Tim Lee: 2025 and the driverless car revolution
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
Release Date: 05/24/2025
Noah Carl and Bo Winegard: probing the intellectual darker web
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Bo Winegard and Noah Carl, the editors behind the online publication , 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 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...
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Tim Lee: 2025 and the driverless car revolution
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
Today Razib talks to , a on Unsupervised Learning. Lee hosts . Lee covered tech more generally for a decade for , , and . He has a master's degree in computer science from Princeton. Lee writes extensively about general AI issues, from to the state of . But one of the major areas he has focused on is . With expansion of Waymo to , 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...
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Bonus monologue: Finland as Germania
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
This podcast accompanies my post . The two preprints at the heart of this post are, and .
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Laura Spinney: rise of the proto-Indo-Europeans
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
Today Razib talks to Laura Spinney, Paris-based British author of the forthcoming . A science journalist, translator and author of both fiction and non-fiction, she has written for,,,, and. Spinney is the author of two novels, and , and a collection of oral history in French from Lausanne entitled Rue Centrale. In 2017, she published , an account of the. She also translated Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz's novel into English. Spinney graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Sciences from Durham University and did a journalism...
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Bonus monologue: man the hybrid monster
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
Today, Razib talks about a new paper, : 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...
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John Sailer: a time of troubles in higher education
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
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...
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Jacob Shell: academia must diversify or die
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to . Shell is a professor of geography at Temple University and author of , and the . 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, . 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...
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Matt Welch: from blog pioneer to podcasting mainstay
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to . 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 and wrote . Today, Welch co-hosts 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...
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Bonus monologue: ancient North Africans and the Green Sahara
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib comments on a new paper in Nature,. Here is the abstract: Although it is one of the most arid regions today, the Sahara Desert was a green savannah during the African Humid Period (AHP) between 14,500 and 5,000 years before present, with water bodies promoting human occupation and the spread of pastoralism in the middle Holocene epoch1. DNA rarely preserves well in this region, limiting knowledge of the Sahara’s genetic history and demographic past. Here we report ancient genomic data from the Central Sahara, obtained from...
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Andrew Song: cooling the planet with technology
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to , co-founder of . An NYU graduate with a degree in economics, Song was a member of the class of winter 2016. Before becoming a founder, Song worked at firms involved in data analytics and artificial intelligence. A repeat attendee at the Founders Fund “Hereticon” conference, Song’s company has been profiled , and . Razib and Song first talk about the current state of climate, or more precisely, climate change and anthropogenic global warming. Song argues that the...
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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.