On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to the pseudonymous commentator “Peachy Keenan.” A native of Los Angeles with an Ivy League education, Keenan worked in entertainment before detouring into punditry, writing for the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind, appearing on Fox News and penning Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War.

Razib and Keenan discuss her peripatetic and unique journey from a relatively apolitical member of America’s liberal professional managerial class to a conservative Catholic housewife with a large family. Keenan talks about her ability to connect with audiences of all stripes despite her partisan leanings as the product of her cosmopolitan upbringing among coastal elites. Though in her values and practices she lives the life of the “domestic extremist,” she still retains an aesthetic appreciation of the broader culture in which she grew up. Domestic Extremist is to a great extent a roadmap from where she was, to where she is. Keenan offers a sort of  primer on how to change the “factory settings” for the American professional class, proposing traditional family life as an exit out of the endless rat race.

They also discuss the reality that the modern conservative culture falls short of produce any art for its own sake, at most putting out fare that ranges from  overly didactic films produced by the Daily Wire to the cringe-inducing Christian film industry. Keenan emphasizes that good art must be good art, first and foremost, and whatever ideological valence should be layered in with subtlety and taste. She also discusses the problems with raising consciousness among conservative philanthropists about the problem of right-wing philistinism, and why aesthetic excellence would be a boon in any attempt to recapture the cultural high ground.

On this episode Razib talks to Jesse Singal, a journalist who has covered the social science beat for the last decade. Singal has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from University of Michigan and a master’s in public affairs from Princeton. Currently a freelance journalist who writes his own Substack, Singal-Minded, and contributes to Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog, Singal is formerly an editor at New York Magazine. His first book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, covered the replication crisis.

Razib and Singal first talk about what he learned, and unlearned, during his time as a reporter at New York Magazine, especially social psychology results that were long on glamor but short on robustness. They discuss how long we’ve known that social psychology had a problem, and whether it still hasn’t reformed itself. Singal also reflects on his role in publicizing sexy findings, and how journalism has taken steps to be more careful lately. They also address some of the specific findings that came out of early 2010’s social science, from implicit bias to power posing.

Next, Razib asks Singal about youth gender medicine, and the major controversies over the last few years. Singal discusses the differences between female to male transitions as opposed to male to female, and relates the whole domain back to the replication crisis and the lack of good research. They also discuss political and social aspects, and where Singal sees youth gender medicine going in the next few years.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to economist Sam Hammond.  Canadian-born Hammond serves as the Senior Economist at the Foundation for American Innovation. His work primarily focuses on innovation and science policy, with particular attention to the societal and institutional impacts of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Before his role at FAI, Hammond was Director of Poverty and Welfare Policy at the Niskanen Center. Hammond also held a research fellowship at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, focusing on policy issues related to technology and regulation. He holds a BA in Economics from Saint Mary’s University and MA's in Economics from George Mason University and Carleton University.

After a quick discussion about Canadian housing, Razib and Hammond consider his piece 95 theses about AI. Hammond’s contention is that AI might prove as impactful as the printing press, or, at the outer edge equivalent to photosynthesis. Nearly two years into the current “AI hype cycle” we still haven’t found the “killer app” of AI, but thinkers like Hammond are getting ahead of the likely inevitable societal changes. He believes that change is inevitable, and the details that need to be worked out are how we as a species adapt and evolve in response to our technology. Hammond contends that the AI-revolution is likely to produce changes in the next generation analogous to industrial transformations of the late 19th centuries and early 20th centuries, when cars, electrification and airplanes transformed civilization.

 For early access, feel free to explore it there.

https://www.razibkhan.com/p/sam-hammond-i-for-one-welcome-our 

The full episode is available on: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/14000-years-of-natural-selection

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks about what we have learned from a blockbuster new preprint, Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation. Synchronously released was the Ancient Genome Selection browser, which allows you to trace the allele frequency of variants of interest over the last 10,000 years. Razib covers:

• The relationship of selection to adaptation and the Darwinian understanding of evolution

• Non-genetic selection

• Types of biological selection like positive, negative, background and balancing selection

• Hard vs. soft sweeps and their relevance to detecting selection in the genome

• Older forms of natural selection detection between species (dN/dS, Tajima’s D)

• Newer forms of selection detection within species with haplotype structure, outlier SNP analysis and site frequency spectra

• The Generalized Linear Mixed Model used to model allele frequency change over time, and estimates of selection in cases where population structure and drift are not sufficient

• Specific examples of SNPs whose variation can be examined in the browser and are clearly cases of selection

• Survey of traits that were revealed under selection, including blood groups, pigmentation and intelligence

• Critiques of the methods due to not accounting for drift or population structure, and its limitations in relation to the ability to port across populations due to LD structure

On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the genetic and archaeological history of Europe from the arrival of modern humans (permanently) 45,000 years ago, to the end of the Bronze Age in the decades after 1200 BC. He covers these time periods:

• Pre-Aurignacian (before 43 kya) 

• Aurignacian (43-26 kya) 

• Gravettian (33-21 kya) 

• Solutrean (22-17 kya) 

• Magdalenian (17-12 kya) 

