Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
188 episodes - English - Latest episode: 22 days ago - ★★★★★ - 157 ratingsRazib Khan engages a diverse array of thinkers on all topics under the sun. Genetics, history, and politics. See: http://razib.substack.com/
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Episodes
Samo Burja: China's future, Russia's present and archaeology's past
June 04, 2023 18:39 - 1 hour - 144 MBOn 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 fall of 2020, spiraled into a long discussion on the Chinese past and future, and Razib follows up to find out wher...
Lillian Tara: more babies for a better world
June 04, 2023 15:44 - 54 minutes - 39.3 MBIn 1968, Stanford ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich, published The Population Bomb, arguing that rapid growth in human numbers would result in environmental catastrophe and widespread famine. Overall the dire predictions of The Population Bomb did not come to pass, with the Green Revolution staving off the specter of mass starvation. With eight billion people today, the world population has doubled since 1970, and global TFR (totality fertility rate) is now 2.4, down from 4.5 in 1970. When it comes ...
Timothy B. Lee: don't rage against the machine
May 29, 2023 19:52 - 48 minutes - 88.3 MBA 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, but Lee covered tech for a decade for Washington Post, Ars Technica, and Vox.com, and has a master’s degree ...
The collapse of the Bronze Age civilization
May 29, 2023 19:23 - 48 minutes - 37.8 MBRecently, 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 globalized world. This collapse marked the end of a multi-century period when the Near East’s empires a...
Peter Nimitz: Seven Ages of Western Eurasia
May 29, 2023 16:20 - 1 hour - 62.5 MBOn 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 to the Present. In the piece, he explores the changes that Europe and West Asia have undergone si...
Alex Feinberg: former professional athlete and techie turned trainer
May 10, 2023 19:24 - 50 minutes - 38 MBAlex 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. So he pivoted and focused on growing his Twitter following, and noticed that his lifestyle tweets...
Adam Mastroianni: a history of experiments in social psychology
May 10, 2023 19:00 - 57 minutes - 43.8 MBOn 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-up, The dance of the naked emperors). Mastroianni opened a can of worms; the post has more than 800 likes an...
David McKay: AI and the end of the world as we know it
April 20, 2023 20:50 - 1 hour - 153 MBThis 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, where he breaks down the technical elements that come together to allow for AI. In this episode, McKay, a Cam...
The modern human conquest of earth
April 10, 2023 19:53 - 1 hour - 174 MBOn 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 Africa more than 200,000 years ago, then moving on to their breakout from the ancestral continent an...
Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate 20+ years later
April 02, 2023 20:35 - 1 hour - 43.6 MBTwenty-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 Mind Works. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss stated in a 2003 review that The Blank Slate “may be the most...
David Sloan Wilson: the past and future of multi-level selection theory
March 22, 2023 21:06 - 1 hour - 58.3 MBDr. 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 Way We Think About Our Lives, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution and Atlas Hugged: The ...
Introducing the intellectual brown web (IBW)
March 19, 2023 04:05 - 1 hour - 55.9 MBOn 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 differences, all four are skeptical of the ideological orthodoxies regnant in American culture, even though one...
Human pigmentation: the genetics and evolution of human shades
March 09, 2023 20:35 - 37 minutes - 86.8 MBThis 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 discusses the genetic basis and evolutionary origins of variation on this trait that has held such impor...
Glenn Loury: four decades in economics
March 04, 2023 18:56 - 55 minutes - 126 MBToday 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 erstwhile progressive, Loury was a neoconservative in the 1980’s before his gradual shift to back the political right i...
Virginia Postrel: from synthetic meat to synthetic fabric
February 23, 2023 20:36 - 1 hour - 154 MBOn 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 Postrel discuss her recently reported piece for The Wall Street Journal, Synthetic Meat Will Change the Ethic...
Charles Fain Lehman: homicide, death in the charts
February 18, 2023 02:30 - 1 hour - 141 MBhttps://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 with one in The New York Times published in November of 2021: The similarity is simply a f...
The prehistoric genetic roots of the Chinese
February 10, 2023 07:02 - 1 hour - 63.4 MBOn 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 16% of humanity. With China’s new prominence in genomics over the last decade, the genetic structu...
