184 episodes

Razib Khan engages a diverse array of thinkers on all topics under the sun. Genetics, history, and politics. See: http://razib.substack.com/

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning Razib Khan

    • Science
    • 4.8 • 17 Ratings

Razib Khan engages a diverse array of thinkers on all topics under the sun. Genetics, history, and politics. See: http://razib.substack.com/

    Chris Stringer: human evolution in 2024

    Chris Stringer: human evolution in 2024

    On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer. Affiliated with the Natural History Museum in London, Stringer is the author of African Exodus. The Origins of Modern Humanity, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth and  Homo Britannicus - The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain. A proponent since the 1970’s of the recent African origin of modern humans, he has also for decades been at the center of debates around our species’ relationship to Neanderthals. In the 1980’s, with the rise to prominence of the molecular model of “mtDNA Eve,” Stringer came to the fore as a paleoanthropological voice lending support to the genetic insights that pointed to our African origins. Trained as an anatomist, Stringer asserted that the fossil evidence was in alignment with the mtDNA phylogenies, a contention that has been broadly confirmed over the last five decades. 
    But in 2010, Stringer and other proponents of an “out of Africa” “with replacement” model of recent human origins began to modify their views in response to the mounting evidence of archaic admixture, the introgression of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes into the modern human genome. On this episode, Razib queries Stringer on the state of human evolution from the fossil’s-eye view in 2024. They discuss “Dragon Man,” and whether this is just a fossil of one of the Denisovan populations. Razib also presss Stringer about the diversity of human species in Southeast Asia, and just how many Denisovan populations or “races” might have existed. They also touch on Homo naledi, and the ensuing controversies around naledi-related publications. Razib seeks Stringer’s opinion on different models of African origins for our lineage, from extensive archaic admixture to “African multi-regionalism.” On a more speculative note, they mull over the possibilities for complex societies in the Pleistocene in light of the finds at Göbekli Tepe. With Stinger’s over five decades in the discipline, very few rival his qualifications or capability to provide a bird’s-eye view of where we are in understanding human evolution in 2024.

    • 1 hr 13 min
    Zoe Booth and Iona Italia: Quillette's dynamic duo

    Zoe Booth and Iona Italia: Quillette's dynamic duo

    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 from Cambridge University. She is the author of Our Tango World, former editor-in-chief of Areo Magazine and the host of the Two for Tea Podcast. Razib discusses both of their trajectories into the heterodox intellectual sphere, Booth, from her starting point as a younger Millennial and Italia as a member of Generation X. While Booth recounts she had typical generational views on social justice and left-inflected politics, Italia admits despite being very left-wing most of her life she was never very well disposed to the identitarian trend that has crystallized into “woke” politics in the 2020s. Booth also addresses the reality that even if the existence of Quillette, a female-led bastion of free thought, with founding editor Claire Lehmann and now managing editor Italia might seem to suggest otherwise, it is not always easy to be a heterodox woman. Booth and Italia discuss how female personality orientation tends more toward making people feel comfortable and included rather than confrontations over truth claims that might hurt feelings. Italia and Razib also address her unique personality quirk of very high disagreeability, which might explain both her rejection of group-think and her earnest quest for the truth as she understands it.
    Booth and Italia talk about how the recent events around the Gaza war between Israel and Hamas, have resulted in changes in their social life due to political polarization. Overall Quillette has taken a pro-Israel position across the editorial staff, which has resulted in some blowback among their readership. Italia also talks about her own change from solidarity to the global left because of their Hamas-friendly stance, and her continued rejection of conservative social movements, including Islam. Booth and Italia also address Quillette’s consistent trend of touching cultural and political third rails, but in the service of classical liberal values. Italia believes any blowback toward her and the magazine comes disproportionately from a small group of malcontents, and that broadly liberal values are much more popular than most people realize.