• Epigravettian (21-10 kya) 

• Mesolithic (12-7 kya) 

• Neolithic (9-5 kya) 

• Bronze Age (5-3 kya)

The full episode is available for paid subscribers on: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/europe-40000-bc-to-1200-bc

Relevant papers:

• Reconstructing contact and a potential interbreeding geographical zone between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans

• The Persian plateau served as hub for Homo sapiens after the main out of Africa dispersal

• A genome sequence from a modern human skull over 45,000 years old from Zlatý kůň in Czechia

• An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor

• Palaeogenomics of Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherers

• Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula

• A 23,000-year-old southern Iberian individual links human groups that lived in Western Europe before and after the Last Glacial Maximum

• Population genomics of Mesolithic Scandinavia: Investigating early postglacial migration routes and high-latitude adaptation

• Late Pleistocene human genome suggests a local origin for the first farmers of central Anatolia

• Genomic Evidence Establishes Anatolia as the Source of the European Neolithic Gene Pool

• ​​Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

• The genomic ancestry of the Scandinavian Battle Axe Culture people and their relation to the broader Corded Ware horizon

• The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years

• Steppe Ancestry in western Eurasia and the spread of the Germanic Languages

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Misha Saul, the host of the Kvetch Substack. Saul is a first-generation Jewish Australian, born in Georgia (former Soviet republic), who grew up in Adelaide and now lives in Sydney. He graduated from the University of Adelaide with degrees in commerce and law. His day job is in finance, but the Kvetch highlights his interests in history and Jewish culture.

Razib and Saul discuss extensively the differences and similarities between the US and Australia, and how each relates to other Anglophone nations like Canada, New Zealand and of course the UK. Saul asserts though Australia leans into its frontier reputation, in reality it is much more of a bureaucratic-ruled nation than the US, albeit with more of a Scots-Irish flavor than comparatively middle-class New Zealand. He also contrasts the relatively generous welfare-state of Australia and America’s inequality, which he describes by analogy to the film 2013 Elysium, with its contrast between an earth dominated by favelas and a well-manicured low-earth orbit utopia for the super rich. They also discuss the geographical and cultural coherency of a vast nation like Australia, which has a desert at its center. Saul mentions it is often actually cheaper to fly to and vacation in Bali or another Asian locale than going to Perth from Sydney. Despite the reality that Australia has exotic fauna, it is notably an overwhelmingly urban society, where few have any interaction with the “bush.” Though Australians appreciate archetypes like “Crocodile Dundee,” Saul paints a picture of a much more urbane reality. Razib asks about the phenomenon of “white-presenting” Aboriginals, and Saul argues all societies look somewhat crazy from the outside because of their shibboleths, and the debates around Aboriginality are Australia’s.

As an immigrant and first-generation Australian, Saul also discusses Australia’s immigration system, which strictly controls and regulates migration. Saul argues that because of the high educational and skill qualifications most Australian immigrants assimilate well, and he contends that there is a broad consensus to maintain strict limits on inflows. He argues that the Anglo-Australian identity is strong enough that the assimilative process continues to work even with the large number of Asians from China and India, who have triggered nativist worries and political activism.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Cremieux, a Twitter anon who is regularly retweeted by the likes of Paul Graham, Noah Smith and Elon Musk. A data scientist and statistician, Cremieux specializes in visualizations and analyses that cut to the heart of social and cultural dynamics, from economics to behavior genetics. Cremieux and Razib first discuss the polls and demographic results of the 2024 election, in which Donald Trump seems to have made broad-based gains across all demographics. They also discuss the mirage of the “emerging Democratic majority,” and the possibility that Latinos and Asians shifted so much in the last four years that the racial depolarization predicted by analysts like David Shor since 2012 has finally come to pass.

Cremieux also talks about the likely policy outcomes implied by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk’s slated heavy involvement in the next Trump administration, from the exit of Lina Khan to the reversal of numerous Biden executive orders in areas like employment and civil rights. Cremieux argues that there will be a massive house-cleaning in the civil service. Cremieux has talked to Ramaswamy’s people; if Ramaswamy gets a role like chief of staff, they plan to operationalize insights from Richard Hanania’s book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics.

On this episode of "Unsupervised Learning," Razib talks to Rachel Haywire, who writes at Cultural Futurist. Haywire is the author of Acidexia and began her career in futurism as an event planner for the Singularity Institute. She got her start as part of the "right-brain" faction around the Bay Area transhumanist and futurist scene circa 2010. Currently, she is working on starting an art gallery in New York City that serves as an event space for avant-garde creators who are not encumbered by mainstream or "woke" cultural sensibilities.

Haywire recounts her experience as a creator in the early 2010s in the Bay Area and the transition from a socially libertarian milieu where diverse groups mixed freely to one more defined by a progressive cultural script, with the threat of cancel culture beginning to be noticeable. She points to the 2013 cancellation of Pax Dickinson for edgy tweets as a turning point. Razib and Haywire also allude to the role that the reclusive accelerationist philosopher  Nick Land played in seeding certain ideas and influencing movements like the  Dark Enlightenment.

