YouSaid · the spoken record

Razib Khan

lines on the record: 81
first: 2022-04-20
most recent: 2022-04-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Okay, so you have to make it relevant to them somehow. So, for example, let's say you want to write about signal detection. I think text-to-speech type stuff. There are things people are super interested in. So, for example, people are super interested in Akshanazi Jewish genetics, people who are super interested in the genetic architecture of skin color. I mean, okay, why? I can talk about the genetic architecture of like, I don't know, something else, you know, and it wouldn't be a super interesting. So you have to find the domain that they're interested in and then apply your method, right? So, if you're interested in, so actually, there's a sub stack on personality that talks about personality and using machine learning methods to classify personality. Machine learning is technical, but personality is interesting.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, it's been great. And it's really helped me figure out what people are interested in in terms of what they're willing to pay for. And, you know, it's given me some direction, I guess. But I plan to do, I basically do what I continue to have done in various ways in the past into the future. And, you know, like thinking of startup world way I would pivoted iterate is what I'm thinking.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, no. Well, I mean, it surprised, okay, I'm going to be honest. It probably surprised me how many people are willing to pay, but people have been reading me for a long time. So I just kind of like professionalized at some.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Joe and his group are working on that. They're moving into history. They're doing some serious imperialism that's causing problems. Yeah.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, cultural evolution. That's what Joe Henrik and some of his people wanted to do. Yeah, so I think in cultural evolution, there's going to be a lot of gains because Peter Turchin, Joe Hendrick, these people are applying evolutionary principles to historical processes. And to have the empirical data set is really important. And this is a really new nascent feel. So I think that that's going to be the big thing that I would think people should focus on. Peter said like, oh, like getting anthropology knowledge. And I'm like, God, I don't think the short-term knowledge is super important. I think having a deep, deep, deep, thick knowledge about historical arts would probably be pretty useful. Yeah.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting. Rather than focusing on getting gain of function genes, which is okay, like how do you identify those, fix all of your copy errors. That's a finite number. Compared to the pedigree of the parents, look at the de novo mutations. Look at the parents' de novo mutations against the idealized reference, et cetera, et cetera. That might be much more feasible. Yeah.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they're just degenerative diseases that kill people in the prime of their life. But, you know, 20 years, that's a long time. We have 40-year-old IVF babies now. I think almost 40. But so I think 20 years, yes, you will start to see parents editing the genes of their offspring. I think intelligence is difficult because it's apologetic trait with a lot of different genomic positions. I wonder if they're going to go for other things first and then kind of work to it. And then, you know, there's that theory that Armand Leroy was talking about it, but other people is like, it's not like what you should do is focus for mutations and other things, try to fix those and see if that just inadvertently increases the, you know.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to take the risk, right? So I think that's honestly going to be the first thing. The first thing is going to be transfection or like, you know, gene editing of adults for Mendelian diseases. So that's the next 10 years. Okay. It's already happening now. They're already hearing people of malaria or sickle cell, and I think they're working literally right now as we record on cystic fibrosis and ALS.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think with gene editing, the intelligence thing is going to be like 20 years, let's say 20 years, okay? Like, I think in the short term, gene editing really will do is we'll probably cure cystic fibrosis, clear sickle cell. Like these are like Mendelian, quasi-mandelian diseases with large effect loci, and people just have issues. And so, you know, there's always a delivery problem. There's always a problem with off-target effects, which cause mutations, because cancers. But, you know, if your cystic fibrosis, you're going to be dead by 45.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then the first person that gets in there is going to be like Christopher Columbus or, you know, it's going to be a situation where they may be actually in very, very advantageous position instead of being a primitive prototype. They might basically have all the quote-unquote land in this cyberspace, right? Where it's like they do all the learnings really early on. They iterate, they pivot, and so they can be like, you know, the god of that universe. I don't know. I'm just speculating here, but I'm trying to say that I think the possibilities there are pretty extensive, pretty high variants.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's going to be a situation where it's like going to the new world where, you know, there were attempts to go to the new. They didn't know the new world was there. But there were people in the Middle Ages who left for the West and they never. Obviously, the ships just disappeared. You know, they die. They died at sea, right? So there's going to be people who do things like going to Mars, there's going to be high mortality rates, you know, these sorts of things. Similarly with these human computer interfaces, there are going to be high death rates. There's basically people just disappear into the ether.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That could be a big deal in a good way or a bad way. And I think a lot of your listeners know about all the existential risk crises and artificial, you know, like we talk about like, you know, hostile AI and general artificial intelligence and all this stuff, but I mean, I mean, perhaps it'll start with us. Perhaps SkyNet will be some uploaded crazy kid, you know, where it's like.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I guess I think of gene editing, to be honest, more as like Smithian growth, whereas increased efficiencies. Because we have the genetic variation now. Like we can make him smarter. We have the technology. Okay, we're not there yet. I can see that, though. I mean, we can all understand the basic logic there. Like, there is John von Noman existed. The experiment has been done. So we can aspire to create a bunch of unknown myths. Okay, that's great. Now, the issue is with the human computer interfaces, that's never been done, right? So that is like an innovation. That's like technology driven growth that's increasing like the baseline productivity by crazy amount. Like that's that could be the possible quantum leap.