Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to archeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkins about his 2005 book The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Ward-Perkins was born and grew up in Rome, a son of architectural historian and archaeologist, John Bryan Ward-Perkins. Educated at Oxford University, Ward-Perkins eventually became a fellow of Trinity College at the same university, from which he has since retired. An archaeologist with a deep interest in economic history, Ward-Perkins’ standout book The Fall of Rome was to a great extent a restatement of traditional understandings of the Roman fall in the wake of academic revisions stimulated by Peter Brown’s 1989 World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750. Ward-Perkins scholarship focuses on the outputs of economic production: fine pottery, grand public buildings and copious coinage. In contrast, Brown and his fellow travelers tended to focus on religious innovation and creativity in the centuries coincident with Rome's fall. The Fall of Rome documents in crisp, dense prose the material collapse attendant with the dissolution of the Western Empire in the late 5th and 6th centuries, from the vanishing of pottery in Britain to the cessation of the construction of massive buildings across  the Italian peninsula.

Razib also asks Ward-Perkins his opinions on his colleague Pete Heather’s book The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians.  Ward-Perkins sees Heather’s work as complementary; while Ward-Perkins is interested in the material aspects of everyday Roman life, Heather documents and narrates the diplomatic and military affairs of the Roman elite. Ward-Perkins also comments on Chris Wickham’s work in books like The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000, which outlines how the Roman and post-Roman states differed, in particular, the disappearance in Europe of professional soldiers paid in currency, rather than feudal levies. They also discuss  Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, and whether Roman citizens were actually materially better  off than their medieval successors. Ward-Perkins also gives his estimation of the time measured in centuries until Western Europe reattained Roman levels of social, technological and political complexity.

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nikolai Yakovenko, a returning guest to the podcast, about his new AI startup, DeepNewz, and the state of the LLM-driven AI landscape circa the summer of 2024, where we are in relation to earlier expectations and where we might be in the next decade. Yakovenko is an AI researcher who has worked at Google, Twitter and Nvidia, and is now a serial entrepreneur. He is also a competitive poker player. He currently lives in Miami, Florida, though he travels frequently to America’s numerous “ideaopolises,” from San Francisco, Austin, Boston to New York City.

Razib and Yakovenko discuss the reality that in the middle of 2024 here they are again, chatting about the world on a podcast, a scenario not everyone anticipated in the heady days of December 2022/January 2023 when the more overheated visiony tech  imaginations swirled with expectations that the advent of artificial general intelligence, the “machine god,” was imminent. Though OpenAI’s GPT 3/3.5 was a leap ahead of GPT 2, GPT 4/4o has been a less spectacular advance. One of the major unforeseen aspects of the LLM-based framework in AI has been the returns to scale in terms of training data, but the last year and a half have not seen any great quantum jumps. The paradigm-shifting revolution that was promised has not arrived. Though AI has increased productivity on the margins, and certain artistic professions and translators have been decimated, overall, it is still a technology with more promise than realized outcomes. Yakovenko points out that AI-driven music creation produces serviceable outputs, but not great masterpieces. To test this, Razib used Suno to create a song “Nikolai’s Dream” within 5 minutesmid-conversation. Though mildly catchy, Suno’s lyrical styling elicited more amusement than awe.

Yakovenko notes the importance of the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard to get a sense of the performance of the various LLM projects. Using the feedback of participants, it produced an updated ranking of chatbot performance. The top ten models are from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and a Chinese vendor. Yakovenko notes the compression, with a very tight distribution of scores at the top. It turns out that OpenAI is not running away from their competition contra  its brand visibility likely being two orders of magnitude greater than Anthropic’s. This brings to the fore the reality that these AI technologies have been viewed as both scientific research projects and potential business and consumer products.

Finally, Yakovenko and Razib talk about DeepNewz. While most LLM-based chatbots tend to exclude very recent data and events, Yakovenko had the idea of creating DeepNewz to aggregate and assemble the breaking news in various categories like science and sports. Instead of a top-down query of news in various categories, the idea behind DeepNewz is to both cater to your preferences in terms of what you might find interesting, but also to surface stories that you might not know you might be interested in, adding more value.

