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•Ep 108•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 107•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 106•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 105•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 104•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 103•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 101•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 100•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 99•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast Three blockbuster papers on ancient DNA just landed in Science Magazin e: 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 pac...
Sep 17, 2022•30 min•Ep 97•Transcript available on Metacast Katherine Brodsky is today a freelance writer who in the early 2000’s was the founder and editor-in-chief of an online culture magazine that was registering 600,000 pageviews a month while herself still an undergrad. In this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib explores a life lived online, from the dot-com bubble to the social media era. Brodsky, whose Substack is Random Minds , is an observer of culture from a peripatetic vantage point, a Canadian working in the American film in...
Sep 10, 2022•1 hr 23 min•Ep 96•Transcript available on Metacast This week takes The Unsupervised Learning podcast in a somewhat different direction. In response to a common listener request, Razib takes on his first “one-man-show,” digging into his stores of knowledge of the population genetics of ancient peoples and tribes, delving into the significance of abstrusely labeled clusters like “Ancient North Eurasian” (ANE) over 60 minutes. But as anyone following this substack will anticipate, first a caveat: in these heady days of endless ancient DNA discoveri...
Sep 07, 2022•31 min•Ep 95•Transcript available on Metacast The recent killing by Ayman al-Zawahiri, erstwhile leader of al-Qaeda, brought many Americans back to awareness of an era that has been fading, the decade of the “War on Terror” that dominated geopolitics after the 9/11 terrorism attack. The World Trade Center bombings galvanized Americans, setting the stage for our disastrous invasion of Iraq and American meddling in Muslim nations worldwide. But while 9/11 drove a closing of ranks against radicalism across much of the West, a small minority dr...
Aug 31, 2022•2 hr 50 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast Despite the fundamental reality that the US exists thanks to a rebellion against the power of the British Crown in the 1700's, for the last century, the two dominant English-speaking powers have enjoyed a relatively positive geopolitical relationship. Whereas the US is younger, Britain has settled into the role of junior partner, as the daughter nation outstrips the parent in economic, military and cultural reach. And yet despite the commonalities between these two Anglo-Atlantic polities, there...
Aug 19, 2022•1 hr 23 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast Spectator sports are a massive cross-cultural phenomenon in the modern world, from cricket in India to football in Europe and American football in the US. In the middle of the 20th century, commentary on sports was generally found in newspapers that also reported results from the previous day’s games. By the end of the century, many sports television channels arose that provided new venues for commentary and analysis, and the vocation of “sports commentator” exploded beyond simply analyzing the ...
Aug 14, 2022•2 hr 40 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast About a month ago, during a COVID-19 wave, I saw a Substack post, How to Get Paxlovid Quickly, If You Get Covid - How to get the 89%-effective Covid cure called Paxlovid, despite government red tape , shared across various group chats. For non-Americans, the utility of such a post and the question of why the government couldn’t distribute this drug and communicate its utility might require some explanation. If you are an American, you probably don’t need an explanation. The post's author, Maxim ...
Aug 08, 2022•58 min•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast What if everything you learned about anthropology turned out to be wrong? Well, OK, maybe not everything , but some very important things. Today Razib talks to Manvir Singh about primitive communism and misconceptions about hunter-gatherers, what anthropology got wrong in the past and how it has continued to confuse us into the present. Singh is a scholar at The Institute of Advanced Study in Toulouse , as well as an artist and essayist . His academic interests lie in explaining why most human s...
Aug 01, 2022•58 min•Ep 90•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Dr. Judge Glock about the case for optimism in America in 2022. An economic historian by training, Glock is a Chief Policy Officer at the Cicero Institute. Though public polling shows that 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the nation, Glock really doesn’t share the sentiment, and he puts forward a case for sunny optimism in the historical and geographical context. In short, it turns out that for the vast m...
Jul 23, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Iona Italia ’s name often perplexes the public, but it’s entirely explicable considering her background. Her late father was from the Parsi community of the Indian subcontinent. Descendants of Persians who continued to adhere to the Zoroastrian religion of their ancestors, the Parsis migrated to northwestern India about 1,000 years ago. Remaining predominantly endogamous, they nevertheless developed a synthetic culture, adopting the Gujarati language, Indian dress, as well as some very idios...
Jul 15, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 86•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 84•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 82•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast 
