Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Cody Moser, co-author of a recent paper, Innovation-facilitating networks create inequality. Moser is an evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist at UC Merced, where he is completing his doctorate. A previous guest on the podcast, Moser immediately digs deep into the abstruse and technical model that shows that more is not automatically better when it comes to innovation and discovery. First, he contrasts his results with the Tasmanian cultural evolution model outlined by Joe Henrich nearly 20 years ago. In short, Henrich showed that very small populations tend to lose cultural traits and skills over time. Going through a population bottleneck has a memetic as well as genetic effect. The converse scenario is one where a large population is able to retain and even accumulate more cultural traits and skills.

Moser’s main finding is that some fragmentation of these large populations may in fact foster innovation. On the evolutionary psychological scale, massive groups may tend toward conformity, and disrupting information flows may foster independence of thought. A significant immediate implication is that scholarly thought might benefit from separating into competing schools and departments where distinct groups can develop solutions collectively but retain enough independence to resist being drawn into broader irrational herd behavior. Moser’s results have broader implications for how businesses and corporations should operate, and perhaps quantify why nimble startups often outpace and defeat massive organizations despite the latter having almost infinite resources. Groupthink is powerful. Though small populations will be hit by skill loss with the death of keystone individuals, large populations may ossify, “locking in” regnant ideologies. 

Razib also probes Moser about the rise of agent-based modeling and simulations in social science over the last 20 years, and how they have allowed scholars to circumvent the limitations of relying purely on college students to act as experiment subjects.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Philippe Lemoine, a fellow at CSPI, a philosopher of science trained at Cornell. Lemoine often wades into controversial topics, like whether Chinese COVID data is trustworthy, but recently, he posted on Twitter that “Americans *genuinely* believe they have better food than France. They really believe it.” Not only did this trigger a response by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, but the controversy broke out of social media into the international media.

For the first portion of the conversation, Razib and Lemoine reflect on the circus surrounding his tweet, and what he really means. Though Lemoine defends his tweet, he wants to emphasize that while Americans kept pointing to restaurants, he wanted to emphasize how superior French home cooking was over what Americans produce when they eat in (though he will still defend French restaurants as superior, he admits that if you value variation and diversity of cuisine as goods in and of themselves, then “American food” can be counted as superior). Additionally, Lemoine extolls the virtue of French meal-time customs and norms, with their leisurely pace. He asserts, likely plausibly, that Americans with their on-the-go philosophy of life truly don’t enjoy food, they consume it. Razib pushes Lemoine on whether he would genuinely prefer to live in France despite the nation being 33% poorer than the US on a purchasing-power-parity basis, and he sticks to his guns.

Then they move to a topic that unambiguously throws France into a worse light than the US: immigration policy. Lemoine discusses the reality that French immigrants and immigrant-descended populations are not doing very well. Not integrating, committing crime and both economically and socially marginalized. He also claims that the French government actually does have a good breakdown of ethnic groups even though it cannot officially collect such data. Lemoine asserts that America’s positive experience with immigration has little to do with America, and mostly to do with the source and character of immigrants: unlike Europe, the US imposes a strong selective sieve on education and skills. In contrast, European nations often simply receive immigrants from their former colonies or through the asylum process. Razib and Lemoine also discuss French fertility, which remains higher than that of the US.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses war and diplomacy from 9/11 to 10/7 with Mark Safranski. Safranski is a long-time military affairs and foreign policy commentator who ran the popular weblog Zenpundit beginning in 2003. They survey how the 21st century, from the 9/11 attacks down to the Hamas atrocity against Israelis on 10/7, has seen a transformation of war and diplomacy by other means. From an age of flip phones as a luxury item in the early 2000’s to ubiquitous smartphones in the 2020’s, Safranksi and Razib explore how even still in 2023, Russia and Ukraine are engaging in the most significant set-piece battles since War War II, recapitulating some of the worst aspects of stagnant trench warfare more than a century on.

