Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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,...