How do we make science in the 21st century better? Stuart Buck , Executive Director of the Good Science Project has some ideas. More concretely, Buck is part of a broader movement of researchers, activists and philanthropists reimagining how science can be done in the wake of the replication crisis . Between 2010 and 2015 many fields of science relying on statistical methods from the 20th century were found to be plagued by methodological errors that produced the ‘sexy’ results the breathless me...
Jul 09, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 88
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to his friend Claire Lehmann , founder and editor-in-chief of Quillette magazine, and columnist for The Australian . Though Lehmann’s initial public prominence involved her key role in the “ intellectual dark web ,” publishing thinkers critical of identity politics like Coleman Hughes , John Wood Jr. and John McWhorter , Razib was especially interested in the fact that over the last few years she has gotten involved in various online discussio...
Jun 30, 2022•58 min•Season 1Ep. 87
A bit over one percent of Americans are of Filipino ancestry , making them one of the largest Asian American subgroups. Unlike Chinese, Mexicans or Europeans, Filipino immigrants are unique in that their homeland, the Philippines, was actually an American colony for five decades, between 1898 and 1946. This is one reason that the level of English fluency in the Phillippines is very high, a factor in very strong economic integration with the US through outsourcing. And yet despite the historicall...
Jun 23, 2022•56 min•Season 1Ep. 86
In 1973 the eminent evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote an essay entitled “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Presumably, that would include molecular biology, and as Dobzhanksy was writing, the field of molecular evolution was bearing fruit that would revolutionize our understanding of Darwinian evolutionary biology. Or, perhaps more precisely, it would extend and move beyond a purely Darwinian understanding of changes in the DNA sequence on the mo...
Jun 16, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 85
Who was the smartest human of the 20th century? Though intellectual celebrity probably dictates that the majority would answer Albert Einstein, another candidate is the mathematician John von Neumann . Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to science journalist Ananyo Bhattacharya , author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann , and erstwhile physicist and editor at Nature . They discuss the life and science of a scholar whose mental acuity was so preternatural ...
Jun 13, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 84
In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Stuart Ritchie joins Razib., Ritchie is the author of Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth and Intelligence: All that Matters . Ritchie is also a lecturer at King’s College London and the author of the new Substack Science Fictions . Razib and Ritchie first discuss why he has a Substack considering all the different projects he’s already juggling, and what value he sees coming out of it (beyond the remuner...
Jun 05, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 83
Last month Razib talked to Alex Nowrestah of the Cato Institute about the state of migration and policy in the US in 2022. An enthusiast for immigration, Nowrestah expressed some chagrin that the issue has fallen off the American public’s radar, at least judging by the sharp dropoff in media inquiries to his office. And yet there remains a whole policy class in Washington D.C. that is still attending to the complex and fraught topics in and around migration that shape the future trajectory of Am...
May 27, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 82
Three of R.A. Fisher’s Ph.D. students remain active today, C. R Rao at age 101 and A. W. F. Edwards , and W. F. Bodmer , both 86. Bodmer was not only a student of Fisher, the cofounder of both population genetics and modern statistics, he was also mentored by Joshua Lederberg , the 1958 winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in bacterial genetics. With more than 60 years in science , Bodmer joins Razib on this episode of Unsupervised Learning to discuss everything from his recollecti...
May 19, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 81
The official conversion of the nation of Lithuania to Christianity was in 1387. This means officially Lithuanians have been Christian for 635 years, and did not adopt the religion until more than 1,000 years after Constantine the Great accepted Christianity and set the Roman Empire on its way to becoming synonymous with the faith. But Francis Young , a historian of religion, is here to tell you there’s more to this story. His new book, Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic: Sixteenth-Century Ethnogr...
May 12, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 80
Rand Simberg is the author of 2014's Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space , and a space business consultant , as well as a longtime blogger and commentator. Today, on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Simberg about SpaceX’s ambitiously named vessel, Starship , and what it means for the space business. In the process, Simberg outlines just how much of a lead SpaceX has over its competitors, and how it...
May 05, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 79
In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Molson Hart , founder and CEO of Viahart , an educational toy company. He is also co-founder of Edison , an intellectual property-focused litigation financing firm. Hart has gained some visibility as a prominent seller on Amazon, with strong opinions on the company both positive and negative. First, Razib asks Hart about Amazon’s role in the American economy, and how it compares and contrasts with Walmart. Unlike many who have negative expe...
Apr 28, 2022•54 min•Ep. 78
In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Alex Nowrasteh , the director of economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute . Alex is also the author of Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions . His beat at Cato is immigration, and he has been keeping a close watch on the transition between the Biden and Trump administrations. The first issue Razib and Nowrasteh address is the reality that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a massive crash in ...
Apr 21, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 77
In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to James Lee , a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. Lee is a co-author of a new paper in Nature , Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals . A landmark in the field of cognitive genomics, this publication is the result of years of collaboration between two dozen researchers. Over the course of the episode, they deep dive into t...
Apr 14, 2022•2 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 76
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Josiah Neeley , Senior Fellow in Energy at the R Street Institute and co-host of the Urbane Cowboys podcast . They discuss the past, present and future of the energy markets, and how best to understand the workings of the global energy ecosystem. Considering geopolitical events in Europe, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they dive right into how distribution differences between oil and gas will conspire to keep Europeans dependent on Russ...
Apr 08, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 75
Today on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jacob L. Shapiro , Director of Geopolitical Analysis at Cognitive Investments . He overviews the geopolitical perspective in understanding international relations, one predicated on looking at nation-states as fundamental units of analysis, in order to achieve a descriptive understanding of the world. Shapiro points out that the more familiar “schools” of foreign policy, from realism to liberal internationalism, use geopolitics as a tool to understan...