Safranski then explains the theories promoted by military scholars about how warfare has, and should, change in the technological era, particularly William Lind’s ideas of fourth and fifth-generation warfare. He also argues that drone technology in various forms has been around since World War I, though it was perfected in the past twenty years. Considering America’s technological advancements over the 21st century, Safranski alarmingly explains that the gap between us and our nearest competitor, China, is rapidly closing (with the US losing every government-sponsored war game against China in the years around 2020). He believes that the unipolar moment of the late 1990’s is truly ending, and elaborates on the decay that has overtaken some branches of the US military, in particular, what had been the world’s dominant blue-water navy, which is literally rusting away.

They conclude the conversation by reflecting on the changing role of the blogosphere in influencing military and foreign policy thinkers, and how the decade after 9/11 saw a fertile cross-pollination between online discourse and the brain trusts of the military-industrial complex. Finally, Razib asks Safranski if the neoconservative movement is making a comeback in the wake of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, and what has surprised him about American reactions to 10/7.

Today, Razib interviews Nikolai Yakovenko, already a three-time guest on his podcasts (A Twitter engineer on machine learning and his former company's prospects, GPT-3 and the rise of the thinking machines and AI and Biology). An artificial intelligence researcher based in Miami who has worked at Google and Nvidia, Yakovenko is the founder of DeepNews where he currently works.

Razib and Yakovenko talk about the economic, technological and socio-political implications of the leadership turmoil at OpenAI, the $86 billion dollar company that has supercharged the field of artificial intelligence with their product, ChatGPT. Yakovenko digs deep into the nuts and bolts of how artificial intelligence works today, from transformers to GPUs and different compute needs of training vs. inference. They also discuss the importance of shipping products at a tech company, in contrast to simply publishing papers as the measure of productivity in academic basic science research for example, and how on this count OpenAI succeeded where Google has not. Razib asks Yakovenko if OpenAI might now fall behind Google, whose corporate risk-aversion had squandered it an early lead in technology like transformers. Now that OpenAI is seized by such organizational chaos as to stop development, Google may have time to catch up. Yakovenko also talks about the likelihood of artificial intelligence becoming a corporate oligopoly due to the field's colossal compute needs. Finally, Razib and Yakovenko address the cleavages that arose at OpenAI due to the board’s adherence to effective altruism, while leadership and employees instead charted a shift toward effective accelerationism.

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

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib discusses personality with Brent Roberts, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. Roberts explains what personality actually is as a psychological construct, and how it differs from personality traits, like extraversion. Razib and Roberts also address the Big Five Personality system, and how it relates to the Myers-Briggs framework. Roberts elucidates what the Big Five’s extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and disagreeability actually mean, and how they correspond to Myers-Briggs dichotomies of extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuitive, thinking/feeling and judging/perceiving. Though Myers-Briggs may have some shortcomings, for example collapsing continuities in discrete categories, Roberts maintains that it still retains some utility, and is not as unscientific as many researchers assert.

Razib then asks about personality’s relationship to behavior genetics. What is the heritability of personality’s subcomponents? How do they interrelate? And what might the evolutionary context of personality variation be? Roberts also addresses the idea that personality traits can change over one’s lifetime, and are unstable from test to test. Razib also wonders how different traits, like agreeability, correlate with life outcomes in income and happiness. Finally, they discuss the nature of psychopaths and sociopaths, and how they relate to the Big Five categories.

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

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.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Carl Zha. Zha is a Sichuan-born China-commentator who had a long-term professional sojourn in southern California, before settling in Bali, Indonesia. He hosts the Silk and Steel podcast, which covers China, the Silk Road, and more general history, culture and geopolitics. Zha and Razib have known each other since the 2010’s, and often circle back to discussions of China, its history, politics and culture. The course of their conversations has spanned both the close of the “Chimerica” period of trade and political relations, and the more adversarial status that obtains in both the US and in the People’s Republic of China under Xi Jinping.

But first, Razib and Zha discuss what it’s like to live as an ethnic Han Chinese in Indonesia, albeit one who resides in Hindu-majority Bali, where Zha settled after marrying a local woman and becoming a father. Though Indonesia has an economically and politically powerful Chinese minority, it was also the scene of ethnic riots in the 1990’s and a genocide of Han Chinese in the 1960’s. Until recently, the state did not recognize Confucianism as a religion and discouraged Chinese names and Chinese-language schools. Nevertheless, Zha presents a relatively positive picture of relations on the island of Bali, where the Hindu population seems to have had an easier time integrating Han in a more syncretistic culture than in the Muslim-majority islands.

