Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Recently Yale Law School (YLS) student Trent Colbert wrote Why I Didn’t Apologize For That Yale Law School Email: We must end the culture of performative repentance for Persuasion. I was broadly familiar with the culture-war saga that Colbert was caught up in, having read a piece a few weeks ago in The Washington Post describing how a seemingly innocent and jocular email triggered accusations of racism at YLS (as well as Aaron Sibarium’s piece in The Washington Free Beacon). Colbert’s in Persuasion made me curious about him, and I reached out to talk about what he had seen, and the lessons that we as a society and individuals might take from it.

First, Colbert gives us his own perspective of what transpired at YLS to make him a “trending topic” on social media. Perhaps to the surprise of Millennials, the 23-year-old Zoomer seemed not entirely familiar with the well-known podcast Chapo Trap House. As a member of Gen X, I have to admit it's a little unnerving to hear Millennials viewed as geriatric elders. But Colbert grew up in a world of super-charged cultural change and perhaps perceives the passage of time differently than those of us who came into adulthood before smartphones. He contended that some of the offense others perceived might be a matter of cohort differences and even just his casual Zoomer manner. Even a few years' difference today might mean an entirely alternative landscape of memes and sensibilities, so a subtle and wry reference among his age-mates could strike an individual only a few years older as offensive, opaque and “tone-deaf.”

With that in mind, I was curious about his background, and where he got the strength to stand up to the YLS administrative bureaucracy. We explored his relationship to his Cherokee background, as well as growing up in a moderately conservative household where religion was important. Colbert takes the idea of right and wrong seriously, and he felt that his own conscience would not allow him to agree to an apology that was premised on lies. Importantly, he also had a supportive group of friends at YLS and a wider circle of backers in the community.

Eventually, we moved to broader social forces, and how his individual choices and decisions might impact others. By doing the right thing, rather than the easy thing, Colbert hopes to show that it is possible to defeat the kind of bureaucratic machine that was unleashed upon him and trigger a preference cascade that changes the culture on campus. And doing the right thing has not been entirely easy, as Colbert admits to being uncomfortable with realizing how others at YLS viewed him purely through a racial lens, as well as the fact that many prominent organizations accused him of being a racist.

Overall, perhaps the take-home lesson is that it doesn’t take an exceptional person to take on the system. Just someone who has a core set of principles and friends and family who support them when they might have to make decisions that lead to socially unpopular outcomes.

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This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast I’m joined by author and journalist Kat Rosenfield. She has a new novel out, No One Will Miss Her, is a co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast, and a contributor at various places, like UnHerd and Newsweek.

We first talk about Andrew Cuomo (the former governor of New York), Al Franken, #metoo, and how the dynamics of fame, power and identity play into the media narrative around sexual harassment, as well as cancel culture more broadly. Kat believes the phenomenon is best understood by examining the waves of periodized reactionary movements which generate a push-pull of cultural signaling between the two extremes of the political spectrum. She believes that the ebb and flow will crest, but remains cognizant of the domination of the culture-warrior left in the emergent multi-billion-dollar diversity-and-inclusion industry that operates independently of the political institutions. 

I do wonder if the tactic may be self-limiting and end up backfiring, as the left may actually be more at risk from it than their conservative counterparts. The left relies on institutions like the press to secure its dominance, but as respect for those institutions collapses due to polarization, their sway will weaken.

Kat and I both agree that the trend towards guilt by association is high-school-level drama, while the role of social media as a panopticon and litmus test of beliefs is a disturbing trend. We discuss how shifting ideological baselines means that maintaining a consistent stance on any given issue may end up pushing a person out of one coalition and into another. 

Kat explains her experience as an independent journalist watching a marked shift in reporting and journalism over the last several decades.  She notes that the emphasis on accreditation, rather than on-the-ground experience, has come to dominate hiring practices, limiting the diversity of opinions presented and creating a more insular bubble around the profession. Her own immunity from the woke fashions may have to do with the fact that her social circle does not consist of always-online journalists, but more “normal” people.

As we conclude, Kat talks about her experience collaborating with Stan Lee and her new book No One Will Miss Her, a thriller centered around the murder of a woman and her ties to a social media influencer - coming out in October. With its opening chapters set in October, it may just be what you’re looking for to cozy up to as the nights grow long and the cool weather of autumn settles in. 

In this week’s Unsupervised Learning Podcast, Razib is joined by author and psycholinguist Steven Pinker to discuss his new book Rationality: what is it, why it seems scarce, and why it matters. Pinker makes the case the humans are fundamentally rational beings, and that it’s this capacity that has allowed Homo sapiens to spread across the planet and occupy virtually every niche available to us. Our intuitive ability to understand how physical objects, other creatures and other humans think and behave, combined with our cultural innovativeness, has allowed us to become the apex species of planet earth. Our natural logical abilities allow us to remain one step ahead in the evolutionary arms race.

