12 september 2023 · 1 uur 4 min

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    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…

25. Alex S. Young and James J. Lee: quantitative genetics in 2023

    3 september 2023 · 2 uur 6 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 …

26. Diana Fleischman: evolution, sex and eugenics

    30 augustus 2023 · 54 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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.

27. Nicola Buskirk: old books for a new generation

    24 augustus 2023 · 1 uur 23 min

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    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 a…

28. Hannah Frankman: unlearning the lessons of the past

    22 augustus 2023 · 1 uur 17 min

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    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 materi…

29. Lyman Stone: God is dead, long live the Lord!

    20 augustus 2023 · 1 uur 7 min

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    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 t…

30. IBW Episode #2: Muslims vs. LGBTQIA+

    4 augustus 2023 · 1 uur 6 min

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    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.

31. Samuel McIlhagga: the UK as a zombie nation

    4 augustus 2023 · 1 uur 33 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 innova…

32. Renu Mukherjee: Affirmative Action's End

    29 juni 2023 · 1 uur 9 min

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    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." Lees meer

    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.

33. Elizabeth Jones: ancient DNA as "celebrity science"

    23 juni 2023 · 55 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 coll…

34. Lee Fang: investigative journalism and investigating journalists

    15 juni 2023 · 1 uur 7 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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.

35. Ross Douthat: fantasy and the literary imagination

    8 juni 2023 · 1 uur 6 min

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    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? Lees meer

    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.

36. Samo Burja: China's future, Russia's present and archaeology's past

    4 juni 2023 · 1 uur 19 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 …

37. Timothy B. Lee: don't rage against the machine

    29 mei 2023 · 48 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 d…

38. The collapse of the Bronze Age civilization

    29 mei 2023 · 49 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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?

39. Peter Nimitz: Seven Ages of Western Eurasia

    29 mei 2023 · 1 uur 36 min

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    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. Lees meer

40. Alex Feinberg: former professional athlete and techie turned trainer

    10 mei 2023 · 50 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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.

41. Adam Mastroianni: a history of experiments in social psychology

    10 mei 2023 · 57 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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…

42. David McKay: AI and the end of the world as we know it

    20 april 2023 · 1 uur 7 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 beyo…

43. The modern human conquest of earth

    10 april 2023 · 1 uur 16 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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.

44. Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate 20+ years later

    2 april 2023 · 1 uur 7 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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…

45. David Sloan Wilson: the past and future of multi-level selection theory

    22 maart 2023 · 1 uur 6 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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."

46. Introducing the intellectual brown web (IBW)

    19 maart 2023 · 1 uur 10 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 …

47. Human pigmentation: the genetics and evolution of human shades

    9 maart 2023 · 38 min

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

    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.

48. Glenn Loury: four decades in economics

    4 maart 2023 · 55 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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 discus…

49. Virginia Postrel: from synthetic meat to synthetic fabric

    23 februari 2023 · 1 uur 7 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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…

50. Charles Fain Lehman: homicide, death in the charts

    18 februari 2023 · 1 uur 2 min

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    https://razib.substack.com Lees meer

    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.