Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning,  Razib talks to  Zoe Booth  and  Iona Italia . Booth is community engagement officer and Italia is managing editor at  Quillette . An Australian, Booth has degrees in French, Politics and Law from the University of Newcastle. Italia is an erstwhile academic of British nationality and mixed Parsi and Scottish heritage, with a Ph. D. in English literature f...

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib  talks to  Nick Cassimatis , erstwhile  artificial intelligence researcher  and currently an  entrepreneur . Cassimatis has undergraduate and doctoral degrees in cognitive and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a master's degree in child psychology from Stanford. He studied for his Ph. D. under  Marvin Minsky , arguably t...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks about AI, the  singularity  and the post-human future, with  James D. Miller , a  Smith College economist , host of the podcast  Future Strategist  and the author of  Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World . Miller and Razib first met at 2008's "Singularity Summit" in San Jose, and though  S...

    On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Rob Henderson , author of the new book  Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class . Henderson is a commentator known for coining the term " luxury beliefs, " a tendency among elites to use their beliefs to signal social status, with real-life costs of those beliefs born by non-elites alone. Henderson grew up in Califo...

In this episode, Razib talks to Wilfred Reilly , political scientist, author and fearless cultural  commentator . 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 discusses his ten-year diversion from academia, including his stints as a canvasser for the gay rights group...

Today Razib talks to geneticist Erich Schwarz , a Research Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University  since 2012. Schwarz has a molecular biology degree from Harvard and a Ph. D. from Caltech. After working with the fruit fly  Drosophila melanogaster  in graduate school, he switched to the nematode  Caenorhabditis elegans , and has continued studying nemat...

  Today, Razib talks to  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz , author of  Who Makes the NBA?: Data-Driven Answers to Basketball's Biggest Questions  and  Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are . Stephens-Davidowitz, formerly of Google and  The New York Times , is a freelance data scientist and author. He has a degree in philosophy from Stanford and a PhD...

  Do 20% of the men on dating apps get 80% of the dates? Is the Zoomer generation the sexless generation? What are the best predictors of relationship success? These are some of the questions Razib asks  Alex of DatePsychology  on this episode of  Unsupervised Learning . A psychologist who studied cognitive and behavioral neuroscience in graduate school, Alex explores topics around dating on his ...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  David Lightbringer , a YouTube content creator who focuses on the  world of The Game of Thrones  and the  mythologies of ancient peoples . Though Lightbringer writes  essays , and distributes his thoughts via  podcast  (and you can also read his views in short-form on numerous topics via his  tweets on X ), his primary platform is his  Y...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to human geneticist  Cesar Fortes-Lima  about his new paper,  The genetic legacy of the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples in Africa . Fortes-Lima has a Ph. D. in Biological Anthropology and his primary research areas include African genetic diversity, African diaspora, transatlantic slave trade, demographic inference, admixture dynamics an...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to  Cody Moser , co-author of a recent paper,  Innovation-facilitating networks create inequality . Moser is an  evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist  at UC Merced, where he is completing his doctorate. A previous  guest  on the podcast, Moser immediately digs deep into the abstruse and technical model that shows that more is...

Katherine Brodsky  hosts the Substack  Random Minds  and is author of the soon-to-be-published book  No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage―Lessons for the Silenced Majority . The daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to Israel and then Canada, Brodsky has worked as a photographer, in public relations and as a publisher. A recent  visiting fellow  of the Danube Insti...

Today, Razib cross-posts an episode of his other podcast . When not working on this Substack, Razib devotes his time to  GenRAIT , a startup accelerating scientific discovery by providing infrastructure and tools to researchers. GenRAIT fosters science and discovery by making biological data accessible, usable, and minable. Razib and his cofounders,  Dr. Santanu Das  and  Taylor Capito , will talk...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Philippe Lemoine , a fellow at  CSPI , a philosopher of science trained at Cornell. Lemoine often wades into controversial topics, like whether  Chinese COVID data is  trustworthy, but recently,  he posted on Twitter  that "Americans *genuinely* believe they have better food than France. They really believe it." Not only did this trigger...

  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...