Nov 30, 2022
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...
Nov 20, 2022
When Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO last year, I wondered what we could expect from the new leader, Parag Agrawal. Luckily, I knew Nikolai Yakovenko, who worked at Twitter on deep neural networks in the mid-teens. Yakovenko told me Agrawal was not a rock-the-boat kind of guy, and perhaps that’s why Dorsey...
Nov 18, 2022
On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib discusses the history and genetics of Anatolia, from the first farmers to the Ottoman conquest of the peninsula. He focuses on the underappreciated reality that prehistoric Anatolia was the font of the first wave of farmers that built the majestic Neolithic...
Nov 4, 2022
Today, on the Unsupervised Learning podcast Razib talks to Erik Hoel, author of the novel The Revelations, and host of The Intrinsic Perspective Substack. Hoel is a neuroscientist at Tufts who is interested in the problem of consciousness. Hoel admits right off that the questions and answers around consciousness...
Oct 28, 2022
Jonathan Haidt is the author of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. One of the pioneers of Moral...