Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Over the past generation, China has gone from a developing nation of bicycles and Volkswagens to a global economic juggernaut that is Mercedes-Benz’s single biggest market. You can track this transformation in charts or follow it in dispatches from foreign correspondents, but this week’s guest on the podcast has seen it up close and personal. Colin is a black American who works in the corporate technology sector and has lived in and visited China on and off since the late 1990’s. He is also a genetic genealogy enthusiast, so he and Razib have known each other for over ten years as the field of DNA-informed family and ancestral personal history has grown to become ubiquitous.  First, Colin talks about the changes he’s seen first hand, in particular in Shanghai. What today is a gleaming international capital of finance and commerce, just a generation ago it was a parochial burg, where many residents still spoke the local dialect in public and walked the flooded streets in their pajamas. Colin contrasts the sheer rapidity of change in and around Shanghai, with his experiences traveling to Europe: while he does not have to update his “mental map” of Paris or London when years pass between visits, Chinese cities are constantly shifting, transmuting and growing. He notes that while the Chinese of a generation ago were curious and diffident, today they tend to be self-assured and confident about their place in the world. Then they discuss the peculiarity of Colin’s position of being both a Westerner and black, and how reactions to this juxtaposition have changed over the last generation. Whereas in the 1990’s, being Western and white were seen as proxies for each other, and his black racial identity presented his interlocutors with a conundrum, today’s Chinese are much more aware and sophisticated about the world beyond their borders. Colin also addresses the idea that the Chinese are prejudiced against darker-skinned people. Though this is true, he attributes this as much to their ideas of class as to anything biological. Colin points out that the Chinese perceive majority-white Western nations to be developed and orderly, while South Asia and Africa are perceived to be undeveloped and chaotic. The national associations transfer over to race and easily map onto traditional Chinese notions, where uneducated rural peasants who spend their days laboring outside are darker-skinned, as opposed to fair-skinned scholars.  For a nominally “Communist” nation, Colin argues that China is riven by massive visible class divisions. Until the late crackdown by Xi Jinping, the Chinese nouveaux riches flaunted their wealth in a gaudy manner that would take most Westerners by surprise. While some of the wealthy living in Western nations are relatively understated in their consumption, the Chinese rich display their material riches so as to signal their success and status. Finally, Razib and Colin discuss the place of religion in the People’s Republic of China today. This seems a case where everything new is old, as the traditional Chinese suspicion of “foreign religions,” in this case, Islam and Christianity, is contrasted with the relative indulgence shown to native religious practices, including Buddhism and Daoism. While the Western press is often fixated on the vocal and well-connected Christian minority, Colin’s experience is that the average Chinese is very weakly engaged with organized religion, if at all, as the nation’s history would lead you to expect.

Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Caleb Watney is the co-president of The Institute for Progress (along with Alec Stapp), which exists to foster innovation and technological advancement through public policy levers. Founded in January of 2021, The Institute for Progress declares itself a “think tank for accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress.”  Razib’s first major question is why such a think tank even needs to exist. Isn’t there a huge complex of research universities in the US? Caleb outlines many problems with academic science in the US, with 40-45% of primary investigators’ (lab heads’) time being spent on writing grant applications to fund their labs. The preferences of the funding institutions and the size of the grants, determine the course and scope of research. With this in mind, rather than targeting interesting questions, many academics target questions that are fundable.  As for why he needed to found a new think tank as opposed to expanding out of an established one like Niskanen or Brookings, Caleb argues that fresh institutions are often necessary for innovation, and it was important to start something without legacy baggage so they could talk to both Republicans and Democrats. The Institute for Progress is an attempt by public policy entrepreneurs like Caleb to break out of Washington D.C.’s paralyzed and polarized two-party dynamic. The Institute for Progress also has a broad scope, targeting topics as diverse as security, space, and life science. Razib and Caleb talk about the miracle of mRNA vaccines in tackling COVID-19 (a sharp contrast with the health establishment’s numerous failures in confronting the pandemic), and the incredible possibilities for future vaccine development, from rapid targeted development to general-purpose vaccines. They also tackle how and why SpaceX happened, and what it means for spaceflight in the 21st century and beyond. Then they address the differences between the effective altruism movement and the progress studies movement, and the relationship between them. Whatever differences exist, both movements channel the spirit of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. They conclude the conversation talking about China, its promise and peril, and US immigration policy. Caleb argues that the challenge of China is fundamentally different from that of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet Union had roughly the US’s population, China is a far larger nation-state in terms of raw numbers, so it presents a much more formidable economic opponent. The US’s advantage over the Soviet Union was its capitalist framework, but it does not have this edge over a nominally Communist China. One of the ways Caleb argues we can forestall being superseded by China is to allow for more immigration, specifically high-skill immigration. A major project of The Institute for Progress is to help fix our broken immigration system, and so rebuild America’s stock of human capital in the coming rivalry with China.

Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Chad Orzel is a physicist and science writer who has been blogging for twenty years. He’s the author of four books, Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog and Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist. On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Chad about his newest book, A Brief History of Timekeeping, a mix of cultural and engineering history, archeology and physics. It is a wide-ranging book, jumping all the way from the calendrical functions of Neolithic megaliths to the future of quantum clocks. Since much of the work covers history and archeology, Razib and Chad discuss the cultural and historical context of Neolithic Europe, and in particular historical genetic findings about the builders of Newgrange, one of the “astronomical calendars” featured in A Brief History of Timekeeping. Chad also outlines the cultural, historical, and engineering aspects of astronomical calendars, and the quirks in the Maya system that made 2012 so important. Then Razib asks about water clocks and other physical-based instruments that measure time, items that often feature in period pieces, but have long been superseded by modern technologies.  One of the aspects of A Brief History of Timekeeping that makes it different from Chad’s earlier works in physics is that there are so many concrete everyday facts of life he explores with surprising historical origins. For example, he discusses how Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) became a de facto standard (and no, it does not have to do with Britain’s imperial preeminence over a century ago), as well as the cultural changes wrought by standardized time in the late 19th century, as our work and life clocks started to come into sync across time zones. Going back to physics, the conversation eventually addresses how Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity changed our perception of fixed and invariant time. Finally, Chad and Razib talk about futuristic methods of time measurement, like nuclear and quantum clocks. Though the human fixation with time has deep roots, it is clear its importance in technology means that we will keep improving.

Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Have you ever wondered how academic publishing works? If you’re not in academia, probably not, but you might be surprised by how much intrigue and politics it entails. If you are an academic, you probably don’t want to think about it any more than you have to because it’s a mess. Nearly a decade ago, Razib co-authored a paper, Dragging scientific publishing into the 21st century, that sketched out a map of a possible future. That future isn’t here yet, but things are changing with the emergence of preprint culture. In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Dr. William Gunn, Head of Communications at Quora. Before Quora, William worked in communications at the massive publishing house Elsevier, which purchased Mendeley, a reference management startup where he had a senior position. Despite his current roles, William’s original training was at Tulane in molecular biology. William and Razib talk about how he navigated the career path that took him from academic science to tech and publishing (or, more precisely, how he stumbled onto a career transition). They also address the contingent role of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, a storm that scattered the laboratory where he was conducting his research. Then they discuss the current state of academic publishing and its path forward. Though many academics have ideas about how platforms can drive change, William points out that these endeavors consistently flail and fade due to the natural conservatism of science and scientists. He argues that though scientists often demonize Elsevier and the publishing houses, the role of editors in shaping peer review is often underappreciated. William addresses the future of online information exchange more generally, focusing on Quora. They then discuss the peculiarity that for Indians, Quora has become a social media platform, while Americans continue to use it as a Q & A clearinghouse. Willam recalls his involvement in metascience, open science, and the reproducibility crisis during his time at Elsevier. He argues that institutional resistance to improving the methods within science is due to fear that admitting room for improvement feeds skepticism of science. Transcript Finally, they close by reviewing how COVID-19 has illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of the American information ecosystem, in particular the positive and negative role of preprints.

Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Rav Arora came to public prominence in 2020 with a column for The New York Post provocatively titled “The Fallacy of White Privilege.” He suffered personal and professional blowback, but today the 20-year-old Canadian undergraduate has a semi-regular column in The New York Post, and is interviewed by the likes of Glenn Loury. Arora’s fearlessness in expressing his opinions on a wide range of topics, in particular politically controversial ones, combined with a dogged work ethic has earned him a wide platform, publishing in The New York Post, The Global and Mail and Quillette. He’s also already had guests on his podcast as prominent as Sam Harris. Not too shabby for someone who hasn’t even graduated university. But on this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Arora discusses a new passion, the intersection of psychedelics, therapy and mysticism. When he’s not writing about social and political topics, he is now exploring “science of mystical experience and psychedelics” on his new Substack, The Noble Truths with Rav Arora. Razib first lays his cards on the table and admits that he has no firsthand knowledge of psychedelics and no personal interest or understanding of mysticism. And yet, he acknowledges that discussion of drugs like psilocybin is pervasive across society. Rav disabuses Razib of the idea that psilocybin and other psychedelics are dangerous, a case where Generation-Z has to enlighten a member of Generation-X who was inculcated with the “Just Say No To Drugs” message of the 1980’s. For Rav, psychedelics are a means to an end, a tool like any other. But much of the discussion goes deeper into issues of metaphysics. What is spirituality, and what does Rav say to people who express no interest in mysticism or religion? Rav contends that the utility of psychedelics for spirituality doesn’t have anything to do with religion, making the point that the atheist Sam Harris has long been intrigued by the potential of psychedelics in bringing about heightened mental awareness. Though Razib remains skeptical, it’s clear that this decade will see more discussion of this topic, and Rav also notes the extensive research in psychotherapy showing that psychedelics are proving effective in treating mental illness. The substack is The Noble Truths with Rav Arora, where he posts essays on the science of mystical experience and psychedelics. Paid subscribers can also get Rav’s post-psychedelic trip audio recordings and FaceTime podcasts with ‘IDW’ figures.

Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share Today’s podcast guest, erstwhile scientist and bond-trader Chris Arnade is a cultural commentator, photographer and novelist. Arnade’s father was a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an academic and settled his family in a conservative, working-class Gulf-Coast Florida town. This gives Arnade a personal understanding of America outside of the cosmopolitan coastal cities. He notes that, whereas he left Florida and completed a physics Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, the vast majority of his high school classmates did not go to college. Eventually, he exited academia for a 20-year stint on Wall Street, before ultimately settling into a life of photography and writing.  He talks about how he was always out of place in the world of high finance due to his socialist politics, continuing a lifelong pattern of being an outsider. In 2013, Andrade began to explore the poor and working-class neighborhoods of New York City on a lark, photographing sex workers and drug addicts. Arnade’s subjects eventually expanded to include the poor and working-class more generally across the US. In particular, he began a project where he photographed people at McDonald’s all across the country, a portrait of what he termed “Back Row America” (as opposed to upper-middle-class “Front Row America”). Arnade and I talk about his peculiar position of being the target of progressive animus due to his prediction in 2016 that Donald Trump could actually win the election, based on his interaction with working-class Americans. Despite his socialist bona fides, he believes that his critics will never forgive him for being right about Trump’s popularity among the working class.  Today Arnade has a new project, walking across cities, both photographing what he sees, and writing up his impressions, back on his Substack. 

This week on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, R. Taylor Raborn, a genomicist and associate bioinformatics principal investigator at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) joins Razib to discuss his current and former research interests, touching on the unpredictable path a career in science can take.  Taylor was drawn to biology at a young age due to his naturalist bent. Eventually, as a graduate student, he became particularly interested in the topics of gene-promoter evolution and cis-regulatory differences in populations among eukaryotes. These are keys to gene regulation, the process that massages the raw read-out of DNA sequence so that it can be tapped to produce the wide array of proteins and structures that contribute to an organism’s phenotypic variation.  The conversation also veers into evolutionary topics, considering why species across millions of years and thousands of taxa all utilize meiosis, despite the two-fold cost of maintaining dimorphism between sexes. After some technical deep-dive into the particularities of the subject, Razib and Taylor are left reflecting on the staggering amount of data geneticists have in 2021. Finally, they reflect on the past two years of COVID-19, and the role it has played in Taylor's new position at the NBACC. After years as an evolutionary geneticist in academia pondering basic science questions, he is now planning for and responding to real-world biological threats to the United States.  Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share

Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share The day after Christmas 2021, the great entomologist and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson died at the age of 92. Carl Zimmer in The New York Times wrote an obituary that highlighted his seminal early contributions to science, as well as his role as a public intellectual after the publication of 1975’s Sociobiology. Wilson also wrote an autobiography, Naturalist, telling the story of his life in science from his own perspective. In the days after his passing, I wanted to touch base with those who knew him, collaborated with him, and even had disputes with him. The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson (no genetic relation) has talked in his books about how he was influenced by the elder Wilson early in his career, and also how they eventually became colleagues and allies in scientific debates. Recently he published The Six Legacies of Edward O. Wilson as a reflection on E. O. Wilson’s career and influence. These six were his contributions to evolutionary biology, biodiversity, human sociobiology, the unification of knowledge, his encouraging stance toward young scientists and other learners, and finally, the frontier of ecosystems studies (his very last project). David Sloan Wilson I’ve talked to David before about his work on multi-level selection as well as his ambition toward utilizing evolutionary biological frameworks in the context of social science and policy, so I reached out to discuss the piece he wrote about E. O. Wilson’s life. Knowing that the elder Wilson had encouraged David's interest in group selection as a graduate student, I expected to focus on the late scientist’s great contributions. But in fact, we addressed the reality that the elder Wilson often had greater aspirations than concrete paths of execution. No one can deny E. O. Wilson’s original contributions to ecology and his mastery of entomology, but David Sloan Wilson points out that some of his recent books sketch out grand plans, but do not deliver any roadmap on how to achieve those ends. Rather than a hagiography, the conversation emphasizes that we shouldn’t make icons out of scientists, that science is a collective enterprise, and that too often it is depicted as the products of singular “Great Men.” Nevertheless, over the course of the discussion, David Sloan Wilson and I do discuss the late Wilson’s positive and important contributions to entomology and mentorship, as well as his last forays into scientific debates when he became involved in a controversy around the utility of W. D. Hamilton’s inclusive fitness framework in 2010, and their collaboration in the 2000’s on multi-level selection theory. Charles C. Mann One of the things about E. O. Wilson’s life that many have observed was his great range. In addition to his contributions to evolutionary biology, over the last few decades of his life, Wilson became a promoter of conservation and biodiversity (a term he helped popularize in the late 1980’s). But his activism was not without controversy. In the last third of the podcast, I talk to the science writer Charles C. Mann about his run-ins with Wilson in relation to environmentalism, where the scientist’s love of nature seems to have driven him beyond what conservation biology may have entailed. Mann also recounts Wilson’s dismissals of his pointed questions in relation to predictions made by his scientific theories about island biodiversity, reiterating that even the greatest of scientists are not necessarily dispassionate when it comes to their own scholarship.  Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share

Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Eric Kaufmann, political scientist and demographer, and the author of The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. During the course of their conversation, Razib and Eric focus on the thesis at the center of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, the prediction that due to the higher reproductive rates of religious groups compared to the secular population, the future is going to be more religious than the present. Eric’s thesis is that aspects of religious belief, for example, the divine commandment in the Hebrew Bible to be “fruitful and multiply,” result in differential fertility on the individual level. On the group level, he notes that poorer societies are more religious, and these societies also are driving migration and demographic change in secular developed countries (for example, London is more church-going than the rest of England, due to large immigrant congregations). Before digging into the possibilities for future demographics, Razib gets Eric’s opinions and views on the secularization evident across much of the world over the last few centuries. How does this align with the idea that the future will be religious, especially when worries about differential fertility have been mooted as far back as early 19th-century France? At the time, secular French intellectuals worried about the immigration and reproductive rates of highly religious Catholics from Poland and elsewhere. And yet today France is even more secular than it was 200 years ago. Much of the subsequent discussion revolves around the idea that social and cultural change is impacted by alternative forces acting in balance. Transcript Eric emphasizes that the core of his argument does not rely upon the idea of large prominent religious groups expanding through mass conversion. Rather, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? argues that fertility differences in the liberal secular societies are going to be impacted in the long-term by small strict endogamous groups, like ultra-Orthodox Jews in England and Israel, or Laestadian Lutherans in Finland. Eric makes the case that these fundamentalist groups benefit from the spread of secular liberalism, as they are more inoculated from the anti-natal currents in the broader populace, driving large differential fertility differences. Finally, they also touch on what is driving secularism in America, the demographic problems facing Mormons in America, and how secularism might play out differently in South and East Asian societies dominated by non-Abrahamic religions.  Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share

Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib catches up with Leighton Woodhouse, a documentarian and journalist (with a Substack!), to discuss the rise of political polarization and the disintegration of traditional parties and coalitions on both the left and the right. Leighton, whose activism began in 1999 at the WTO protests in Seattle, reflects on the financial, geopolitical and social shocks of the last twenty years, how they’ve transformed the movements he came up in, and the new elitist vs. populist dichotomy he sees developing around him. Originally a labor organizer and Marxist, he argues that the decline in rigorous debate in favor of moralistic platitudes and ideological conformity is both a symptom and cause of America’s current listless cultural malaise. As someone with an academic background, Leighton also bemoans universities now sacrificing difficult intellectual discourse on the altar of easy performativity.   The conversation confronts the reality that in 2021 heterodox thinkers who refuse to perform are often pilloried. They observe how Glenn Greenwald, once lionized by the left for his courageous exposés and uncompromising defenses of civil liberties, is now demonized as a right-wing shill. Liberals even accuse Greenwald of undermining the security state, as if that’s a bad thing. Equally detrimental from Leighton’s viewpoint is the reduction of issues that should be nonpolitical, like humane treatment of animals, into political football games where there’s only one winner.  Despite starting from very different political positions Razib and Leighton find common ground in critiquing a cultural moment in which appearance and outrage have taken center stage, and those claiming the mantle of leadership make only token changes while making sure to keep a grip on their power and privilege. Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share