Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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Noah Carl and Bo Winegard: probing the intellectual darker web
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Bo Winegard and Noah Carl, the editors behind the online publication Aporia Magazine, founded in 2022. Winegard and Carl are both former academics. Winegard has a social psychology Ph.D. from Florida State University, and was an assistant professor at Marietta College. He was an editor at Quillette before moving to Aporia. Carl earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Oxford University. He was a research fellow at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, before becoming a contributor to The Daily Skeptic and UnHerd, and a managing editor at Aporia. First, Razib asks Winegard and Carl about their respective cancellations, and the recent attacks on Aporia from the British media in particular. Winegard observes that many of the criticisms were muddled, as journalists struggled to get basic facts straight about who did what, as well as mixing up present associations among various editors with past ones. The two also address the change in the culture over the last few years, as cancellations seem to have lost some of their bite. Then Razib asks Winegard about the perception that Aporia is fixated on the third-rail of American culture: race and IQ, and its relevance to social policy and politics. Winegard talks about how he has long since said everything he has to say on the topic, but he still finds that the public conversation fails to address the possibility of cognitive differences between populations, and so keeps finding himself wading back in, to fill a gap in the discourse. Razib also asks the editors about their view of “cold winters theory,” which attempts to explain the higher IQs of temperate zone populations versus tropical ones. Then they discuss the disappointments of the MAGA movement, and its appeal to populist emotion. Winegard had hoped that despite its inchoate nature, it might have been able to pare back the radical excesses of the progressive cultural changes of the 2010’s, but now he worries that overreach may up the chances that woke policies make a comeback with the inevitable political backlash in the next few years. Winegard also addresses his personal souring on reflexive anti-wokism, and Carl shares his own views from across the Atlantic, where Britain appears to follow in the US’ footsteps, even if from an entirely different social-historical context. Winegard discusses the difficulties of maintaining a consistent heterodoxy in the face of tribalistic demands for conformity. Finally, they discuss the path forward for publications like Aporia that do not toe any particular party line.
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1:54:24
Tim Lee: 2025 and the driverless car revolution
Today Razib talks to Tim Lee, a previous guest on Unsupervised Learning. Lee hosts Understanding AI. Lee covered tech more generally for a decade for Washington Post, Ars Technica, and Vox.com. He has a master's degree in computer science from Princeton. Lee writes extensively about general AI issues, from Deep Research’s capabilities to the state of large language models. But one of the major areas he has focused on is self-driving cars. With expansion of Waymo to Austin, and this June’s debut of Tesla’s robotaxis, Razib wanted to talk to Lee about the state of the industry. They discuss the controversies relating to safety and self-driving cars. Is it true, as some research suggests, that Waymo and self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars? What about the accidents Waymos have been implicated in? Is it true that they were actually due to human error and recklessness, rather than the self-driving cars themselves? Lee also contrasts the different companies’ strategies in the sector, from Waymo to Zoox to Tesla. Razib also asks him about the fact that self-driving cars’ imminent arrival seems to have been overhyped five years ago, with Andrew Yang predicting trucker mass unemployment, to the reality that Waymo has now surpassed Lyft in ride volume in San Francisco. They also discuss the limitations of self-driving cars in terms of their ability to navigate cities and regions where snow might be a major impediment, and why there has been a delay in their expansion to freeway routes.
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55:46
Bonus monologue: Finland as Germania
This podcast accompanies my post Germans are from Finland, Finns are from Yakutia. The two preprints at the heart of this post are, Postglacial genomes from foragers across Northern Eurasia reveal prehistoric mobility associated with the spread of the Uralic and Yeniseian languages and Steppe Ancestry in Western Eurasia and the Spread of the Germanic Languages.
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23:58
Laura Spinney: rise of the proto-Indo-Europeans
Today Razib talks to Laura Spinney, Paris-based British author of the forthcoming Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. A science journalist, translator and author of both fiction and non-fiction, she has written for Nature, National Geographic, The Economist, New Scientist, and The Guardian. Spinney is the author of two novels, Doctor and The Quick, and a collection of oral history in French from Lausanne entitled Rue Centrale. In 2017, she published Pale Rider, an account of the 1918 flu pandemic. She also translated Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz's novel Derborence into English. Spinney graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Sciences from Durham University and did a journalism residency at Berlin’s Planck Institute. First, Razib asks Spinney how difficult it was to integrate archaeology, linguistics and paleogenetics into her narrative in Proto, which traces the rise and proliferation of Indo-European languages from its ancestral proto-Indo-European. She talks about why this was the time to write a book like this for a general audience, as paleogenetics has revolutionized our understanding of recent prehistory, and in particular the questions around the origin of the Indo-Europeans. Razib and Spinney talk about various scenarios that have been bandied about for decades, for example, the arguments between linguistics and archaeologists whether proto-Indo-European was from the steppe or had an Anatolian homeland, and the exact relationship of the Hittites and their language to other Indo-European branches. They also delve into how genetics has helped shed light on deeper connections between some branches, like Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian, or Greek and Armenian. Spinney also addresses how writing a book like Proto involves placing fields like historical linguistics and archaeology with charged political associations in their proper historical context
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1:01:18
Bonus monologue: man the hybrid monster
Today, Razib talks about a new paper, A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans: Understanding the history of admixture events and population size changes leading to modern humans is central to human evolutionary genetics. Here we introduce a coalescence-based hidden Markov model, cobraa, that explicitly represents an ancestral population split and rejoin, and demonstrate its application on simulated and real data across multiple species. Using cobraa, we present evidence for an extended period of structure in the history of all modern humans, in which two ancestral populations that diverged ~1.5 million years ago came together in an admixture event ~300 thousand years ago, in a ratio of ~80:20%. Immediately after their divergence, we detect a strong bottleneck in the major ancestral population. We inferred regions of the present-day genome derived from each ancestral population, finding that material from the minority correlates strongly with distance to coding sequence, suggesting it was deleterious against the majority background. Moreover, we found a strong correlation between regions of majority ancestry and human–Neanderthal or human–Denisovan divergence, suggesting the majority population was also ancestral to those archaic humans.
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19:35