    • 1 hr 44 min
    Nick Cassimatis: fear not AI, this too shall pass

    Nick Cassimatis: fear not AI, this too shall pass

    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 the most prominent and influential artificial intelligence researcher of the second half of the 20th century. Later, Cassimatis was a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founder of a successful startup, and a researcher at Yahoo and Samsung.
    Because of the explosion of large language models as implemented in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, we are now living through an artificial intelligence “hype cycle.” But Cassimatis observes that this is not the first time this has occurred. The 1960’s saw enthusiasm triggered by the ELIZA therapist chatbot. Then, in the 1990s another wave of interest crested because of the mastery of chess by Deep Blue. Finally, there was a boom of excitement around artificial intelligence after Watson’s victory in Jeopardy in the early 2010s. But these hype cycles also have their equivalent troughs; Cassimatis recounts that when he went to study artificial intelligence in the early 2000s, many people discouraged him because the field’s allure had cooled considerably. And yet, under Minsky he developed an interest in how computers could learn, writing papers like A cognitive substrate for achieve human-level intelligence. This background makes Cassimatis a particularly well-informed and trenchant observer and analyst of the current arguments about the possible emergence of artificial general intelligence in the next decade, and what it means for the future of humanity.
    But first, Cassimatis and Razib step back and address some basics. What is machine learning? How does this relate to deep learning and natural language processing? What are transformers and what is a neural network? These are terms that are thrown around casually in the technology press, but these concepts emerge from over fifty years of research in computer science. With those preliminaries out of the way, Razib probes Cassimatis’s opinions about the past and future of large language model-driven artificial intelligence, and the probability of Ray Kurzweil’s “intelligence explosion” soon. Cassimatis believes it is likely that this hype cycle will eventually fade and suspects that large language models may run up against their limits very soon. He suggests that since ChatGPT’s release in the fall of 2022, the massive transformations predicted in our lives have not come to pass more than a year later. It has not, for example, replaced search on the web, nor has it revolutionized software engineering.
    And it is the last issue, the impact of artificial intelligence and advances in computing that underpin Cassimatis’ current start-up, Dry.Ai, a platform for developing applications in a no and low-code framework. The enablement of faster and more productive programming frameworks like GitHub Copilot over the last few years has prompted some to wonder if  a crash in demand for engineers is in the offing, with a smaller number of far more productive workers. Cassimatis reminds us that in the early days of high-level programming languages, like Perl, Python or Java, the same argument was mooted. And yet, on the contrary, the demand for developers has remained high. Cassimatis expects  in the near future to see artificial intelligence hitched up to platforms like Dry.Ai which will make programming easier, reducing the time from conception to final release of an application. Overall, he sees a future that is more technologically advanced, but he does not anticipate that the next generation will bring the revolutionary transformation of all life as we know it.
    For the first time ever, parents g

    • 1 hr 25 min
    James Miller: the end of world as we know it

    James Miller: the end of world as we know it

     


    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 Singularity Rising was published in 2012, some of the ideas were already presented in earlier talks, including at that conference. More than 15 years since Miller began formulating his ideas, Razib asks him how the theses and predictions in his book have held up, and how they compared to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Coming. On this last point, Miller is very bullish on Kurzweil’s prediction that artificial intelligence will surpass that of humans by 2030. He also believes that the “intelligence explosion,” Kurzweil’s “technological singularity” when AI transforms the earth in unimaginable ways through exponential rates of change will in fact come to pass.
    But while Kurzweil predicts that the singularity will usher in an era of immortality for our species, Miller has a more measured take. He believes AI will drive massive gains in economic productivity, from cultural creativity to new drug development regimes (one of the original rationales behind IBM’s AI program). But while Kurzweil anticipates exaltation of conscious human life into an almost divine state, Miller suspects that AI may eventually lead to our demise. He estimates a 10% probability that Kurzweil is correct that we will become immortal, and a 90% probability that AI will simply shove us aside on this planet as it begins to consume all available resources.
    Overall, Miller is satisfied with the predictions in the first third of Singularity Rising. Computational technology has become far more powerful than it was in the late aughts, with a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket. Though the advances in AI seem to exhibit discontinuities, in particular with the recent seminal inventions of transformers and large language models coming to the fore, the smoothed curve aligns with Kurzweil’s 2030 target for human-level intelligence. On the other hand, where Miller has been disappointed is the merely modest advances in biological human engineering, with far fewer leaps forward than he had anticipated. Razib and Miller discuss whether this is due to limitations in the science, or issues of governance and ethics. Miller closes making the case for a program of cloning the great 20th-century genius John von Nuemann and the statesman Lee Kuan Yew.
    While the computational innovation driving AI seems to have advanced on schedule, and the biological revolution has not taken off, the last section of Miller’s book focused on the economic impacts of the impending singularity. He still believes the next 10-20 years will be incredible, as our economy and way of life are both transformed for the good. Until that is, humans become obsolete in the face of the nearly god-like forms of AI that will emerge around 2050. Until then, Miller anticipates the next generation will see rapid changes as people make career shifts every half a decade or so as jobs become redundant or automated. If Singularity Rising proves correct, the next generation will be defined by what the economist Joseph Schumpeter termed “creative destruction.” If Miller is correct, it may be the last human generation.
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    • 1 hr 15 min
    Rob Henderson: foster-kid to Ivy League graduate

    Rob Henderson: foster-kid to Ivy League graduate

     


     

