Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to Daniel McCarthy, editor-in-chief of  Modern Age . Former editor-in-chief of  The American Conservative , his writing has also appeared in the  New York Times ,  USA Today ,  The   Spectator ,  The   National Interest  and  Reason . McCarthy also helped run communications for the 2008 Ron Paul campaign and was a senior editor at ISI Books. H...

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to  Tade Souaiaia , a statistical geneticist at SUNY Downstate about his new preprint,  Striking Departures from Polygenic Architecture in the Tails of Complex Traits . Souaiaia trained as a computational biologist at USC, but also has a background as a division I track and field athlete. Razib and Souaiaia discuss what "genetic architecture"...

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks with  Washington Post  columnist  Shadi Hamid. A native Pennsylvanian of Egyptian ethnic background, and Islamic faith, Hamid completed his Ph. D. in politics at Oxford University. He is an  assistant professor at Fuller Seminary , co-host of the  Wisdom of Crowds  podcast and website, and now the author of his own  Substack  and a recent book,...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Conn Carroll , the author of  Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy . Caroll is currently an editor for the  Washington Examiner , but previously he was the communications director for Senator Mike Lee of Utah, an assistant director at the Heritage Foundation, White House correspondent for  Townhall.com...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib has a wide-ranging conversation with Dan Hess, the man behind the  More Births  account on social media. An engineer with a large family in the DC area, Hess' essays on topics like  Israelis' high birth rate  have gained the attention of X, with an account that has come from a few hundred followers to more than 30,000 in 2 years. Razib and Hess fi...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Brian Chau , who writes at the  From the New World  Substack. A graduate of the University of Waterloo and former software engineer with a background in pure mathematics, today Chau is executive director of the  Alliance for the Future , a think tank that believes artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better. Chau addr...

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, third-time guest  John Hawks  returns after two years to discuss what we've learned in paleoanthropology since he and Razib last talked. Hawks obtained his PhD under  Milford H. Wolpoff , and is currently a professor in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Hawks has also co-authored   Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Disc...

  Three years ago  David Mittelman  came on  Unsupervised Learning  to talk about emerging possibilities on the frontiers of genomics, and his new startup at the time,  Othram . Since then, Othram's work has been featured widely in the media, including in a  Law & Order  episode,   and the firm has solved thousands of unsolved cases, with nearly 500 public. For over a decade, Mittelman has been at...

  On this episode of  Unsuperivsed Learning  reviews what we know about Indo-Europeans as 2024 comes to a close. This is prompted by a new preprint  Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages , which finally establishes that populations in Northern and Southwestern Europe derived from a different steppe-origin population than the Gree...

  This week on  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Megan McArdle ,  author  of  The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success  and Washington Post  columnist and op-ed board  member. McArdle was raised in New York City and attended Riverdale Country School. She obtained an undergraduate degree in English from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Chicago. A...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , Razib catches up with  Nikolai Yakovenko  about the state of AI at the end of 2024. Yakovenko is a former professional  poker player ,and research scientist at Google, Twitter and Nvidia. With a decade in  computer science , Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the  large-language-model  revolution that has given rise to multi-billion dollar companie...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to  Yasha Mounk . The founder of  Persuasion , a  contributor  to  The Atlantic  and a professor at  Johns Hopkins , Mounk now has his own  Substack , where he hosts his weekly  column  and  podcast . He is the author of  The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure ,  The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Fr...

  Today Razib talks to Russian commentator and transhumanist  Anatoly Karlin . Karlin has a BA in political economy from U C Berkeley. For most of the 21st century he had positioned himself as part of the right wing of the transhumanist movement. He returned to Russia after living in California's Bay Area for several years, and from there he promoted a nationalistic vision in opposition to America...

  During the Ice Age our ancestors often painted the horse in caves On this week's episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib covers the archaeology, genetics and history of the horse. Dogs may be man's best friend, but for thousands of years horses were humanity's most valuable domesticate. While pigs, cattle and goat were essential elements of the world's subsistence economies, the horse in its mi...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  returning guest  Wilfred Reilly about his new book,  Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricula . Reilly holds a Ph. D. in political science from Southern Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Illinois. Raised in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, he worked...

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning  Razib welcomes  Leighton Akira Woodhouse  back to the podcast. Woodhouse is a freelance journalist and a documentary filmmaker, currently 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  and  The Nation , before starting his ow...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Lyman Stone , a soon to be PhD in sociology from McGill University specializing in population dynamics. Stone runs the  Pro-natalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies , and has had appointments at AEI, and has written for  The Atlantic  and  The New York Times . Well known for his social media presence, Stone is a  published...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to the pseudonymous commentator "Peachy Keenan." A native of Los Angeles with an Ivy League education, Keenan worked in entertainment before detouring into punditry, writing for the Claremont Institute's  The American Mind , appearing on  Fox News  and penning  Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War . Razib and Keen...

  On this episode Razib talks to  Jesse Singal , a journalist who has covered the social science beat for the last decade. Singal has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from University of Michigan and a master's in public affairs from Princeton. Currently a freelance journalist who writes his own Substack,  Singal-Minded , and contributes to  Blocked and Reported  with Katie Herzog, Singal is f...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to economist  Sam Hammond .  Canadian-born Hammond serves as the Senior Economist at the Foundation for American Innovation. His work primarily focuses on innovation and science policy, with particular attention to the societal and institutional impacts of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence. Before his role at FAI, Hammond...

    The full episode is available on: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/14000-years-of-natural-selection On this episode of Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks about what we have learned from a blockbuster new preprint,  Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation . Synchronously released was the  Ancient Genome Selection browser , which al...

On this week's episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib discusses the genetic and archaeological history of Europe from the arrival of modern humans (permanently) 45,000 years ago, to the end of the Bronze Age in the decades after 1200 BC. He covers these time periods: Pre-Aurignacian (before 43 kya)  Aurignacian (43-26 kya)  Gravettian (33-21 kya)  Solutrean (22-17 kya)  Magdalenian (17-12 kya) ...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Misha Saul , the host of the  Kvetch Substack . Saul is a first-generation Jewish Australian, born in Georgia (former Soviet republic), who grew up in Adelaide and now lives in Sydney. He graduated from the University of Adelaide with degrees in commerce and law. His day job is in finance, but the  Kvetch  highlights his interests in  hist...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Cremieux , a Twitter anon who is regularly retweeted by the likes of Paul Graham, Noah Smith and Elon Musk. A data scientist and statistician, Cremieux specializes in visualizations and analyses that cut to the heart of social and cultural dynamics, from economics to behavior genetics. Cremieux and Razib first discuss the polls and demogra...

On this episode of "Unsupervised Learning," Razib talks to  Rachel Haywire , who writes at  Cultural Futurist . Haywire is the author of  Acidexia  and began her career in futurism as an event planner for the  Singularity Institute . She got her start as part of the "right-brain" faction around the Bay Area transhumanist and futurist scene circa 2010. Currently, she is working on starting an art g...