Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Jonathan Anomaly, author of Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement. Anomaly is currently the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at La Universidad de las Americas, Ecuador. He has been a lecturer at Duke and the University of Pennsylvania and holds a philosophy Ph.D. from Tulane University.  Anomaly has been thinking and publishing on the implications of the intersection between ethics and biology for the last fifteen years, from the moral case for synthetic meat to the necessity for a global regulatory regime for antibiotics. Anomaly maintains that modern technology can drive humans to greater excellence and virtuosity, his views explicitly influenced by ancient Greek aesthetics and modern utilitarianism. In Creating Future People he applies these values to the context of 21st-century biotechnologyś possibilities, making the case that we now have the tools to improve and perfect ourselves as a species. Creating Future People is a controversial book, and Anomaly is swimming against current cultural trends in the West that are highly skeptical of biotechnology, whether it be vaccines or genetically modified organisms. But, if our technological capabilities are any indication, the debate is only in its infancy and Creating Future People lays down essential markers and sets some helpful terms for the debate.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Bryan Caplan about Caplan’s new book, Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice. Despite what the narrow purview  the title might suggest, Don't Be a Feminist is a wide-ranging book that contains essays on IQ, immigration and identity politics, among other things (in addition, yes, to women’s rights). Caplan is the editor and chief writer for Bet On It, the blog hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas, and a professor of economics at George Mason. His previous books were The Myth of the Rational Voter,  Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders, Labor Econ Versus the World, and How Evil Are Politicians? Razib and Caplan also discuss his colleague Garrett Jones’ new book The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, the case for open borders, the cultural tenor of academia and its future prospects 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 reviews the year in paleoanthropology and previews the year to come with John Hawks. First, they tackle the latest discoveries regarding Homo naledi, in particular, the finding that they likely used fires deep in the caves where they buried their dead. Hawks reflects on the implications of Homo naledi, a very small-brained hominin that mastered several elements of human culture, for our understanding of hominin evolution and the expected trajectory of the evolution of these groups of species. Razib and Hawks also discuss Denisovans and the profusion of human lineages discovered in Southeast Asia over the last few years. Finally, the discussion moves to the possibilities of ancient DNA and even ancient protein analysis. Hawks reports that soon there will be publications that push protein analysis back to the Miocene, more than 5 million years ago, with speculation about future discoveries that could go as far back as 20 million years.

What is a democracy? Is American democracy in danger? And should we care about the possibilities for democracy in the Middle East? On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at Brookings, an assistant professor at Fuller Seminary, a contributor to The Atlantic, co-host of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast and website, and now the author of his own Substack and a recent book, The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. Before getting into the meat of the discussion, Hamid and Razib reflect on the meaning and importance of the Christmas season, the very positive opinion of Jesus held by Muslims, and Hamid’s views about the secularization of the United States over his lifetime. They then dig into the view from political science over the last decade about the decline of faith in American democracy and the crisis of confidence in the institution in both the Middle East and the US. Hamid reflects on his experience observing the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of democracy in Egypt and how it might offer lessons on a polarized America. Next, they talk about The Problem of Democracy and how liberalism and democracy are assumed to be necessary twins in the modern Western political system but are indeed not in the Middle East and may not be in America’s future. Finally, Hamid discusses what it is like to be an anti-woke brown American liberal and what it’s like to so often be on the receiving end of censure and opprobrium from his own political camp. He muses on the future of liberalism and how things look from the viewpoint of a Muslim American in an age when the War on Terror is truly in the rearview mirror.

As 2022 draws to a close, the chat AI based on GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) has been taking the internet by storm, with millions of users beginning to ask it questions. Is humanity on the way to birthing a true artificial general intelligence (AGI)? I asked GPT-3 that particular question, and this was the answer: It is difficult to say for certain whether or not humanity is on the way to creating a true artificial general intelligence, as there is no clear consensus on what exactly a true AGI would be or what it would be capable of. However, it is clear that significant progress has been made in the field of artificial intelligence, and many experts believe that it is only a matter of time before we see AGI-level capabilities in machines. That being said, it is also important to note that the development of AGI is a highly complex and uncertain field, and it is impossible to predict exactly when, or even if, it will be achieved. Whether GPT-3 is truly intelligent, it’s clearly just the beginning. At least according to this week’s returning guest on Unsupervised Learning, Nikolai Yakovenko of Deep NFT Value, a machine-learning engineer who just last month took time to discuss what was going on at his old employer, Twitter. Yakovenko is not entirely surprised by GPT-3’s abilities, though he admits progress is faster than expected. He tells Razib that there are more advanced versions of GPT-3, and Americans must brace themselves for a new technological revolution. He believes Westerners, in particular, due to their religious and metaphysical frame are unprepared for the changes that AI may produce in our society. Yakovenko rejects the most dystopian and negative predictions of hostile AI and singularity and argues that the Japanese are a model of a culture that is more sanguine about the emergence of human-like machine intelligence. Razib and Yakovenko also discuss the utility of AI-generated art and how it might replace or complement human artists.

