Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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

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

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

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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 it off course as an enterprise, might leave it more a social club than a venerable institution to generate information. Clark is candid that she is not sure she would recommend heterodox students even attempt to join the academy.

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

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

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

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

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

https://razib.substack.com

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

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

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

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

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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 materials, all the way to "unschooling," whereby students are much more self-guided and undirected. Frankman also recounts her own personal experiences with nontraditional education, the pitfalls and benefits, and why she left the traditional path when she was just six years old. They then discuss the reality that the last few years have seen crashing test scores across the countries and a widespread realization that aspects of the traditional system that might have been well geared toward producing factory workers in the 20th century may be ill-suited to the "information economy" of the 21st century. Frankman makes the case for a diversity and pluralism of responses, and she and Razib talk about various paths that other nations have taken, including the more structured systems of East Asia. Finally, they discuss the future of Rebel Educator, and her vision for a future of American education focused on choice, experimentation and flexibility better suited to our current learning options and the needs of a modern economy.

https://razib.substack.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://razib.substack.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://razib.substack.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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