Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to internet commentator formerly known as default friend who is perhaps better known today as the internet culture writer Katherine Dee. Dee is a regular contributor to Retvrn, The Washington Examiner, The American Mind, Tablet Magazine and UnHerd. She has also recently written a piece for Compact: Why You're Never Leaving Twitter. But first, Razib and Dee discuss how they have known each other for nearly a decade, going back to 2015 on the site formerly known as Twitter, and more substantially as residents of Austin in the late teens. Since 2019 Dee's existence has been a peripatetic one; after leaving Texas and first moving to the Bay Area, she then lived in the Pacific Northwest, before finally settling in Chicago. Working in advertising, and then in big tech, Dee has finally settled on a career as a freelancer, with all the freedom and uncertainty that entails. Razib asks Dee whether there is today, in 2023, any culture that isn't somehow connected to the internet. She agrees about the pervasive nature of digital and social media, and how thickly it is interleaved into the lives of younger Millennials and Zoomers. And yet as a counterpoint to this conception of a revolution that has transmuted "IRL" life online, Razib argues that ‌social media is just an amplification of "bulletin board system" (BBS) culture which existed as early as the 1980's. Dee then reflects on her maturation as an observer of all things internet through Twitter and Discord, and the shadow-impact of more obscure platforms like Tumblr and 4chan on our broader culture, beneath the notice of the wider population of "normies," while Razib reminds her how small Twitter's user base is compared to platforms like Facebook or YouTube (the latter are measured in billions, while Twitter retains some 450 million active users). In her piece, Why You're Never Leaving Twitter, Dee argues that the anemic showing of dozens of Twitter clones and pretenders in the last decade argues that the platform just isn't going to be dethroned from its central role in the media, and thereby wider American culture. From right-wing to left-wing imitators, or Facebook's Threads, every challenger has failed to eat into Twitter's critical position as a nexus in the media ecosystem, a central node in transmitting information throughout diverse subcultures. But Razib plays devil's advocate, musing whether Elon Musk's erratic tenure since assuming ownership of the platform, his change of its brand to X, his petty beefs with publishers like Substack and ex cathedra pronouncements of major feature changes, might actually spell the end of the platform. Though Dee seems skeptical that even Musk could destroy his new property, not seeing any replacement on the horizon, suggests to her that the age of a single central information switchboard for the internet may be ephemeral and one we look back on as a particular and unique moment in history, just as we do the age of three major television networks in the 20th century.

Today Razib talks to Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women's Forum, a Lincoln Fellow with the Claremont Institute and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Stepman also hosts two podcasts, High Noon and Clown Car. She and Razib first discuss the current distress, both economic and cultural, in higher education as several decades of bloat, inflation-beating cost increases and political radicalism run up against their natural limits. Stepman's recent policy report, Taxing Universities, tackles the massive fiscal bill that the American people will face in the next generation as bad loans backed by the federal government finally come due. Razib admits that as a member of "Generation X" he was unaware of the massive change in educational debt since the public sector took over almost all lending after the 2008 financial crisis. A graphic that illustrates the impending crisis comes from The New York Times: The takeaway is that student loans originated from 2009 onward exhibit a pattern where Latinos, blacks, and nearly half of women, owe more now in 2023 than when they began payments after graduation. Stepman discusses the broader reasons for this dynamic, the expansion of higher education, the rise of credentialing in lower-paying "pink collar" jobs that saddle people with debt they can't service and an evidence-free elite consensus that more education results in more value and skills. In contrast to the current orthodoxy, Razib argues that the bachelor's degree is often simply a signaler of intelligence and conscientiousness, and the expansion of this diploma to nearly half the youngest age cohort has diluted its utility. In the second half of the podcast, Razib probes Stepman on how she arrived at a relatively conservative cultural stance despite being a secular native of Palo Alto, California, and a current resident of Manhattan. Stepman's starting point is that males and females are fundamentally different because of our biology, and we must organize human societies around this fact, rather than attempting to ignore this reality while striving for an egalitarian utopia. Stepman calls herself an anti-feminist because she believes that this denial of human nature goes back to the beginning of the movement, with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's The Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792.