Madagascar: where Asia and Africa met
February 04, 2023 15:00 - 24 minutes - 57.1 MBFor 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, distinct from Africa to the west and unconnected to the world of the Indian Ocean coastlines to the nor...
Jonathan Anomaly: To Make a Better World
January 26, 2023 23:30 - 1 hour - 29 MBOn 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 University. Anomaly has been thinking and publishing on the implications of the intersection between ethics a...
Bryan Caplan: Open minds and Open borders
January 20, 2023 10:00 - 1 hour - 40.2 MBOn 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 chief writer for Bet On It, the blog hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas, and...
John Hawks: A Year in Paleoanthropology
January 13, 2023 14:30 - 1 hour - 30.5 MBOn 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 mastered several elements of human culture, for our understanding of hominin evolution and the expected traject...
Shadi Hamid: Democracy in America and Araby
January 04, 2023 19:42 - 1 hour - 48.3 MBWhat 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 own Substack and a recent book, The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an I...
Nikolai Yakovenko: GPT-3 and the rise of the thinking machines
December 29, 2022 10:00 - 1 hour - 36.4 MBAs 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 the way to creating a true artificial general intelligence, as there is no clear consensus on what ...
Joshua Lipson, Aric Lomes and Leo Cooper: the medieval origins of the Ashkenazim
December 22, 2022 10:05 - 1 hour - 47.6 MBOn 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 the 12th century was also published, 2022 has seen a massive growth in our ancient-DNA-informed understanding...
Michael Bonner: Iran's Sassanid Empire
December 16, 2022 10:00 - 1 hour - 45.3 MBMost 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 Khomeini loom large as figures who for a time monopolized television screens and front pages of news ma...
Eurocentrism, the West, and white supremacy
December 08, 2022 03:59 - 46 minutes - 107 MBhttps://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, Razib discusses the cultural and genetic origins of Europeans, how they have been viewed ov...
Garett Jones: The Culture Transplant - How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left
December 02, 2022 18:27 - 1 hour - 44.3 MBOn 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 Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, and then moving to 10% Less Democracy: Why You Shoul...
Cody Moser: Universal Baby Talk
November 30, 2022 17:07 - 1 hour - 45.9 MBHow 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 relates to the new field of evolutionary psychology. He observes that some of the conceptual ideas tha...
Nikolai Yakovenko: a Twitter engineer on machine learning and his former company's prospects
November 20, 2022 07:42 - 1 hour - 50.3 MBWhen 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 leadership is in the news again, due to Elon Musk’s status as “chief twit,” I wanted to talk to Yak...
Razib Khan: Anatolia over 10,000 years
November 18, 2022 07:37 - 31 minutes - 28.2 MBOn 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 people left the vast stoneworks that dot Europe’s Atlantic coasts to this day, beginning with the m...
Erik Hoel: neuroscience is dead, long live neuroscience!
November 04, 2022 05:00 - 1 hour - 59.5 MBToday, 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, he also points out that the discipline has a long way to go before it uncovers deep and insightful counter...
Jonathan Haidt: Social media kills the internet utopia
October 28, 2022 05:31 - 59 minutes - 32.8 MBJonathan Haidt is the author of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. One of the pioneers of Moral Foundations Theory and a founder of Heterodox Academy, over the last few years Haidt has been focused on the impact of social media on our politics and culture (he is writing two boo...
Religion in China, India and the West
October 22, 2022 15:51 - 43 minutes - 37.5 MBOn this monologue episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib considers the different roles religion plays in various world civilizations. To explore this topic, he contrasts religion in the West (which includes Christendom and the Dar-al-Islam), on the Indian subcontinent and in China. Depending on which characteristics you focus on, these societies deploy and understand religion quite differently, even though religion as a cultural phenomenon is easily recognizable to all humans. Razib argue...
Oliver Traldi: welcome to the intellectual dark web
October 13, 2022 16:34 - 1 hour - 59.6 MBOn this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses approaching politics through philosophy, political philosophy, and what it’s like being an excessively online academic in 2022 with Oliver Traldi. Currently working on a book on understanding politics through a philosophical lens, Traldi explains the relevance of epistemology to the project, while Razib queries the role that deductive, abductive and inductive reasoning might play in political views. Both also consider that political or...
