Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to returning guest  Claire Lehmann . Lehmann has an undergraduate degrees in psychology and English from the University of Adelaide. She was enrolled in a graduate program in psychology, but left it after becoming disillusioned with moral relativism, she went on to found the online magazine  Quillette  to reflect a more traditionally pro-reaso...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to philosopher of science  Nathan Cofnas , whose specialty is biology and ethics. An American, Cofnas is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Columbia University, and his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. His...

Today Razib talks to repeat  guest  Steve Hsu about China, a topic with so many currently relevant dimensions gIven the PRC's clear emergence as an economic, military and political rival to the US. Hsu is a Caltech‑trained theoretical physicist who migrated from black holes to big data, co‑invented privacy tech at SafeWeb, helped found the biotech company Genomic Prediction, all while remaining a...

Today Razib talks to David  Gress, a Danish historian. The son of an American literary scholar and a Danish writer, he grew up in Denmark, read Classics at Cambridge, and then earned a Ph. D. in medieval history from Bryn Mawr College in the US in 1981. During a fellowship form 1982-1992 at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, he published on Cold‑War strategy, German political culture, and N...

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib welcomes back  Ethan Strauss , a writer who has covered sports and culture for the past decade, including in the book  The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty . More recently his writing is to be found at his Substack,  House of Strauss , which is notable for offering a candid take on the cross-pollination bet...

  Today Razib talks to  Manvir Singh  about shamanism, religion and anthropology. Singh is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. An  artist  and  essayist , he is also now a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His academic interests lie in explaining why most human societies, from preliterate foragers to urbanites, develop cultural phenomena like "witchc...

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Bo Winegard and Noah Carl, the editors behind the online publication  Aporia Magazine , founded in 2022. Winegard and Carl are both former academics. Winegard has a social psychology Ph. D. from Florida State University, and was an assistant professor at Marietta College. He was an editor at  Quillette   before moving to  Aporia . Carl ear...

  Today Razib talks to  Tim Lee , a  previous   guest  on  Unsupervised Learning . Lee hosts  Understanding AI . Lee covered tech more generally for a decade for  Washington Post ,  Ars Technica , and  Vox.com . He has a master's degree in computer science from Princeton. Lee writes extensively about general AI issues, from  Deep Research's capabilities  to the state of  large language models . Bu...

  This podcast accompanies my post  Germans are from Finland, Finns are from Yakutia . The two preprints at the heart of this post are,  Postglacial genomes from foragers across Northern Eurasia reveal prehistoric mobility associated with the spread of the Uralic and Yeniseian languages  and  Steppe Ancestry in Western Eurasia and the Spread of the Germanic Languages .

  Today Razib talks to Laura Spinney, Paris-based British author of the forthcoming  Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global . A science journalist, translator and author of both fiction and non-fiction, she has written for   Nature ,   National Geographic ,   The Economist ,   New Scientist , and   The Guardian . Spinney is the author of two novels,  Doctor  and  The Quick , and a collection...

  Today, Razib talks about a new paper,  A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans : Understanding the history of admixture events and population size changes leading to modern humans is central to human evolutionary genetics. Here we introduce a coalescence-based hidden Markov model, cobraa, that explicitly represents an ancestral population split...

  On this episode of the podcast Razib talks to John Sailer. Sailer is currently the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He covers issues of academic freedom, free speech, and ideological capture in higher education. Sailer has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Free Press and Tablet Magazine. Sailer holds a master's degree in philosophy and ed...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Jacob Shell . Shell is a professor of geography at Temple University and author of  Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals , and the  Giants of the Monsoon Forest: Living and Working with Elephants . Educated at Columbia and Syracuse universities, Shell is active on social media, where he comments extensively on the politiciza...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Matt Welch . He co-founded the Prague-based newspaper  Prognosis  in the early 1990's and later worked as an opinion section editor for the  Los Angeles Times.  From 2008-2016, Welch served as editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, where he currently holds the position of editor-at-large. He co-authored  The Declaration of Independents: How...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib comments on a new paper in  Nature ,  Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage . Here is the abstract: Although it is one of the most arid regions today, the Sahara Desert was a green savannah during the African Humid Period (AHP) between 14,500 and 5,000 years before present, with water bodies promoting human occu...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , Razib   talks to  Andrew Song , co-founder of  Make Sunsets . An NYU graduate with a degree in economics, Song was a member of the  Y Combinator  class of winter 2016. Before becoming a founder, Song worked at firms involved in data analytics and artificial intelligence. A repeat attendee at the Founders Fund "Hereticon" conference, Song's company has...

  Today on  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Zineb Riboua , a research fellow and program manager of Hudson Institute's Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. She specializes in Chinese and Russian involvement in the Middle East, the Sahel, and North Africa, great power competition in the region, and Israeli-Arab relations. Riboua's pieces and commentary have appeared in the  Wall...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to Mark Lutter. Lutter is an urban development expert known for his work on charter cities—new urban areas aimed at fostering economic growth and progress. He is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the Charter Cities Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to building the ecosystem for charter cities, as well as the CEO of Braavos Cities, a chart...

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Graeme Wood. Wood is a staff writer at  The Atlantic , where he usually covers geopolitics and international affairs. His work ranges from a profile of  Richard Spencer , the American white nationalist public figure with whom he went to high school with, to the  Islamic State . He is the author of  The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with...

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes  Leighton Akira Woodhouse  back to the podcast for his  third   visit . Woodhouse is a journalist and documentarian based in Oakland, California. He grew up in Berkeley, and was a doctoral student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. After leaving academia he contributed to outlets like The Intercept, UnHerd and The Nation, before starting his own...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Kevin Klatt , a  metabolism researcher , dietitian and  science communicator . Klatt holds a BA in biological anthropology from Temple University and a PhD in Molecular Nutrition from Cornell University. Before a current appointment as a research scientist at UC Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor College of Medicine. Klatt'...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , friend of the podcast,  Charles Murray  returns to chat with Razib again. Murray has been a public intellectual and scholar since the 1970's. He is the author of  Losing Ground ,  The Bell Curve ,  Human Accomplishment ,  Real Education ,  Coming Apart  and  What it means to be a libertarian   and  Human Diversity , among others. Born in 1943 in Newton...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to  Titus Techera , a Romanian living in Budapest, but commenting extensively on American and European culture. He is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation, International Coordinator of the National Conservatism Conference and is a primary contributor to the Substack  PostModernConservative . Techera also hosts a  podcast  ...

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to  Nathan Lents  about his new book,  The Sexual Evolution: A Provocative Look at Sexual Behavior Through the Lens of Evolution . A professor at John Jay College in New York City, Lents earned a Ph. D. in Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences in 2004 at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, and did his postdoctoral fellowship in can...

  Today Razib talks to Antonio Regalado , reporter at  MIT Technology Review . Regalado covers how technology is changing medicine and biomedical research. Before joining  MIT Technology Review  in 2011, he lived in São Paulo, Brazil, where he wrote about science, technology, and politics in Latin America for Science and other publications. From 2000 to 2009, he was a science reporter and foreign...