https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Dr. Cory J. Clark, a behavioral scientist and executive director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania. Clark got her Ph.D. in social psychology at UC Irvine, but her interests have broadened over her career as is clear in a diverse oeuvre. First, Razib and Clark talk about the culture of self-censorship within science due to politicization and intra-scientific politics. They discuss whether fraud is more damaging to the career of a senior or junior scientist, and the crisis coming for behavioral economics in the wake of the Francesco Gino and Dan Ariely ethics scandals. While Razib offers the prescription of viewpoint diversity, Clark argues that a recommitment to objectivity and truth as the fundamental values of science is needed. They then move on to her major current project on "adversarial collaboration." Whereas in "normal science" two rival research groups may hold to conflicting hypotheses for decades, with outsiders unable to adjudicate, Clark argues that researchers with differing views should come together to converge upon the truth. Her interest in the culture of science leads naturally to a broader concern about human cultural equilibria. In The Evolution of Relentless Badassery, Clark argues that a particular personality type is socially and evolutionarily favored. Razib and Clark discuss whether we live in a time of peace so that disagreeable violent characters are at a low ebb in their stature, and perhaps in the face of cultural chaos the "badass," figures like Michael Corleone in The Godfather films may reemerge to establish order and ruthless justice. The discussion loops back to a consideration of the values that unite scientists, and the cultural and political winds moving through the profession that might threaten to blow it off course as an enterprise, might leave it more a social club than a venerable institution to generate information. Clark is candid that she is not sure she would recommend heterodox students even attempt to join the academy.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Alex Young of UCLA and James Lee of the University of Minnesota about quantitative genetics and its relationship to complex traits and the genomic revolution. Young, trained as a mathematician, and Lee, trained as a psychologist, have both converged upon research programs exploring the role of genetics in generating variation in human behavior and disease. First, the trio reviews quantitative genetics' modern basis in R. A. Fisher's 1918 paper The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance, and how the field emerged from the same intellectual root as population genetics in the first decades of the 20th century. They then discuss phenomena closely associated with quantitative characteristics: polygenicity, heritability and the central limit theorem. Razib also outlines the role of population genetic parameters like mutation, selection and drift in shaping the distribution of any given trait, particularly the characteristic's variation and median values. After a deep dive into major concerns like the difference between heritability in the "broad sense" and "narrow sense," what additive genetic variance is and why it's so important to evolution and applied breeding and contemporary heritability estimates of traits like height and intelligence using twin studies and family-based genomic analyses, the conversation concludes with a discussion of Gregory Clark's new PNAS paper, The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022. What are its implications? Why did it ignite a firestorm on social media? Lee in fact contributed a comment on the paper to PNAS, while Young has tackled its methods and conclusions on social media. In a conversation that stretches on for over two hours, Razib, Lee and Young touch upon many aspects of a discipline that combines the statistical insights of the 20th century with the genomic technologies of the 21st. Lee also expounds on a result from one of his papers that didn't make it into the final publication due to reviewer skepticism: what he calls a "beer-chugging phenotype" reported from the study of twins.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Aporia Magazine's Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist who earned her Ph.D. in David Buss' lab at the University of Texas in Austin. Fleischman discusses the origins of her field, its methodological framework and presuppositions, and why evolutionary psychologists seem obsessed with sex. Razib also brings up the relationship of evolutionary psychology to primatology and the role that behavioral studies of common chimpanzees and bonobos play in understanding what Jared Diamond termed the "third chimpanzee," humans. They then circle back to the importance of the reality of heritable "hard-wired" behaviors in evolutionary psychology, and its relationship to behavior genetics. Fleischman and Razib then move on to eugenics and the controversy that ensued after Fleischman's piece You're probably a eugenicist. They wonder how narrowly to constrain the term; for example, is the ubiquitous termination of fetuses with Down Syndrome eugenic if those individuals brought to term cannot themselves reproduce? Is selection for intelligence and height in your marriage partner eugenical? Razib and Fleischman also talk about the eugenical impact of abortion, including the decline of crime, and why the Left does not talk extensively about this topic. Fleischman discusses eugenics' future with the rise of reproductive technology and a more detailed understanding of complex trait architecture. The possibility of embryo selection's rise brings up concrete concerns and resurrects the specter of bottom-up eugenics, despite the abolishment and banning of top-down eugenics. Fleischman and her co-authors tackle ‌‌embryo selection for complex traits in a recent piece in Aporia.