Tania Reynolds: let's talk about intrasexual competition
October 06, 2022 07:30 - 1 hour - 101 MBEvolutionary psychology is a field that has made headlines ever since its inception as a distinct discipline in the 1980’s. In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Dr. Tania Reynolds of the University of New Mexico, who researches intrasexual competition and cooperation, as well as sexual and social selection. Reynolds outlines what evolutionary psychology means for her and explains why she thinks it is helpful in our quest to understand human behavior. In particular, her fi...
Richard Hanania: markets in every prediction
September 29, 2022 06:02 - 1 hour - 48 MBHow do we know when to trust the experts? On January 23rd, 2020, Vox published a piece titled The evidence on travel bans for diseases like coronavirus is clear: They don’t work. Journalists are largely limited to reporting what experts tell them, and in this case, it seems Vox's experts misled them. By December 2020 The New York Times could reflect that “interviews with more than two dozen experts show the policy of unobstructed travel was never based on hard science. It was a political dec...
Kerry of Mary Lincolniana: America made in the image of Massachusetts
September 22, 2022 21:50 - 1 hour - 57.9 MB“Yankee go home!” has often been hurled at Americans indiscriminately. But the reality is that Yankee as a category initially meant the people of New England and its colonies across the northern fringe United States, from upstate New York to Minnesota. Yankees were a minority of Northerners during the American Civil War. Nevertheless, Yankee spearheading the Northern cause meant that Southerners disparaged all their occupiers with that label. This reflects the core insight that Yankees were,...
Razib Khan: the "southern arc" and Indo-European origins
September 17, 2022 08:37 - 30 minutes - 25.7 MBThree blockbuster papers on ancient DNA just landed in Science Magazine: The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe, A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia, and, Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia (ungated copies available at the Reich lab website). Why three papers in one issue of Science? The authors claim there was too much data to pack...
Katherine Brodsky: from internet entrepreneur to cultural commentator
September 10, 2022 05:52 - 1 hour - 82.3 MBKatherine Brodsky is today a freelance writer who in the early 2000’s was the founder and editor-in-chief of an online culture magazine that was registering 600,000 pageviews a month while herself still an undergrad. In this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib explores a life lived online, from the dot-com bubble to the social media era. Brodsky, whose Substack is Random Minds, is an observer of culture from a peripatetic vantage point, a Canadian working in the American film...
Razib Khan: surveys of the great ancient human DNA Diasporas
September 07, 2022 06:12 - 30 minutes - 25.2 MBThis week takes The Unsupervised Learning podcast in a somewhat different direction. In response to a common listener request, Razib takes on his first “one-man-show,” digging into his stores of knowledge of the population genetics of ancient peoples and tribes, delving into the significance of abstrusely labeled clusters like “Ancient North Eurasian” (ANE) over 60 minutes. But as anyone following this substack will anticipate, first a caveat: in these heady days of endless ancient DNA disco...
Jason Walters: from Salafism to Sartre
August 31, 2022 07:25 - 1 hour - 93.7 MBThe recent killing by Ayman al-Zawahiri, erstwhile leader of al-Qaeda, brought many Americans back to awareness of an era that has been fading, the decade of the “War on Terror” that dominated geopolitics after the 9/11 terrorism attack. The World Trade Center bombings galvanized Americans, setting the stage for our disastrous invasion of Iraq and American meddling in Muslim nations worldwide. But while 9/11 drove a closing of ranks against radicalism across much of the West, a small minorit...
Ed West: Albion past and future
August 19, 2022 02:52 - 1 hour - 60.3 MBDespite the fundamental reality that the US exists thanks to a rebellion against the power of the British Crown in the 1700's, for the last century, the two dominant English-speaking powers have enjoyed a relatively positive geopolitical relationship. Whereas the US is younger, Britain has settled into the role of junior partner, as the daughter nation outstrips the parent in economic, military and cultural reach. And yet despite the commonalities between these two Anglo-Atlantic polities,...
