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 Cam...
Apr 20, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 127
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 d...
Apr 10, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 126
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 ...
Apr 02, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 125
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 Au...
Mar 22, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 124
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, ...
Mar 19, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 123
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...
Mar 09, 2023•38 min•Season 1Ep. 122
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...
Mar 04, 2023•55 min•Season 1Ep. 121
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 Ethic...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 120
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 th...
Feb 18, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 119
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 ...
Feb 10, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 118
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...
Feb 04, 2023•25 min•Season 1Ep. 117
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...
Jan 26, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 116
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...
Jan 20, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 115
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 trajecto...
Jan 13, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 114
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 ...
Jan 04, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 113
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 exact...
Dec 29, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 112
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...
Dec 22, 2022•1 hr 44 min•Season 1Ep. 111
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 maga...
Dec 16, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 110
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 l...
Dec 08, 2022•47 min•Season 1Ep. 109
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 ...
Dec 02, 2022•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 108
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 un...
Nov 30, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 107
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 Yakov...
Nov 20, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 106
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 megal...
Nov 18, 2022•31 min•Season 1Ep. 105
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 counterint...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 104
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 book...
Oct 28, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 103
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 th...
Oct 22, 2022•43 min•Season 1Ep. 102
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 orie...
Oct 13, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 101
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 i ntrasexual 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 fiel...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 100
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 decisi...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 99
“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...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 98