Apr 01, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 74
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back Samo Burja , a guest who needs no introduction for long-time listeners. Burja is the podcast’s first third-time guest, and with good reason. Previously, he came on to discuss social technology and China and lost civilizations , plumbing the depths of the human past for insights about the present and future. Today Burja spotlights a timely new venture of his firm, Bismark Analysis : the Bismarck Brief newsletter, which provides a taste ...
Mar 26, 2022•2 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 73
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Zack Stentz , a screenwriter and producer in Hollywood, and a former journalist. His credits include 2011 films X-Men: First Class and Thor , as well as the television shows Andromeda , Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous . Considering that working in Hollywood as a writer is a “dream job” for many, Razib and Stentz discuss how to break in and succeed in show business. Like most people, Stentz wrote in...
Mar 17, 2022•53 min•Season 1Ep. 72
On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to his friend Sarah Haider , founder of Ex-Muslims of North America and the writer behind a new Substack , Hold That Thought . Born in Pakistan, and raised in Texas in a Shia Muslim family, Sarah came to prominence in 2015 after she gave a speech called "Islam and the Necessity of Liberal Critique" at The American Humanist Association's 74th annual conference. Razib and Sarah first discuss where the Ex-Muslim community is in 2022, ...
Mar 14, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 71
Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast the focus is on genetics, culture and geopolitics with Muhammad Sohail Raza , a Pakistani genomicist living and working in Beijing, China, whose research focuses on bioinformatic methods and high-altitude adaptations. Razib and Muhammad first discuss how he got interested in biology, and what took him to do his graduate work in the People’s Republic of China. Muhammad talks about his various inspirations, in particular David Reich’s work on historical p...
Mar 04, 2022•52 min•Season 1Ep. 70
Today on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to Suhag Shukla , the Executive Director of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF). Suhag is an attorney who grew up in Cupertino, California, and is now a leading advocate for the interests of American Hindus . Razib and Suhag clear up the fact that HAF does not speak for all Hindus, of whom there are over one billion, or, the world’s 1.4 billion Indians. Additionally, the HAF is an explicitly Hindu-focused organization, as opposed to an India...
Feb 25, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 69
Over the past generation, China has gone from a developing nation of bicycles and Volkswagens to a global economic juggernaut that is Mercedes-Benz’s single biggest market. You can track this transformation in charts or follow it in dispatches from foreign correspondents, but this week’s guest on the podcast has seen it up close and personal. Colin is a black American who works in the corporate technology sector and has lived in and visited China on and off since the late 1990’s. He is also a ge...
Feb 18, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 68
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Caleb Watney is the co-president of The Institute for Progress (along with Alec Stapp ), which exists to foster innovation and technological advancement through public policy levers. Founded in January of 2021, The Institute for Progress declares itself a “think tank for accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress.” Razib’s first major question is why such a think tank even needs to exist. Isn’t there a huge complex of research uni...
Feb 12, 2022•53 min•Season 1Ep. 67
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Chad Orzel is a physicist and science writer who has been blogging for twenty years. He’s the author of four books, Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects , How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog , How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog and Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist . On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Chad about his newest book, A Brief History of Timekeeping , a mix of cultural...
Feb 04, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 66
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Have you ever wondered how academic publishing works? If you’re not in academia, probably not, but you might be surprised by how much intrigue and politics it entails. If you are an academic, you probably don’t want to think about it any more than you have to because it’s a mess. Nearly a decade ago, Razib co-authored a paper, Dragging scientific publishing into the 21st century , that sketched out a map of a possible future. That future isn’t here ye...
Jan 27, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 65
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Rav Arora came to public prominence in 2020 with a column for The New York Post provocatively titled “ The Fallacy of White Privilege .” He suffered personal and professional blowback, but today the 20-year-old Canadian undergraduate has a semi-regular column in The New York Post , and is interviewed by the likes of Glenn Loury . Arora’s fearlessness in expressing his opinions on a wide range of topics, in particular politically controversial ones, co...
Jan 25, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 64
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Today’s podcast guest, erstwhile scientist and bond-trader Chris Arnade is a cultural commentator, photographer and novelist. Arnade’s father was a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an academic and settled his family in a conservative, working-class Gulf-Coast Florida town. This gives Arnade a personal understanding of America outside of the cosmopolitan coastal cities. He notes that, whereas he left Florida and completed a physics Ph.D. at Johns H...
Jan 20, 2022•48 min•Season 1Ep. 63
This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, R. Taylor Raborn , a genomicist and associate bioinformatics principal investigator at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) joins Razib to discuss his current and former research interests, touching on the unpredictable path a career in science can take. Taylor was drawn to biology at a young age due to his naturalist bent. Eventually, as a graduate student, he became particularly interested in the topics of gene-prom...
Jan 13, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 62
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share The day after Christmas 2021, the great entomologist and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson died at the age of 92. Carl Zimmer in The New York Times wrote an obituary that highlighted his seminal early contributions to science, as well as his role as a public intellectual after the publication of 1975’s Sociobiology . Wilson also wrote an autobiography, Naturalist , telling the story of his life in science from his own perspective. In the days after ...
Jan 11, 2022•2 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 61
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Eric Kaufmann , political scientist and demographer , and the author of The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America , Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities . During the course of their conversation, Razib and Eric focus on the thesis at the center of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? , the prediction that due to the higher reprodu...
Jan 08, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 60
Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib catches up with Leighton Woodhouse , a documentarian and journalist (with a Substack !), to discuss the rise of political polarization and the disintegration of traditional parties and coalitions on both the left and the right. Leighton, whose activism began in 1999 at the WTO protests in Seattle, reflects on the financial , geopolitical and social shocks of the last twenty years, how they’ve transformed the mo...
Dec 31, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 59