Next, they delve into the history of academic discourse on thinking and rationality, from Aristotle to artificial intelligence, and try to probe and characterize the differences between logic and critical thinking, correlation and causation, and domain-specific versus general intelligence.

Then they discuss Bayes’ theorem and the spread of Bayesian thinking and discourse across the broad population in the 21st century.  Pinker suggests that the Bayesian framework can actually be observed quite widely even in hunter-gatherer populations like the San Bushmen of the Kalahari. He argues we are all Bayesians – we just might not consciously realize that when we are applying it to our problem-solving. Pinker believes that having a better understanding of the whole process may aid our decision-making and help us avoid common pitfalls, like ignoring the base rate, which is usually given the spotlight in the heuristics and biases literature.

Finally, the discussion then veers into tackling the interplay between rationality and morality, and how the former can aid progress in the latter. They conclude with a discussion on our current cultural climate, and the discourse on sex, race and wokeness.

Today’s episode of the Unsupervised Learning Podcast has been sponsored by my friends over at Fluent, a chrome extension to help you learn a new language while browsing the web. Fluent teaches you select words on the web pages you're already reading, like on substack, in the new language you’re trying to learn. It's great for improving your vocabulary without needing to spend any extra time on apps or flashcards. You can learn French, Spanish, or Italian for free by going to Fluent.co.

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This week Razib talks to Fredrick DeBoer, author of The Cult of Smart, about the heritability of intelligence and its broader implications for society and education. The two discuss the difficulties of having fact-based conversations around the topic of heritability without being shouted down or accused of being proponents of eugenics. They also talk about how The Cult of Smart compares to Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery.

Freddie breaks down the evidence that heritability, rather than just environment, is a major determining factor when predicting intelligence. He cites numerous examples where early indicators of intelligence, such as standardized tests, are predictive of long-term success despite changes in the environment over time - emphasizing that these indicators as early as kindergarten can be used to predict a child’s success in college. 

Then, the discussion turns to the implications of heritability on academic performance and how a deeper understanding might be used to inform educational policy decisions.  They discuss how policies like No Child Left Behind failed largely due to their inability to grapple with inherent differences in IQ and the impulse to view students as “blank slates” – and contrast it with the equally flawed reactionary position of doing away with standardized testing completely to focus on ‘the whole individual’ and the unintended consequences such a policy might have.

This week Razib is joined by evolutionary psychiatrist Dr. Emily Deans to discuss the coronavirus pandemic. The conversation begins with the importance of winning and retaining hearts and minds when managing a pandemic, where nations have succeeded and failed in their public health messaging – and how numerous institutional failings – like sloppy contact tracing and poor communication - have eroded a portion of the public’s trust in the pandemic response.  

They also discuss the psychology of individuals and populations in response to the coronavirus and how failures to understand group psychology have hindered and, in some cases, adversely affected the population’s willingness to cooperate with public health measures like mask-wearing and vaccination. Emily suggests that moving forward an understanding of people’s inherent motivations, anxieties, and recalcitrance towards authority should inform how institutions communicate with the public. This would mean we maximize public health efforts to minimize hospitalizations and deaths without further alienation or balkanizing of the population into adversarial tribes at the expense of general welfare. Messaging matters.

The conversation continues, touching on the emergence of variants, whether these variants are potentially more virulent, and what our goals and priorities should be now that “Zero COVID” is beyond reach due in part to widespread animal reservoirs. 

Razib and Emily wrap up by noting the difficulty of teasing out causation from data sets with multiple confounding factors - including comorbidities and seasonal human lifestyle patterns - which makes high infection and lethality rates in the American Southeast this summer difficult to attribute solely to lagging vaccination rates. The conversation concludes with a discussion of burnout, fatigue, and frustration of medical personnel with the continuing overwhelming of hospital infrastructure and a few practical common-sense changes that could be implemented to help decrease transmission and increase public safety.  

On this week’s Unsupervised Learning Podcast,  Razib sits down with Mahan Ghafari, a doctoral candidate at Oxford’s department of zoology to discuss his ongoing research in the area of viral evolution.  

They discuss the difference between RNA viruses and DNA viruses and how viral evolution differs from that of more complex life forms – accentuated by a virus’s short reproduction cycle and high mutation rate - particularly in RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 which can mutate orders of magnitude faster than DNA based viruses. 

