Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib reviews the year in paleoanthropology and previews the year to come with  John Hawks . First, they tackle the latest discoveries regarding  Homo naledi , in particular, the finding that they likely  used fires  deep in the caves where they buried their dead. Hawks reflects on the implications of  Homo naledi , a very small-brained hominin that maste...

What is a democracy? Is American democracy in danger? And should we care about the possibilities for democracy in the Middle East? On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib talks to  Shadi Hamid , a  senior fellow at Brookings , an  assistant professor at Fuller Seminary , a contributor to  The Atlantic , co-host of the  Wisdom of Crowds   podcast  and  website , and now the author of his o...

As 2022 draws to a close, the  chat AI based  on GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) has been taking the internet by storm, with millions of users beginning to ask it questions. Is humanity on the way to birthing a true artificial general intelligence (AGI)? I asked GPT-3 that particular question, and this was the answer: It is difficult to say for certain whether or not humanity is on th...

On this very special episode of  Unsupervised Learning  I talk to three guests,  Josh Lipson ,  Aric Lomes  and  Leo Cooper , about their contribution to a new paper,  Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century . Given that a month earlier,  Genomes from a medieval mass burial show Ashkenazi-associated hereditary diseases pre-date th...

Most Americans are vaguely aware of a few rulers of ancient Achaemenid Persia: Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, whether from the Bible, from historically grounded films like  300 , or in the rare case, from reading Herodotus'  The   Histories . More recently, Iran has loomed large due to its geopolitical significance, and for Americans of a certain age, the Shah Reza Pahlavi and his successor Ayatollah K...

https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack, https://razib.substack.com, and original video content. What does it mean to be Eurocentric? What does it mean to be a white supremacist? What does the term "the West" mean, and how is it different from simply the geographical designation Europe? On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast,...

On this episode of  Unsupervised Learning  Razib discusses the new book,  The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left , with author Garett Jones. Jones is a professor of economics at George Mason University, and  The Culture Transplant   is the third book in what he likes of think of as his "Singapore trilogy," beginning with  Hive Mind: How Y...

How is it that babies across entirely different cultures seemingly elicit one single sort of "baby talk" from adults? To answer this question, Razib talks to Cody Moser, coauthor of a recent  paper  on the topic, and an evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist at UC Merced. Moser first discusses what cultural evolution today means in the context of American anthropology, and how it rela...

When Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO last year, I wondered what we could expect from the new leader,  Parag Agrawal . Luckily, I knew  Nikolai Yakovenko , who worked at Twitter on deep neural networks in the mid-teens. Yakovenko told me Agrawal was not a rock-the-boat kind of guy, and perhaps that's why Dorsey tapped him to head Twitter after some tumultuous years. Now that Twitter and its...

On this episode of the  Unsupervised Learning  podcast, Razib discusses the history and genetics of Anatolia, from the first farmers to the Ottoman conquest of the peninsula. He focuses on the underappreciated reality that prehistoric Anatolia was the font of the first wave of farmers that built the majestic Neolithic societies of Europe, from arid Iberia north to the shores of the Baltic. These p...

Today, on the  Unsupervised Learning  podcast Razib talks to  Erik Hoel , author of the novel  The Revelations , and host of   The Intrinsic Perspective  Substack. Hoel is a  neuroscientist  at Tufts who is interested in the problem of consciousness. Hoel admits right off that the questions and answers around consciousness motivate neuroscience in the first place, but throughout the conversation,...