Jumping to the present, Haywire now lives in New York City, and she addresses the Dimes Square scene centered around the neighborhood in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Haywire points out that the actual artistic production from Dimes Square luminaries is quite low, with an almost total lack of music and a focus on online personas. Her goal with her salons and soon-to-open gallery is to put the emphasis on art above politics or e-celebrity culture.

Finally, Razib discusses the impact of AI on creativity and whether it will abolish the artist. Haywire believes that AI is just another tool and has had mixed success leveraging it for her own artistic works in areas like industrial music. She believes that the real use of AI will be to create drafts and prototypes that artists will have to polish and reshape so that they reflect human creativity rather than just some averaged algorithm.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Halie May, the host of the Substack The Sequence, and a genetic counselor at Natera. May has a B.S. in chemical biology from Stevens Institute of Technology and a M.S. in human genetics from Sarah Lawrence. Before working at Natera she was a researcher and instructor at Columbia University and designed testing panels at genetics start-up, Tomorrow’s Health.

Razib and May discuss how much the field has changed even in her short career, in large part because genetic counseling is a 50-year-old profession that has been transformed in the last decade by the introduction of genome-wide datasets. May highlights the changes in the last ten years, and how they have impacted counselors and end users, in particular the ubiquity of noninvasive prenatal screening tests. Here, she mentions that whole-genome analysis isn’t quite where she had expected when she began studying these issues six years ago, and Razib brings up the fact that it’s already a decade ago he had his son whole-genome sequenced. They discuss the hold-ups in the progress of genetic testing and analysis, and May points out that a major issue is likely the utter lack of federal guidelines, with oversight of genetic healthcare mostly being left to the states. This lack of coordination means that there is no top-down signal, and localities and institutions are left to cobble together frameworks in an ad hoc manner. Razib also asks May about how private companies, like Natera, might fill the gap in what hospitals can provide, and the potential pathways and promise of the democratization of genetic results.

On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning Razib talks to native Californian, Inez Stepman. Stepman has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from UC San Diego, and obtained her J.D. from University of Virginia. She is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a contributor to The Federalist. Stepman is also a co-host of the High Noon podcast.

Razib and Stepman first talk about her reaction to Marxist author Malcom Harris’ Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World, exemplified by her piece in First Things, Ambitious Nihilism. A native of Palto Alto who went to high school with Harris in the early 21st century, Stepman believes that the left-wing narrative in Palo Alto is misleading. Though Silicon Valley avows fashionable social liberalism and radicalism, Harris argues that it is actually a seedbed for right-wing neo-Neo-Reaganism and capitalism. Stepman disagrees; though it is true that from a Marxist and explicitly socialist perspective Silicon Valley falls short, the overall political tenor was firmly on the left. She recalls even after 9/11 that her Palo Alto milieu took a dim view of American patriotism. For Stepman, Silicon Valley was more a laboratory of fashionable woke shibboleths, about a decade ahead of its time, as well as being the training ground for conformist grinds who were geared toward jumping over the next academic or professional hurdle.

Stepman sees this narrow and short-sighted ethos throughout Silicon Valley, and the broader sense in American culture that technology will allow us to transcend our limits to humanity. She argues that wealthy tech entrepreneurs who aim to defeat death, like Bryan Johnson, are fundamentally inhuman in their goals and orientation. Razib and Stepman discuss extensively advances in biotechnology and fertility in particular that American society seems to take for granted, like noninvasive prenatal testing and gene editing, which are rolling out without much discussion.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Christina Buttons, who writes at Buttons Lives. A native Californian and erstwhile artist, Buttons switched to journalism two years ago, writing about gender medicine. A contributor to Quillette, The Post-Millennial and The Daily Wire, Buttons is now a freelance journalist living in Nashville, Tennessee.

The first part of the conversation breaks down what “gender medicine” entails in its gory details. In April Razib had a conversation with Colin Wright about the relationship between sex and gender, and the broader philosophical issues entailed by the ideas of gender ideology. But in the discussion with Buttons, Razib asks what it means for a child to transition medically. What are the surgeries that transition a boy to a girl and a girl to a boy? They also discuss different hormone regimes, from those that block normal puberty to those that enhance the secondary sexual characteristics of the target gender to which the individual aims to transition. Buttons discusses why she got interested in the topic, the fraught area of medically transitioning children. She distinguishes her circumspect and focused critiques of gender transition from the catchall broadsides of so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminists and religious conservatives.

Razib asks Buttons about her departure from The Daily Wire due to ideological differences, and what it feels like to be a moderate between militant factions to both her left and right. Though originally on the Left, and even woke, today Buttons identifies as a centrist classical liberal, which naturally means she tends to offend a great variety of factions with her individualistic viewpoints.

Finally, they discuss youth treatment centers, group homes where self-destructive young people are sent to recover and be rehabilitated. Recently these have been in the news, with Paris Hilton claiming that she and others had been subject to abuse at these centers. Buttons herself spent much of her teens in youth treatment centers, and she believes that Hilton’s case is weak, and shutting down these facilities will result in higher rates of self-harm. Buttons plans on moving to this issue as her next project, because she believes people need to know the truth beyond the sensational headlines.