Mahan also discusses his involvement in SARS-CoV-2 research and the particular challenges that the virus poses, including what caught virologists off guard and where they got it wrong – particularly about the emergence of variants.  He emphasizes how much is yet to be understood about SARS-CoV-2, particularly in how mutations are evolving and in which populations they may incubate and emerge, and the importance of understanding the dynamics between virus and host. 

Mahan goes on to dispel some common misconceptions floating around the Twittersphere regarding mutation and viral virulence and emphasizes the important distinction between virulence and infectiveness.

The conversation concludes with a discussion of the effect of vaccination on the transmission and evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and how having a partially vaccinated population may potentially serve as a viral incubator, making the likelihood of mutation and breakthrough infection far more likely because it gives the virus an opportunity to replicate and maximize its diversity within non vaccinated individuals, while simultaneously exposing it to the selective pressure of the vaccinated – thus driving adaptation and increasing the odds of breakthroughs that are resistant to vaccination and treatment. 

This week Razib sits down with author and tech entrepreneur Antonio Garcia Martinez to talk about some of the myriad ways in which technology and belief structures underpin and reinforce each other.  

Antonio discusses how his ongoing conversion to Judaism has broadened his lens and allowed him to gain perspective on how secular manifestations of Protestant Christianity have permeated our culture in strange and unexpected ways, including the “great awokening” of the 21st century and the dangers of injecting personality and politics into the workplace.   

They continue their discussion on the social consequences of belief and transmission of cultural memes, the not-so-subtle differences between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and how the medium of information transmission effects not only the way information is transmitted and received – but how they affect the very thought processes themselves which underly them - by comparing orality to textual transmission. Anthony notes how certain tech platforms, such as Clubhouse, are reinvigorating orally transmitted information and how even. 

Finally, Anthony discusses how his brief stint with Apple led him to buy a Tesla and the future of autonomous and upgradeable technologies and why he remains optimistic about the technological future of the United States.

Related: The Pull Request, Antonio’s Substack.

In this weeks episode Razib sits down with Maximillian Larena of Upsala Universities evolutionary biology department to discuss the peopling of the Philippines via five proposed population pulses and introgression events beginning with the earliest Australasian expansion of the Philippine Negritos and subsequent migratory waves by the Manobo, Sama, and Cordilleran related populations. 

Max discusses how dispersal models are complicated by the geographic history of the Philippines, which is located on the periphery of the submerged subcontinent of Sundaland, and how sea-level changes may have created complex multidirectional migratory pulses which may not have occurred as a single event but rather a series of more prolonged diffusions. 

The Negrito populations in particular demonstrate deep divergences, on the order of 46,000 years from other Australasian populations such as the Australian Aboriginals and the Papuans, possibly from a common ancestor living in Sundaland some 50,000 years ago.   

Perhaps most interestingly the Philippines Ayta Negrito people have been found to have the highest percentage of Denisovan DNA in the world – Max and Razib discuss some of the nuances of teasing out statistical relations, including the difficulties of cutting through the Neanderthal signature to determine exactly what introgression event occurred since Neanderthals often carry Denisovan DNA.  

The podcast concludes with a brief discussion of the non-Sapien hominids in the Philippines and the exciting possibilities that ancient DNA offers for future studies in the area. 

Related: Philippine Ayta possess the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world and Multiple migrations to the Philippines during the last 50,000 years.

Myra MacDonald is the author of Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War and White as the Shroud: India, Pakistan and War on the Frontiers of Kashmir. The former Reuters Bureau Chief in India, MacDonald is an incisive observer of South Asian politics and commentator on the region’s history (follow her on Twitter!).

On the podcast we discussed Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan, why India cares about that relationship so much, and the looming role of China in the region. I also ask her if she believes the American withdrawal could have been executed more smoothly.

The good news is MacDonald does not believe that Pakistan wants to cause too much mischief in Kashmir right now because of the Karakoram Highway, which connects it to China. If you have some spare time, I highly recommend reading about this road. Some of the vistas and scenery are incredibly spectacular.

Ruben Arslan is a psychologist who works at the Center for Adaptive Rationality. I’ve long tracked his work because of his interest in leveraging evolutionary and genetic frameworks in the context of psychology. Additionally, Arslan has long been an advocate for, and practitioner of, open science.

In this episode we discuss some of his work:

- Intelligence can be detected but is not found attractive in videos and live interactions, where he tests and rejects one of Geoffrey Miller’s hypotheses

- The Effect of Paternal Age on Offspring Intelligence and Personality when Controlling for Parental Trait Levels, where we talk about issues related to mutations and older fathers

More generally we talk about how genomics has transformed psychology over the last 20 years, in particular in relation to phenotypes such as intelligence.