Related: David McKay: AI and the end of the world as we know it and Nick Cassimatis: fear not AI, this too shall pass.

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib welcomes back a returning guest, J. P. Mallory, to discuss his reaction to the recent preprint The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans. Mallory is the author of In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World and The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. He is also a retired professor from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. An archaeologist who trained under Marija Gimbutas, Mallory has long used linguistics to complement his disciplinary training in archaeology to understand the origin and location of Indo-European languages.

Though Mallory admires The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans, he still thinks more work needs to be done to pinpoint the original homeland of the Yamnaya or their ancestors. The fact is that the preprint remains somewhat vague in its final conclusion, and more work is needed to make sure the populace acquires the same level of community. Mallory also discusses the challenges inherent in interdisciplinary work, synthesizing archaeology, linguistics and now genetics. He believes that a key to grasping the emergence of pre/proto-Indo-European is tracing lineage groups through their Y chromosomes, as the genetics, mythology and anthropology indicate that pre/proto-Indo-Europeans were quite patriarchal and patrilineal. Though Mallory is hopeful that we are making progress on the topic of Indo-Europeans he worries that the fraught situation of disciplinary rivalries will retard synergy, where archaeogenetics engages in excessive imperialism vis-a-vis archaeology and linguistics.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to professor Sean Anthony about his book Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam. Anthony is a historian in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. with honors in 2009 at the University of Chicago in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and has a mastery of Arabic, Persian, Syriac, French, and German. Anthony’s interests are broadly religion and society in late antiquity and medieval Islam, early canonical literatures of Islam (Koran and Hadith) and statecraft and political thought from the foundational period of Islam down to the Abbasid Caliphate over a century later.

Razib and Anthony discuss the state of the controversial scholarship about the origins of Islam, which often comes to conclusions that challenge the orthodox Muslim narrative. This earlier generation of scholars, like Patricia Crone, challenged the historicity of Muhammad, the centrality of Mecca in early Islam and even the distinctive religious identity of the early 7th century’s Near East's Arab conquerors. This revisionist school serves as the basis for Tom Holland’s 2012 book, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. While Holland’s work was an accurate summary of research before the 2010’s, Anthony argues that since then new findings have updated and revised the revisionism itself. A Koran dating from the mid-7th century seems to confirm the antiquity of this text and traditions around it, while contemporaneous non-Muslim sources refer to Muhammad as an Arabian prophet. While it is true that coinage did not bear the prophet’s name until the end of the 7th century, it may be that earlier generations of scholars were misled by the lack of access to contemporary oral sources themselves necessarily evanescent. Razib and Anthony also discuss whether the first Muslims actually self-identified as Muslims in a way we would understand, as opposed to being a heterodox monotheistic sect that emerged out of Christianity and Judaism. Though classical Islam qua Islam crystallized under the Abbasids after 750 AD, it now seems quite clear that the earlier Umayyads had a distinct identity from the Christians and Jews whom they ruled.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Chad Niederhuth, an erstwhile academic plant geneticist now working in industry. Niederhuth and Razib discuss the reality that in 2024 it is often human genetics that gets the glory, even though experiments on plants go back to the field’s very origins with Gregor Mendel and his peas. Niederhuth’s original training is in molecular genetics, and they discuss the relevance of differences in basic biological machinery between plants and animals, for example the reality that the former have chloroplasts while the latter have mitochondria. They also extensively discuss the flexibility and variation across plants in terms of size and organization of the genome; plants much more often deviate from a diploid two-gene-copy setup than animals, and their range of genome size is enormous. While the smallest plant genome is 61,000,000 bases, the largest is 148,800,000,000 bases (2,400 times larger than the human genome). 

Razib and Niederhuth discuss the flexibility and utility of plants in basic genetic research, but also in the applied agricultural context. Though classic techniques of selection are still relevant, more and more researchers are using genomic methods that look at variation at the DNA level to predict traits in the next generation, and so allow for more robust and productive cultivars. Razib also notes that public queasiness over genetic engineering in animals, let alone humans, does not seem to apply equally to plants, meaning that GMO techniques can be perfected in crops first before transferring to animal or medical contexts.