On this very special episode of Unsupervised Learning I talk to three guests, Josh Lipson, Aric Lomes and Leo Cooper, about their contribution to a new paper, Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century. Given that a month earlier, Genomes from a medieval mass burial show Ashkenazi-associated hereditary diseases pre-date the 12th century was also published, 2022 has seen a massive growth in our ancient-DNA-informed understanding of the origins of the Ashkenazim. Last year Lipson and I talked about the genetics of the Jews in what would prove the waning days of the pre-ancient-DNA era for this population. This was in the wake of my post, Ashkenazi Jewish genetics: a match made in the Mediterranean. The broad outlines of earlier work have not been overturned with these papers, but Lipson, Lomes and Cooper shed light on numerous details relating to the relationship of the early Ashkenazim and the Sephardim of Spain, the division of the early Jews of Germany into two genetic clusters, and the possible relationship of the Ashkenazim to groups further to the east, including the Khazars. The discussion also touches on the nature of the bottleneck that the Ashkenazim weathered, their possible origins among southern Italians, and the deep roots of many of the recessive diseases that they carry today.

Most Americans are vaguely aware of a few rulers of ancient Achaemenid Persia: Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, whether from the Bible, from historically grounded films like 300, or in the rare case, from reading Herodotus’ The Histories. More recently, Iran has loomed large due to its geopolitical significance, and for Americans of a certain age, the Shah Reza Pahlavi and his successor Ayatollah Khomeini loom large as figures who for a time monopolized television screens and front pages of news magazines. But these are drops in a bucket; the history of Persia or Iran, the two being synonymous, spans nearly 3,000 years. The Farsi language in modern Iran is directly descended from Old Persian, the language of Cyrus the Great, the Persian Empire’s founder. Directly in the middle of Persia’s millennia of history are the Sassanids, who ruled Iran for four centuries after the fall of the Parthians and made appearances in Roman histories, playing an instrumental role in the deaths of Emperors Valerian and Julian. Most Westerners will know the Sassanids only as the name of the last pre-Islamic dynasty of Iran, the last guardians of Zoroastrian Iran, fated to be washed away by history. But according to Michael Bonner’s The Last Empire of Iran, they served as a critical prelude to the emergence of Islamic and modern Iran.  In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib discusses with Bonner the role of religion and ethnicity in Sassanid Iran, how they relate to what came after during the Islamic period, and how they shape Iran’s civilization today. Bonner also covers the role of the Sassanids in the “world war” of Late Antiquity between Rome and Persia, as the last great Shah of the Sassanids almost completed the conquest left unfinished by the Achaemenids. Though the Sassanids and their civilization were overthrown by Islam, Razib and Bonner entertain the idea that Islam, as it developed after the Abbassid Caliphate in the 9th century AD, cannot be understood without the key of Zoroastrian Persian influence.

https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack, https://razib.substack.com, and original video content. What does it mean to be Eurocentric? What does it mean to be a white supremacist? What does the term ”the West” mean, and how is it different from simply the geographical designation Europe? On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib discusses the cultural and genetic origins of Europeans, how they have been viewed over the last few thousand years and how they have viewed themselves. Starting around 3000 BC, when the first Yamnaya men were expanding out of the Pontic steppe and assimilating the Neolithic Globular Amphora culture of eastern Poland, and going down to the 20th century when the nations of the world were cleaved between those aligned with the Soviet Union versus those aligned with the USA, Razib addresses when conceptions of European, Western and white self-identity could have emerged, and indeed did emerge. Were the Classical Greeks white supremacists? Did the Spaniards impose European hegemony on the New World? And when did the West outpace the rest?

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the new book, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, with author Garett Jones. Jones is a professor of economics at George Mason University, and The Culture Transplant is the third book in what he likes of think of as his “Singapore trilogy,” beginning with Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, and then moving to 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less. Jones explains how cultural assimilation and acculturation is actually not nearly as powerful as we might think and that ancestral folkways and norms persist for centuries, transforming nations like the US and Argentina over time as migration streams alter their demographic makeup. He argues that this is important because some nations are highly productive and innovative, and their cultural frameworks are necessary to foster their economic role in the global system. The Culture Transplant takes a contrarian position, going against the stance of mainstream economics, whereby every individual is an interchangeable “homo economicus.” https://razib.substack.com This is where you will find all the podcasts from Razib Khan's Substack, https://razib.substack.com, and original video content.

How is it that babies across entirely different cultures seemingly elicit one single sort of “baby talk” from adults? To answer this question, Razib talks to Cody Moser, coauthor of a recent paper on the topic, and an evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist at UC Merced. Moser first discusses what cultural evolution today means in the context of American anthropology, and how it relates to the new field of evolutionary psychology. He observes that some of the conceptual ideas that underpin modern cultural evolution actually have roots in naturalistic frameworks dating back decades, though out of fashion in American cultural anthropology since just after World War II. Razib and Moser compare and contrast the descriptive and interpretive methods of most cultural anthropology, and the formalistic evolutionary paradigm of cultural evolution. Then Moser gets to the meat of the paper on which he was the second author. He points out that humans have noted the similarities across cultures for decades, with evolutionary psychologists concluding this is a human universal. But it takes evolutionary and cognitive frameworks to understand how this phenomenon emerges naturally out of the common biological heritage of our species. Moser outlines the structural conditions that result in the universality of baby talk across cultures, and what benefits this universality might confer upon us as a species.