Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Jonathan P. Beauchamp, an economics professor at George Mason University and leading genoeconomics researcher, explores how genetics intersects with education, risk tolerance, patience, income, and inequality. They trace the field’s shift from single-gene claims to massive genomic studies, examine polygenic prediction and sibling comparisons, and consider insurance-market upheaval, kinship institutions, and the professional risks of controversial research.

Philippe Lemoine, a Cornell philosophy PhD candidate and data-driven researcher, examines France’s school riots, demographic change, and political paralysis. He explores teenage behavior, social-media contagion, immigration, intermarriage, and far-left activism. The conversation turns to Marine Le Pen’s electoral prospects, France’s strained economy, aging population, pensions, and whether inflation may replace politically explosive austerity.

Ramez Naam, an author and futurist focused on clean energy, AI, and human enhancement, returns for a wide-ranging conversation. They explore solar’s dramatic cost collapse, batteries, EVs, China’s manufacturing edge, and the future of oil economies. The discussion then turns to AI risk, market competition, concentrated power, recursive self-improvement, and the limits of real-world data.

Jerry Z. Muller, historian and professor emeritus specializing in European intellectual history, capitalism, and conservatism, joins a wide-ranging discussion of academia’s crisis of legitimacy. They explore organized skepticism, ideological conformity, university reform, vocational education, demographics, and capitalism’s resilience. The conversation also turns to AI, intellectual atrophy, human purpose, and the future of liberal education.

Theo Jaffee, an AI writer and co-host of Monitoring the Situation, explores the approaching singularity and the forces shaping it. They discuss his 10% estimate of civilization collapsing within a decade, AI 2027 forecasts, capability bottlenecks, alignment failures, political backlash, and the risk of stagnation. They also tackle AI consciousness, moral status, and whether superintelligence will make the future impossible to predict.

Scott Greer, a conservative writer and author of Whitepill, traces the online Right from Ron Paul and paleoconservatism to the alt-right, MAGA, and nationalism. He and Razib Khan examine how Trump reshaped conservatism, then turn to Sunbeltism: Southern growth, sprawl, private libertarianism, country music, immigration, assimilation, and looming cultural clashes.

Brian Chau, a technologist, entrepreneur, and cultural critic with a mathematics and software background, leads Effort.News, an AI-assisted investigative journalism startup. He discusses querying millions of financial, legal, and government records, building research “harnesses,” and uncovering hidden funding networks and conflicts. He also previews major Medicaid reporting and explains why human judgment still drives automated investigations.

Kyle Orton, a researcher and writer on Middle Eastern security, terrorism, and history, explores Islam’s shadowy beginnings. They examine a seventh-century account of Jerusalem, the earliest Saracens, Quranic origins, and whether Islam emerged in the Levant rather than Mecca. The conversation also probes Muhammad’s early historical role, Umayyad narratives, and how Abbasid scholars shaped Islamic orthodoxy.

Nikolai Yakovenko, computer scientist, entrepreneur, and former professional poker player, returns to examine the Hugging Face hack and what it reveals about AI agents. He discusses whether AI optimism is justified, the rise of open-weight models, China’s AI ecosystem, and software engineering’s rapid transformation. They also explore AI-native SaaS, data centers, biological discovery, and Yakovenko’s new ventures, HuggingNews and MarketBrief.

Werner Zagrebbi, a statistics and machine-learning researcher linked to Carnegie Mellon, examines Columbia’s revealing admissions data. He explores Goodhart’s law, application inflation, résumé-driven childhoods, and the SAT’s transformation into positional competition. The conversation also covers affirmative action, SAT-only admissions, Indian and Jewish representation, South Asian stratification, campus politics, and data journalism.