Finally, Niederhuth talks about his transition from being faculty at a research university to a scientist in the private sector. Overall Niederhuth is happy because his pay is greater, and his responsibilities are narrower and more focused. While as a professor he had to also split his time between teaching and serving extensively on committees, his current position is focused entirely on the research he finds so gratifying. Razib and Niederhuth also discuss the politicization of academic science that has occurred over the last 15 years, and the institution’s future prospects.

Related: Earlier conversation with Niederhuth on The Insight about GMOs.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jonathan Keeperman, an former lecturer in writing at UC Irvine and proprietor of Passage Press. Keeperman also posts on the internet under what was until recently an anonymous pseudonym, Lomez. Unlike many anonymous accounts on X, “Lomez” developed a decade-long identity, to the point where Keeperman wrote articles under that name for publications like First Things, The Federalist and The American Mind.

Razib and Keeperman talk about what it is like to go from someone with distinct and separate identities, a well-developed online life as well as a fairly conventional offline world, and how to reconcile them when they collide. Keeperman talks about the peculiar and often offensive scripts and modalities of the world of anonymous commentators, whose goals seem to be to have hidden discussions in plain sight, hiding their discourse through shock and obfuscation, and how difficult it can be to communicate this reality to people with more conventional outlooks. 

Keeperman admits that he understood that at some point his anonymity would be stripped away from him, but admits that it is still a difficult path to negotiate. The Lomez identity was unabashedly on the political Right, but as an academic and writing lecturer he was much more discreet about his views, and many of his friends and acquaintances were shocked as to his true politics. Keeperman’s father was a liberal and a Jewish American, so many of his relatives would no doubt have been surprised by his political commitments. 

Razib also asks Keeperman what exactly an MFA means as a credential, and what it teaches you. Though he does not think much of the credential itself, Keeperman explains that the MFA is a terminal degree for many interested in writing and literature, two loves that pulled him away from a life in the corporate world. He explains that one of his goals in entering the writing profession was to bring a masculine sensibility that he feels has been marginalized in the world of creative writing, which is today dominated by women. Razib and Keeperman talk about the marginalization of certain masculine values of vigorous competition and biting debate in many parts of the culture-producing industries, and how Passage Press is an attempt to cultivate voices that otherwise might not find  a platform. In this vein, Keeperman ends by asserting the importance of free speech for all views, from the most offensive to the most anodyne, as an essential part of American culture and the life of the mind.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about religion with Ryan Burge, professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, and author of The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going and 20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America. Burge also has a Substack, Graphs about Religion, where he posts the latest data on trends in American society.

First, Razib asks Burge to outline the wave of secularization that has impacted American society over the last 25 years, from its causes to its potential end. Burge points out that mainline Protestantism looks to be on the verge of extinction in the 21st century, while evangelical Christianity saw its high point in the 1980s. Then they talk about the nature of religiosity in America, and Burge asserts that in some ways the rise in “religious nones” is probably just social desirability bias. With the fall of Communism, atheism and irreligiosity lost some of their  negative connotations, and more and more people have “come out of the closet” or just accepted their revealed preferences. Razib also asks if Christianity will become a minority religion in the US, and if it is true that people become more religious as they get older. Finally, they discuss extensively the connection between religion and politics and how that drove the rise in defections from Christianity, and Burge talks about how the 21st century will see a normalization of extreme polarization between Christian conservatives and secular Americans.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

If you have a sibling with autism, your future child’s risk for an autism diagnosis is increased by a factor of 2 to 3.5×. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk by screening for over 200 genetic variants definitively linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Discuss your situation with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the idea of “lost civilizations,” the possibility that there were complex societies during the Pleistocene Ice Age. This topic recently rose to salience after a dialogue between writer Graham Hancock and archaeologist Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Hancock is a longtime guest on Rogan’s show and he promotes a theory that an advanced “lost civilization” during the Ice Age left remnants of its culture across the world, for example the pyramids of both Egypt and the New World. In the exchange, Dibble, a vigorous online critic of pseudo-archaeology came back with scientific orthodoxy; civilization emerged after the end of the Ice Age, and there is no evidence for anything during the Pleistocene.