Then they discuss the pivot in US-China relations in the last half a decade, and the possibilities presented by great power rivalry. Razib and Zha address the thorny reality that though China and the US are now embarking on more explicitly adversarial geopolitics, their economic ties remain strong, with Chinese supply chains essential for American firms like Apple and the US consumer demand essential to propping up China’s vast export sector. Zha also offers a defense of Xi Jinping's rule and the prospects for China as it turns inward from the world, focusing on its domestic market and shoring up its geopolitical positions. The discussion turns to the range of likely outcomes in a world where the 21st century is both the American and Chinese century, and the two great powers remain both economically and geopolitically entangled through trade and numerous bilateral relationships with other nations.

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

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.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks with Curtis Yarvin. The host of the Grey Mirror Substack, Yarvin is the former Mencius Moldbug, a pseudonym under which he wrote extensively on culture, politics and history. Yarvin’s social and political views have been profiled widely, including by Vanity Fair and Vox. The intellectual father of neo-reactionary thought, Yarvin is also trained as a computer scientist, and in 2010, he released the first version of Urbit, a decentralized personal server platform, which has spawned an entire community and conferences like Urbit Assembly.

Yarvin’s interests extend beyond technology and politics. He is deeply invested in high culture and believes in the importance of the humanities to our civilization. Razib and Yarvin spend most of this episode on the role of poetry in our broader culture, why it is relevant, why it matters, and the works that Yarvin most values. Though his educational background is as a technologist, Yarvin believes that poetry is an essential ingredient in what makes us human. The question of humanity, along with some references to the Dune universe, moves the conversation to Yarvin’s reflections on the rise of A.I. via large language models, and whether it poses an existential threat to the human race (he does not believe it does). Yarvin also offers his opinions on Eliezer Yudkowsky’s trajectory of thought; Yudkowsky has in the last decade become the leader of the “A.I. doomer” faction within the futurist community. Like many observers with a strong computational background, Yarvin does not believe A.I. will lead to the abolition of man, though it may open up new possibilities, extending what humans are capable of in terms of innovation and productivity through cybernetics. Like all technology, its ultimate utility will be contingent on our decisions as humans.

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

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.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Michael Muthukrishna about his new book, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. Muthukrishna is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics, an affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD and Data Science Institute, Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Technical Director of The Database of Religious History, a fellow at the Charter Cities Institute and board member of the One Pencil Project. Of Sri Lankan extraction, he trained as an engineer in Australia, but later became interested in anthropological and cultural questions. He studied for his Ph.D. under Joe Henrich in Canada. Like his mentor, Muthukrishna cross-applies toolkits from evolutionary biology and population genetics to questions of variation and change in human cultures.

A Theory of Everyone is an ambitious book with arguably galactic ambitions. The chapters jump from topics like the Cambrian Explosion to the ever-increasing amount of energy needed to get at the fossil fuels that power our civilization. But to start off, Razib asks Muthukrishna about his background as a “third culture kid” and how that might have influenced his anthropological interests. Muthukrishna observed firsthand social and political chaos in Papua New Guinea, while his family’s background in Sri Lanka illustrated for him the salience of ethnic tensions, even when differences might seem minimal to outsiders. Then Razib talks about A Theory of Everyone’s fixation on energy and its role in powering organic life, about our technology-driven civilization and about our potential interplanetary future. Here, Muthukrishina thinks like an engineer, albeit with a broad historical and evolutionary perspective. He and Razib also discuss the problems of “degrowth economics” and why it is a dead-end for a dynamic civilization’s flourishing. Razib also probes Muthukrishna for his views on IQ, its utility as a psychological measure, the variation between individuals and groups, and how those might relate to cultural evolutionary frameworks for considering cognitive aptitudes. The conversation concludes with a consideration of future possibilities as we hurtle past our current energy constraints as a civilization (Muthukrishna is bullish on nuclear), and the role of decentralized political experimentation in improving our social technology.

