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.

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.

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.

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.

On this episode of the podcast Razib talks to John Sailer. Sailer is currently the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He covers issues of academic freedom, free speech, and ideological capture in higher education. Sailer has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Free Press and Tablet Magazine. Sailer holds a master’s degree in philosophy and education from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from The King’s College. Prior to joining the Manhattan Institute, he was a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars.

Following on last week’s podcast with Jacob Shell, Razib continues to discuss the rise and fall of woke politics in academia, and the current backlash exploding out of the Trump administration. Sailer discusses his previous work back to 2020 showing how blatant universities became in their discriminatory policies against white males in particular, and how easy it was to demonstrate this dynamic with even the most minimal level of due diligence like freedom of information requests. They also discuss the reality that universities are attempting to adjust to a new landscape with the administration pressuring them to revoke DEI policies, while many faculty are urging that they instead dig in their heels. Higher education is adapting, but Sailer argues that since fundamental values have not changed, some evasion is to be expected.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Jacob Shell. Shell is a professor of geography at Temple University and author of Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the Giants of the Monsoon Forest: Living and Working with Elephants. Educated at Columbia and Syracuse universities, Shell is active on social media, where he comments extensively on the politicization of the academy.

The conversation begins with Shell’s piece in Compact Magazine, To Save Academia, Hire Conservatives. The more than 3,000-word essay argues that academia must diversify ideologically to save itself, but also engage in a wider range of scholarship. Shell points out that US academia has become an ideological monoculture, with an overwhelming dominance of left-leaning faculty, especially at elite institutions. This imbalance, driven by extreme partisan ratios in fields like anthropology, leaves universities politically vulnerable and out of step with the broader public. He challenges the common view that this trend is due to self-selection, or the “pipeline problem,” suggesting instead that informal screening mechanisms discourage or exclude conservative scholars. Shell also argues that the grant system encourages conformity and limits academic freedom. More audaciously, he argues that some academics should be singled out by their peers, whether through their institution or professional organizations,t when they engage in politically motivated misrepresentation of their scholarship. Ultimately, Shell insists that academia’s unique role in public life is to observe and understand the world, not to risk co-option as an arm of any political movement.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Matt Welch. He co-founded the Prague-based newspaper Prognosis in the early 1990’s and later worked as an opinion section editor for the Los Angeles Times. From 2008-2016, Welch served as editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, where he currently holds the position of editor-at-large. He co-authored The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America and wrote McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. Today, Welch co-hosts The Fifth Column podcast with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan.

Razib and Welch first go back to his days in Eastern Europe, and how they shaped his views on foreign policy, making him somewhat heterodox for someone whose primary political inclinations favor libertarianism. Welch discusses how wild, hopeful and chaotic the 1990’s were in the former Eastern Bloc after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of Communism. He also argues that these nations had strong historic and contemporary geopolitical reasons to fear the former Soviet Union, and so pushed for the eastward expansion of NATO. Razib makes the Russian case that its turn away from the West in the 2000’s was in response to America’s strategy of encirclement, but Welch dismisses this as Russian revisionism. He believes that at the end of the day Soviet-era elites retained an imperial attitude toward Eastern and Central Europe rooted in a centuries-long assumption of Russian hegemonic status in the region.

Next, retreating from abstruse foreign policy, Razib and Welch discuss the early days of the blogosphere, in 2001/2002. Then, Welch coined the term “warblogger,” and envisaged a scenario where post-partisan citizen-journalists would play an essential role in the information ecosystem of the 21st century. He discusses his disappointment with the reemergence of partisanship within the blogosphere, as well as the disappointments of post-9/11 interventionism. Welch also talks about the Tea Party, and its connection, and ultimate disconnect, from libertarianism. They also discuss how the Tea Party energy was eventually transferred to the ideologically heterodox and often anti-libertarian Trump movement.

Finally, Welch talks about his latest primary venture, the successful The Fifth Column podcast. Razib asks if the current age of podcasting is analogous to the early blogosphere. Welch talks about how organically and gradually The Fifth Column came into being, and the growing pains with greater professionalization. He also addresses their future on The Fifth Column, with a new shift toward video, while continuing the informal and candid nature of the discussions.