Razib explains why evidence from biology makes it clear that Hancock is almost certainly wrong. No massively advanced global civilization during the Ice Age left its imprint across the world. Though the archaeological evidence is strong, the data from DNA is even more unambiguously robust and informative. But then Razib steps back and asks what “civilization” is, and presents the possibility that stillborn cultures might have existed during the Ice Age. Civilizations that left no descendants and barely any archaeological footprint. He also argues that the modern conception of civilization starting in Sumer and Egypt 5,000 years ago is simplistic, and American ideas about an arrow of history ascending onward and upward tend to be misleading as a guide to the past. Though the orthodox view is mostly right, there are always gaps in our knowledge and surprises around the corner. Graham Hancock’s enthusiasm for what we can know is commendable, his conclusions long ago outpaced his evidence. In the future, understanding the past will be done with even more powerful tools, but we must proceed with humility upon the foundations of all we know while acknowledging what we don’t.

Related: Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought and Paradise Lost.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

10% of pediatric cancer is linked to a single-gene variation. These variants can be detected in embryos before pregnancy begins. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk for cancer by screening for 90+ genetic variants linked to pediatric cancer. Discuss embryo screening and IVF with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Akshar Patel of The Emissary about his recent sojourn in India. Patel began The Emissary because he felt there were many gaps in the media representation of India. Razib asks whether The New York Times’ claim that Modi is a strongman is correct, and whether India is an illiberal democracy. Patel notes that despite a Westernized super-elite embedded in global Left politics, India is fundamentally a conservative society where communal identity and background reign supreme. He observes that this collectivism is recognized in laws and social norms, though urbanized contexts are breaking down traditional barriers.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of modern India is its macroeconomic dynamism; today India is the world’s fifth largest economy, surpassing the United Kingdom. Patel saw widespread optimism about the nation’s economy and citizens’ own futures, bolstering Modi’s broad popularity. Nevertheless, media claims that the Muslim minority is being marginalized does seem to be broadly correct as Indian reaffirms its Hindu identity. Equally as important as religion in India is caste. Though Patel believes that dating apps and day to day interaction are breaking down caste, he observed on the ground the institution’s day to day utility as a way to obtain jobs or foster social welfare. Overall he sees a future India that is economically and geopolitically relevant, but also very distinctive and civilizationally assertive.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.razibkhan.com

10% of pediatric cancer is linked to a single-gene variation. These variants can be detected in embryos before pregnancy begins. Orchid’s whole genome embryo reports can help mitigate your child’s risk for cancer by screening for 90+ genetic variants linked to pediatric cancer. Discuss embryo screening and IVF with a genetics expert.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jeremy Carl, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, where he focuses on immigration, multiculturalism, and nationalism in America. Previously, Carl was a Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute where he analyzed and wrote about energy policy. He has BA with distinction from Yale University and an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Today Carl talks about his new book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. Though it is in vogue to talk about white supremacy and systemic privilege today, it is notable that in 2024, only 32% of Harvard’s student body is white. Largely due to the opioid crisis there has been a decline in life expectancy among whites, disproportionately shouldered by those without college degrees. In The Unprotected Class Carl narrates how in the 60 years since the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960's, the movement has mutated into a war on the soon-to-be-erstwhile white majority, with anti-white sentiment openly and proudly expressed by cultural elites. He argues that this descent into identitarianism undermines the fabric of American society, and divides our society rather than uniting us. Razib and Carl discuss how racialized insults and attacks on whites, seen by many as innocuous due to the power and privilege of the white majority, actually degrade the public discourse and deplete the common cultural capital of Americans to coexist despite their diversity. They also discuss anti-white racism’s erasure of class differences among white Americans, and the social and economic pathologies afflicting regions like Appalachia. Ultimately, The Unprotected Class shows how denigrating and attacking one group of Americans leaves us all with less dignity and rights.