Nicola Buskirk, Publisher at Elessar Books, talks about putting out-of-print books back into circulation. She discusses why J.R.R. Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' appeals to young readers, the differences between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and the lasting appeal of Tolkien's work. They also touch upon the relationship of the films to the books and the importance of preserving historical texts.

Hannah Frankman, founder of Rebel Educator, discusses the past, present, and future of education. Topics include homeschooling, the impact of the pandemic on education, rethinking traditional education models, and the importance of alternative options in the education system.

Razib Khan talks to Lyman Stone, a demographer, about the history and decline of religion in America. They discuss the rise of religious 'nones' and the decline of social conservatives in the Republican party. They explore the uniqueness of America's founding and the separation of church and state. They also delve into the decline in church attendance, religious behavior, and nominal religious affiliation in the US.

https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib hosts three guests, Sarah Haider of A Special Place in Hell (and her own Substack), Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute (and Wisdom of the Crowds and his own Substack) and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept (and his own Substack), for the second episode of the "Intellectual Brown Web" (here's episode #1). Razib, Haider, Hamid and Hussain discuss the recent clashes between Muslim Americans and the LBTQIA+ movement. Was it inevitable? Was the "War on Terror" simply a two-decade interregnum interrupting the alignment of Muslims with social conservatives? And what is the place of Muslim intellectuals and politicians in the progressive movement going forward? Haider has written about how the Muslim-progressive alliance in American politics will unravel, and in this episode, she defends the contention that it naturally falls out of the theological propositions embedded within Islam. Hamid and Hussain in contrast argue that though the tensions are real, there is a possibility of a pluralistic solution, preserving fidelity to Islamic beliefs. All agree that the main issue is the challenge that progressive reworking of gender identity poses to traditional norms and traditional religion and that the Muslim immigrants in places like Hamtramck speak for many Americans in their confusion and sublimated hostility to the changes that they see in American society around them. Related: 'A sense of betrayal': liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags, American Muslims are increasingly ready to find common ground with conservatives against the radical Left and CAIR demands apology from Montgomery County councilwoman over 'offensive' remarks.

In the fall of 2022 Liz Truss was the UK's Prime Minister for 44 days. Her tenure was cut short by turmoil in the financial markets, as her attempts to roll out policies similar to the US's 1980's program of "Reaganomics" that combined lower taxes and higher deficits triggered panic and an intervention from the Bank of England. In retrospect, the problem was that the British elite periodically forgets that it's the not US, it's not the largest economy in the world and the pound sterling is not the world's reserve currency. The US, unlike any other nation, can print money to escape its fiscal straijackets. History hangs over Britain, and the shadows of the past always impinge upon the present. The UK still sees itself as an imperial nation, but today India has a larger economy than its one-time colonizer. The idea of the British Empire persisted deep into the 20th century, but the US was already the larger economy by the end of the 19th century. With World War I, the UK became a debtor to the US, and the power dynamic of the "special relationship" inverted as the mother country became the junior partner. Today Razib talks to Samuel Mcilhagga about Britain's contemporary status as a post-imperial nation-state caught in economic stagnancy. They discuss his piece in Palladium, Britain Is Dead, which is a reflection of the structural and human realities of a fallen empire. Razib and Mcilhagga address the recent divergence between the UK and US from a point of rough parity in 2008, at the peak influence of high finance in developed economies, which placed the City of London in an advantageous position. Economic stagnation and high inflation have afflicted the UK since the great recession, and Britain has lagged niy only the US but fallen behind its continental peers, France and Germany. Mcilhagga attributed some of this to the British elite's inability to move beyond their role as imperial administrators and rentiers; he contrasts the productive and economically innovative American oligarchs to the complacent British upper class. Razib wonders about the strangeness of the difference between the two societies given their shared history, language and culture. Mcilhagga paints a picture of a small and prosperous professional class that benefited from globalization, and a broader populace that has been slowly ground into immiseration over the last two generations. https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack and original video content.