Ethan Strauss: the sports journalism disruptor is in the house
August 14, 2022 02:56 - 1 hour - 73.8 MBSpectator sports are a massive cross-cultural phenomenon in the modern world, from cricket in India to football in Europe and American football in the US. In the middle of the 20th century, commentary on sports was generally found in newspapers that also reported results from the previous day’s games. By the end of the century, many sports television channels arose that provided new venues for commentary and analysis, and the vocation of “sports commentator” exploded beyond simply analyzing ...
Maxim Lott: getting to the truth of the matter
August 08, 2022 17:16 - 58 minutes - 43.8 MBAbout a month ago, during a COVID-19 wave, I saw a Substack post, How to Get Paxlovid Quickly, If You Get Covid - How to get the 89%-effective Covid cure called Paxlovid, despite government red tape, shared across various group chats. For non-Americans, the utility of such a post and the question of why the government couldn’t distribute this drug and communicate its utility might require some explanation. If you are an American, you probably don’t need an explanation. The post's author, Max...
Manvir Singh: beyond anthropological dreams
August 01, 2022 17:04 - 57 minutes - 45.8 MBWhat if everything you learned about anthropology turned out to be wrong? Well, OK, maybe not everything, but some very important things. Today Razib talks to Manvir Singh about primitive communism and misconceptions about hunter-gatherers, what anthropology got wrong in the past and how it has continued to confuse us into the present. Singh is a scholar at The Institute of Advanced Study in Toulouse, as well as an artist and essayist. His academic interests lie in explaining why most human ...
Judge Glock: it's still morning in America!
July 23, 2022 00:43 - 1 hour - 64.9 MBOn this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Dr. Judge Glock about the case for optimism in America in 2022. An economic historian by training, Glock is a Chief Policy Officer at the Cicero Institute. Though public polling shows that 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the nation, Glock really doesn’t share the sentiment, and he puts forward a case for sunny optimism in the historical and geographical context. In short, it turns out that for the ...
Dr. Iona Italia: a cosmopolitan liberal in an identitarian age
July 15, 2022 22:40 - 1 hour - 39.1 MBDr. Iona Italia’s name often perplexes the public, but it’s entirely explicable considering her background. Her late father was from the Parsi community of the Indian subcontinent. Descendants of Persians who continued to adhere to the Zoroastrian religion of their ancestors, the Parsis migrated to northwestern India about 1,000 years ago. Remaining predominantly endogamous, they nevertheless developed a synthetic culture, adopting the Gujarati language, Indian dress, as well as some very id...
Stuart Buck: making 21st-century science better
July 09, 2022 23:06 - 1 hour - 53.6 MBHow do we make science in the 21st century better? Stuart Buck, Executive Director of the Good Science Project has some ideas. More concretely, Buck is part of a broader movement of researchers, activists and philanthropists reimagining how science can be done in the wake of the replication crisis. Between 2010 and 2015 many fields of science relying on statistical methods from the 20th century were found to be plagued by methodological errors that produced the ‘sexy’ results the breathless ...
Claire Lehmann: an Australian at the heart of the heterodox web
June 30, 2022 08:04 - 58 minutes - 44.1 MBOn this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to his friend Claire Lehmann, founder and editor-in-chief of Quillette magazine, and columnist for The Australian. Though Lehmann’s initial public prominence involved her key role in the “intellectual dark web,” publishing thinkers critical of identity politics like Coleman Hughes, John Wood Jr. and John McWhorter, Razib was especially interested in the fact that over the last few years she has gotten involved in various online discussions...
Manuel L. Quezon III: Explaining the Philippines
June 23, 2022 23:53 - 56 minutes - 45.1 MBA bit over one percent of Americans are of Filipino ancestry, making them one of the largest Asian American subgroups. Unlike Chinese, Mexicans or Europeans, Filipino immigrants are unique in that their homeland, the Philippines, was actually an American colony for five decades, between 1898 and 1946. This is one reason that the level of English fluency in the Phillippines is very high, a factor in very strong economic integration with the US through outsourcing. And yet despite the historic...