Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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 hosts three guests, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own Substack), Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute (and Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Subst...

In the fall of 2022  Liz Truss was the UK's Prime Minister for 44 days. Her tenure was cut short by turmoil in the financial markets, as her attempts to roll out policies similar to the US's 1980's program of " Reaganomics " that combined lower taxes and higher deficits triggered panic and an  intervention from the Bank of England . In retrospect, the problem was that the British elite periodicall...

Mukherjee is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute and a Ph. D. student in American politics at Boston College, where her dissertation will focus on affirmative action. Razib asks Mukherjee to discuss the origin of affirmative action as it is practiced in the US today, starting with the Bakke decision in 1978, and then moving on to Grutter vs. Bollinger in 2003. She then moves to the...

In June 1991, The New York Times published a  piece  titled "Scientists Study Ancient DNA for Glimpses of Past Worlds." Published a year after Michael Crichton's 1990 novel  Jurassic Park , on which the 1993 blockbuster would be based, the article opens "Will it one day become possible to breed a living dinosaur from genes preserved in fossils?" More than 30 years on, we obviously have not bred a...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning ,   Razib talks to journalist  Lee Fang . Formerly an investigative reporter at  The Intercept  and a contributing writer at  The Nation , Fang began his journalism career at  ThinkProgress . As an undergraduate, Fang was president of the University of Maryland College Democrats, and interned for Democratic representatives Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Steny H...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib hosts  Ross Douthat , author of  Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics ,  Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class ,  Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream ,  The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery   and   The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Ow...

On this week's  Unsupervised Learning  Razib welcomes back a favorite repeat guest,  Samo Burja , to discuss matters future, present and past. Burja founded the consulting firm  Bismarck Analysis  and developed the " great founder theory ." He contributes to  Palladium Magazine ,  Asia Times ,  City Journal , and  The National Interest . Burja's first appearance on the  podcast , recorded in the f...

A few years ago now, Razib talked to  Tim Lee  about his new Substack  Full Stack Economics , which featured deep dives into economic issues (as well as some on-the-ground-reporting, like when  he drove  Lyft to get a feel for its economics). But recently, Lee decided to put  Full Stack Economics  on pause to focus on a new Substack:  Understanding AI . Artificial intelligence is hot right now, bu...

Recently, scientists  discovered  that a two-year mega-drought beginning in 1198 BC hastened the Hittite Empire's collapse. The finding sheds new light on the history of the decades around 1200 BC, adding specificity to the timing and cause for the period's social and political chaos. Today on the  Unsupervised Learning  podcast Razib discusses the "Bronze Age Collapse," the end of the first globa...

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Peter Nimitz, the author behind the Nemets Substack, which explores topics as diverse as the 2014 Donbass War and the likelihood of Eurasian migration into Chad thousands of years ago. Razib and Nimitz walk through his recent post, the Seven Ages of Western Eurasia: A brief outline of the 11,700 years from the Anatolian Farmers t...

Alex Feinberg  is anything but your typical trainer. An economics graduate from Vanderbilt, Feinberg willed himself to become a professional baseball player through focus and hard work and then talked his way into a sales and business development job at Google. In the late 2010's Feinberg moved into the crypto space, but found that one precondition to success was having a large Twitter following....

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to  Adam Mastroianni , who runs the  Experimental History  Substack. Mastroianni was the inaugural guest on the  Intrinsic Perspective   podcast , hosted by  Erik Hoel , where they discussed his post,  The rise and fall of peer review - Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing  (see also his follow-...

This week on  Unsupervised Learning , Razib and his guest,  David McKay , of the  Standing on the Shoulders of Giants  podcast (Razib was an  early guest ), discuss the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the prospects for artificial general intelligence (AGI). This discussion arose after Razib heard McKay's explainer,  Zen and the Art of ChatGPT , a 30-minute layman's intro to the topic, whe...

  On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning ,   Razib talks about the rise of modern humans, from their beginning as just one population among a diverse set of human species, to the dominant and only remaining lineage of hominids in the present. His reflections are colored by paleontological findings and begin with the evolution of modern humans and their distinctive physical characteristics in Af...

Twenty-one years ago,  Steven Pinker's   The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature   was published. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize,  The Blank Slate  firmly established Pinker as one of the major public intellectuals in 21st-century America; it followed earlier works more narrowly focused on his discipline of psycholinguistics,  The Language Instinct ,  Words and Rules   and  How the M...

Dr.  David Sloan Wilson  is a Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. Co-founder of the  Evolution Institute  and  Prosocial World , Wilson is the author of  Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior ,   Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society ,  Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the W...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning,  Razib hosts three guests,  Sarah Haider  of  A Special Place in Hell ,  Shadi Hamid  of the  Brookings Institute  and  Murtaza Hussain  of  The Intercept . Razib, Haider, Hamid and Hussain discuss the current state of the culture from the perspective of "brown" observers of the public sphere dominated by woke vs. anti-woke factions. Despite ideological d...

This monologue is incomplete, for the complete monologue, checkout: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning Podcast Substack Why does human skin color vary so much? And what is the relationship between hair color, eye color and overall pigmentation? What genes control pigmentation in humans and other animals? Razib addresses all these questions in this episode of  Unsupervised Learning , as he discusse...

Today on the podcast Razib talks to  Dr. Glenn Loury ,  Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences  at Brown University. Loury also has a  Substack  that grew out of his conversations with  John McWhorter  on  bloggingheads.tv  starting in 2008. He is the author of  One by One from the Inside Out ,  The Anatomy of Racial Inequality  and  Race, Incarceration, and American Values . An erstwhi...

On this episode of the  Unsupervised Learning  podcast, Razib talks to Virginia Postrel, the author of  The Fabric of Civilization ,  The Power of Glamour ,  The Substance of Style  and  The Future and its Enemies . Formerly a columnist at  The Wall Street Journal  and  Bloomberg View , and the former editor of  Reason , she is now a fellow at Chapman University's Smith Institute. First, Razib and...

https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. In April of 2021, this Substack published a piece,  The ultimate price of costless gestures , that anticipated a spate of  articles  in the second half of the year in the mainstream media reporting on the rise of murders in 2020. Compare the figure from the Substack piece...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib explores the history of China through the lens of genetics and ancient DNA. This podcast is a companion to the recent two pieces,  Genetic history with Chinese characteristics  and  Venerable Ancestors: untangling the Chinese people's hybrid Pleistocene origins . Today 92% of the citizens of the People's Republic of China are ethnic Han, accounting...

For the complete version of this podcast check out  razib.substack.com On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib discusses the  origins   of the people of Madagascar  in a companion podcast to his two-part series on  the genetics   and history  of the island. An ecologically unique island off Africa's southeast coast, for tens of millions of years Madagascar forged its own evolutionary path...

On this week's episode of  Unsupervised Learning ,   Razib talks to  Jonathan Anomaly , author of   Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement . Anomaly is currently the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at La Universidad de las Americas, Ecuador. He has been a lecturer at Duke and the University of Pennsylvania and holds a philosophy Ph. D. from Tulane Univ...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning ,   Razib talks to Bryan Caplan about Caplan's new book,  Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice . Despite what the narrow purview  the title might suggest,  Don't Be a Feminist  is a wide-ranging book that contains essays on IQ, immigration and identity politics, among other things (in addition, yes, to women's rights). Caplan is the editor and ch...