    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 California foster homes, before being adopted into a working-class family in Redding, CA. After an academically undistinguished period in high school, he joined the U.S. Air Force straight out of high school, eventually serving a short stint in Germany. While in the military, he was identified as intellectually gifted via standardized tests, and it was during this time that Henderson developed habits that equipped him to become an exemplary airman, and eventually a public intellectual. Along the way, Henderson earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale and a Ph.D. in psychology from Cambridge University. 
    Henderson first came to public prominence with his 2018 New York Times op-ed, Why Being a Foster Child Made Me a Conservative. Later he outlined the concept of luxury beliefs in Quillette, and moved his popular newsletter to Substack. 
    Troubled fleshes out the working-class life experiences that made Henderson who he is today, and how and what sets him apart from other members of the elite-educated “professional-managerial class.” While he was an indifferent student who barely graduated high school, parental expectations prepped Henderson’s classmates for the Ivy League. At the time Henderson was studying at Yale, the median family income of his fellow students was $192,000. In Redding, CA, where he grew up, the median family income was about $65,000. About ten times as many Yale students hailed from the top 1% (19%) than the bottom 20% (2.1%) of family income. Troubled would shock many of Henderson’s Yale classmates, because the economic, social and cultural deprivation and domestic volatility he describes would be so alien and unrelatable. Among the most striking illustrations of how he grew up was Henderson’s perplexity upon being expected to be excited for his first birthday party in his adoptive home. As a former foster child with a winter-break birthday, not only had he never received presents, had a cake or a party. Henderson had literally never been sung “Happy Birthday.” Troubled beings with Henderson’s primary memories of his Korean immigrant mother when he was a toddler. After she was deported, Henderson’s formative years in childhood were spent as a ward of the state, shuffled from foster placement to placement.
    Razib also touches on something that Henderson has discovered in the last few years with consumer genetics. Not knowing who his father was, and clearly not being fully Asian, he had always trusted he was of mixed white and Korean heritage. But a 23andMe test makes it plain that his father was genetically Mexican. Not entirely shocking as Henderson was conceived in Southern California, the genetic test turned him overnight into a “BIPOC” individual, with nearly 20% indigenous American ancestry.

    For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

    • 1 hr 54 min
    Wilfred Reilly: a social scientist in the culture wars

    Wilfred Reilly: a social scientist in the culture wars

    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 the Human Rights Campaign and a corporate salesperson. A prolific public intellectual, Reilly is the author of Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me,  Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can't Talk About] and Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War.
    Razib asks what it means to be a “black conservative,” and Reilly responds that the term brackets all black intellectuals who dissent from the progressive orthodoxy, ranging from rock-ribbed right-wingers like Thomas Sowell to moderate liberals like John McWhorter. They also discuss the excesses of Civil Rights legislation and Richard Hanania’s thesis in The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics that the legal system is geared toward racial progressivism. Reilly believes that wokeness cannot be rolled back until that institutional and legal framework driving for radicalism is neutered.
    Segueing into the domain of political science, Razib and Reilly discuss the difference between avowed preferences and revealed preferences around issues like abortion and pornography. Both agree ordinary Americans strongly disagree with ideologues who hold extreme policies. Reilly also points out the strangeness that many of the most violent and visible activists during the BLM protests were white, and he holds these are the people who are buying books by radical activist professors like Ibram Kendi, who meanwhile has little real influence among black academics.
    They also discuss diversity within the black American community, including Laurence Otis Graham’s exploration of socioeconomic status in Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class. Reilly talks about his more upper-class mother’s attempt to inculcate elitism within him, and its failure to stick. Then Razib moots the question of the differences between “American Descendents of Slaves” (ADoS), Africans and Caribbeans, and the fact that Harvard refuses to survey its black students by sub-demographic. Finally, Reilly expounds at length on his “anti-doomer” views, arguing that economic, social and environmental catastrophism is almost always wrong, as well a providing a hearty defense of the cultural richness and economic dynamism of the Midwest.
    For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com.

     

    • 1 hr 12 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
17 Ratings

17 Ratings

Jord Mon Companys ,

What is a podcast?

Razib is a fascinating thinker that specialises on paleogenetics and popgenomics although the sheer breadth of his interests and knowledge is beyond any review. It spills over onto cultural wars, religion and politics in general. If you have a curious mind but also seek and crave in depth analysis of cultural, political and genetic issues, you are in the right place.

Human Flesh ,

Breadth and Depth

Razib has his finger on the pulse of a broad array of disciplines. He interviews a diverse group of writers, scholars, and scientists from many different fields. His style is accessible to a lay audience, while going beyond much of what’s presented in the popular press. Highly recommended for anyone interested in history, genomics, and social science.

Panos Belis ,

Highly Recommended

Razib’s conversations can be very interesting with guests from many different backgrounds, fields, professions and points of view

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