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

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.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Peter Nimitz about what he memorably calls the crisis of the 23rd century. Most people know of the fall of Rome, and the subsequent European Dark Ages. And because of scholars like Eric Cline, today growing numbers are aware of the civilizational collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, when an incipient global civilization enfolding everything from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to Mesopotamia was torn apart by climate change and invasion. But before Rome, before the Hittites, the third millennium BC saw a climatic shock that seems to have abruptly transformed all Eurasia and Africa. There have long been glimmers of this upheaval; historical texts record chaos in Sumer and Akkad, while in Egypt the Old Kingdom fell. But today the toolkit of archaeology can illuminate far more, and is making clear that a massive climatic shift toppled fragile empires and transformed cultures. Some areas of Eurasia, like China, seem to have experienced massive drought. Others, like Siberia, became even colder, with regions becoming ever more inhospitable to human occupation.

And now Nimitz has reviewed what we know region by region in a magisterial post, Crisis of the 23rd Century: Upheavals from Spain to the Yangtze. Razib presses him about the contrast between the three peninsulas of Southern Europe: the Iberian, Italian and Balkan, and how they each experienced the intrusion of Indo-Europeans during this period (informed by ancient DNA findings). They also discuss the potential divide between Corded Ware and non-Corded Ware Indo-European migrations, and how that shook out across Eurasia. Then they touch upon the civilizational hearths of the Near East, and the wholesale transformation that occurred at this moment culturally and demographically in the Horn of Africa. Finally they sweep eastward, into Siberia, Central Asia and finally China, where new cultures arose and old civilizations collapsed in the centuries after the crisis of the 23rd century.

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.

On the third episode of the Intellectual Brown Web (IBW) Razib, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own Substack), Shadi Hamid of The Washingon Post (plus Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Substack) discuss the effects of the Hamas atrocities and the now impending Israeli invasion of Gaza on both geopolitics and American culture. Haider and Khan address why they are finally discussing the Israeli-Palestine conflict, which both have ‌long avoided. In contrast, Hamid and Hussain who have both long taken a scholarly and journalistic interest in the issue, now find themselves deeply engaged once more. Hamid in particular addresses what he sees as the eliminationist rhetoric coming out of some Israeli and American quarters in reaction to the terrorist actions, while Hussain argues that the coming divide will be between the West and the Global South. All four discuss whether 2023 will be similar to 2001, with a massive pivot in American culture and foreign policy forced by Islamist terrorism (conclusion: probably not, but there will be changes).

They also discuss the massive impact of the conflict in American culture already in just the last few days, in particular its relevance to cancel culture and the strident unapologetic anti-Israel reactions of radical Left activists. Hamid puts the spotlight on billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who is attempting to assemble a list of Harvard students who are members of organizations that backed a pro-Palestinian letter so he can have the option of not hiring them. For the last half a decade Hamid has been a vocal opponent of cancel culture, and he objects to its resurgence in a new form, as well as the turning away from avowed principles by old allies against wokeness. Hussain and Haider respond that most people are truly not principled, and appeal to elevated universal ideals solely it is in their interest.

Khan, Haider, Hamid and Hussain finally discuss the relationship of American Jews with the American Left, and prospects for a coalitional crackup, as well as the future of the relationship between Jews and Muslims in the US. Khan brings up the divergence between academia and the rest of American society, with universities and many faculty members remaining silent in marked contrast to the official response to other recent high-profile political events, while Hollywood and corporations have strongly taken Israel’s side.

They finish the conversation by reasserting the need for open discussion, free speech and an understanding and acceptance of human dignity, no matter one’s ethnicity, religion and nationality. Though these principles are violated on all sides, Haider emphasizes that ‌there still need to be principles, lest every discussion and debate collapse into a power game of all against all.

Related: A Special Place in Hell: Israel at War, Israel, Gaza, and the Double Standard on Cancel Culture, Who is Responsible for the War in Gaza? and Hamas is dragging Israel toward the abyss.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.razibkhan.com/subscribe