Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib discusses war and diplomacy from 9/11 to 10/7 with  Mark Safranski . Safranski is a long-time military affairs and foreign policy commentator who ran the popular weblog  Zenpundit  beginning in 2003. They survey how the 21st century, from the 9/11 attacks down to the Hamas atrocity against Israelis on 10/7, has seen a transformation of war and dip...

Brent W. Roberts   On this episode of Unsupervised Learning,  Razib discusses personality with  Brent Roberts , professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. Roberts explains what personality actually is as a psychological construct, and how it differs from personality  traits , like extraversion. Razib and Roberts also address the  Big Five Personality  system, and how it relates to the ...

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Carl Zha . Zha is a Sichuan-born China-commentator who had a long-term professional sojourn in southern California, before settling in Bali, Indonesia. He hosts the  Silk and Steel  podcast, which covers China, the Silk Road, and more general history, culture and geopolitics. Zha and Razib have known each other since the 2010's, and often c...

Today, Razib interviews  Nikolai Yakovenko , already a three-time guest on his podcasts ( A Twitter engineer on machine learning and his former company's prospects ,  GPT-3 and the rise of the thinking machines  and  AI and Biology ). An artificial intelligence researcher based in Miami who has worked at Google and Nvidia, Yakovenko is the founder of  DeepNews  where he currently works. Razib and...

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning,  Razib talks with  Curtis Yarvin . The host of the  Grey Mirror Substack , Yarvin is the former  Mencius Moldbug , a pseudonym under which he  wrote  extensively on culture, politics and history. Yarvin's social and political views have been profiled widely, including by   Vanity Fair  and  Vox . The intellectual  father of neo-reactionary thought , Yarvin...

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to  Michael Muthukrishna  about his new book,  A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going . Muthukrishna is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the  London School of Economics , an affiliate of the  Developmental Economics Group at STICERD  and  Data Science Institute , Azrieli Global...

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Peter Nimitz  about what he memorably calls the  crisis of the 23rd century . Most people know of the fall of Rome, and the subsequent European Dark Ages. And because of scholars like  Eric Cline , today growing numbers are aware of the civilizational collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, when an incipient global civilization enfolding eve...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to Penn State astrophysicist,  Steinn Sigurdsson . Sigurdsson was a one-time colleague at the  ScienceBlogs  website in the twenty-aughts with Razib, where he ran the astrophysics-themed  Dynamic of the Cats   blog. At its peak, ScienceBlogs had nearly 100 writers who commented on topics as diverse as agriculture, Creationism and cosmology. Or...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib welcomes back  Gregory Clark , a  past guest  on this podcast. When he last talked to him, Clark had just been  disinvited from giving a talk  whose results he has now turned into a paper,  The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022 . Until recently an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, Clark is now teaching at...

We're about a generation into the "age of genomics," or as it's sometimes termed the "post-genomic era." Today Razib talks to  John Logsdon , a  professor of biology  at the University of Iowa, about what genomics has wrought in relation to our understanding of evolution, and what evolution has taught us about the structure and nature of the genome. In 2014, Logdson and Sarah J Hanson contributed...

Yesterday , Razib discussed  Richard Hanania's   The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics  with the author. Today,  Unsupervised Learning  hosts a wide-ranging discussion with  Christopher Rufo  on his book,  America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything . While Hanania's focus is law and politics, Rufo looks at intel...

On the third episode of the Intellectual Brown Web  (IBW)  Razib ,  Sarah Haider  of  A Special Place in Hell  (and her own  Substack ),  Shadi Hamid  of  The Washingon Post  (plus  Wisdom of the Crowds  and his own  Substack ) and  Murtaza Hussain  of  The Intercept  (and his own  Substack ) discuss the effects of the Hamas atrocities and the now impending Israeli invasion of Gaza on both geopoli...

  In September 2023, Harper Collins published Richard Hanania's   The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics , two months after  Christopher Rufo's   America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything . Both these books tackle the same issue: the US's Leftist cultural direction, especially since 2015, and what  Matthew Ygles...

https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content...   For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with  Orchid . Check them out at  orchidhealth.com . Related:   The Indian cas...

  In the US, roughly  1 in 33  infants are born with a congenital disability, about  25 % of which have an identified genetic cause.  For the first time ,, parents can use  Orchid's whole genome sequencing  to screen their embryos for these genetic variants and mitigate their baby's disease risk. Check out  orchidhealth.com , and use code  RAZIB  when  signing up  to skip the waitlist. What is cas...

  Today, Razib revisits The Horse, the Wheel, and Language  with  David Anthony , emeritus professor at Hartwick College and collaborator with  David Reich's   ancient DNA research group  at Harvard University. Anthony and Razib survey the last two years in terms of questions regarding the domestication of the horse, the spread of the wheel, and  Yamnaya  steppe herders' language; subjects of his...

Today, Razib talks to  Erik Hoel , host of the Substack  The Intrinsic Perspective  and author of  The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science . An  academic neuroscientist  by training, in  The World Behind the World  Hoel outlines the emergence of modern neuroscience, and where it went wrong in terms of the field's researchers' focus. But first, Hoel discusses...

On this episode of the  Unsupervised Learning  podcast, Razib talks to internet commentator formerly known as  default friend  who is perhaps better known today as the internet culture writer  Katherine Dee . Dee is a regular contributor to  Retvrn ,  The Washington Examiner ,  The American Mind ,  Tablet Magazine  and  UnHerd . She has also recently written a piece for  Compact :  Why You're Neve...

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 co...

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  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 interes...

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...

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...

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 Insti...

https://razib.substack.com 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 podca...

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 ou...