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not straightforward in terms of minimal risk. There's going to be a lot of false starts, which is going to be kind of crazy. But I do think people will approve themselves. Okay. I think they will edit themselves better over the next century. But I think that there's going to be Some integration with brain, computer interfaces. Yes, I do. I mean, I haven't followed it closely, but I do move in some of the similar circles. And I think, you know, brain technology interfaces are going to be a big deal. And I think they're going to really change the game. And I think that's going to be, but the issue there is like...”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it would be ironic if we're a simulation that uploads ourselves into a computer. But anyway, I don't want to get into that, you know? I don't want to get into that. What seems more feasible? I think in the, okay, the biological program of redoing ourselves, I think is actually...”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You might not have enough programmers to service all the code that you have. So these are real issues that I think we have to deal with as primates who've organically developed this technological system and are trying to figure out how to make it work.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, like, even if there's a 50 or collapse, I mean, you know. There's a lot of stuff that we're going to lose. Samo and others have talked about the fact that we can't make rockets the way we could 50 years ago because a lot of those engineers are not, you know. And our military runs on like cobalt software that barely anyone can read is like Cuneiform. It's like the Babylonians, like we laugh at them for like 2,000 years or 1,500 years, 2,000 years after the last native Sumerian speaker died. they were using Sumerian liturgy, but we are going to have a situation soon where there's going to be almost no COBOL programmers, but we have COBOL software base. And so people are going to have to, you know, train and learn from these manuals, these ancient texts from the 1970s. I mean, it's not like that difficult. It's feasible. But the issue here is timing and time.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By overreach, but those civilizations had like local collapses, local regressions. And then they got more, we got more robust with Samaburya with social technology, right? So, for example, you see the Chinese dynastic cycle keeps shrinking every single time in terms of the chaotic in erectum. So one, that means that the previous dynasty was its institutional structure is probably more robust to shocks, and then it can rewind itself back up relatively easily, right? So like the first big unwinding is Xiao Dynasty doesn't really count, but let's do the 500 years decline to Warring States and then the Qin Han dynasty. Then there's like a 300-year period of collapse. And then there's like a hundred fifty year period of collapse, you know, it just keeps shrinking every single time. And so showing you that cultural or social technologies getting better, information technology is getting better. But now we're global.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like really, really like, you know, you think about it, it can be really, really visible. It's really, really visible that That you're an animal of that particular lineage. When you look at, you see where they move, you think about, so like, how long is this going to persist? Like, we obviously evolved during the Pleistocene, even earlier with a lot of our instincts. Now we have the ability to destroy the world, our civilization. Like, we're not going to exterminate all life on Earth. Like, that's just, you know, probably not even all humans. You know, there's probably going to be people in the Southern Hemisphere for sure that are going to survive, but we destroy our civilization. And civilizations have destroyed in the destroyed in the past.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just in general. I look at myself when I see myself, I don't see a primate I see Razee. You know what I'm saying? But if you look at another person.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there are some radical changes going on right now, and we need to think about what that means, because I think we're like, you know, I mean, VR is going to be a big deal. So I have said, like, I did say 20 years ago probably. Because again, like, you know, I know people hope Holden will be okay with me saying that. I've known Holden for 15 years, Holden Karnowski. I think he's, you know. Might be one of the people you're talking about about this century. And I said, like, this might be the last century of. Humans in a way that we would recognize, or it might be a century of regression. I think that we are in a metastable state right now where, I mean, I'm looking at you right now and you look like a primate, you know, and you are a primate, but like you have access to all this technology, like what's going on?”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just like, you know, because we have a lot of people, we have like a desk full of phones, old phones that we never threw away because of whatever, right? And so my kids saw the phone and they were like, what is this thing? And like, it's cool. And they're like, I'm like, oh, that's a phone. And they're like, no, but a phone's a square. And they have an old rotary phone. They traditionally use it as a hammer. It's just like they don't really know what the form factor. It's totally weird for them. So we are living through radical change in terms of, you know, like our social technology or information technology, like most of your viewers probably know Kurtz Weil, information technology is exponential.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My kids who are, like my oldest kid is say 10, my youngest is like five, right? Something like that. And so they're a little dubious about this idea. Sometimes you use the phone for these non-video calls. And they're very confused why people would do that. And they're very skeptical of this idea that that's what this phone was actually originally designed for. So, I mean, like, this is to the point where it's like, okay, like, and like, also, they see a flip phone and they're very confused with how that could be a phone. Like, what is this ancient technology from 2007?”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is mostly gradual, we reified into a step, but I think we might actually be in a step now. I mean, if the slope is steep enough, it's a step. So, I think we might be at a step now. And there have been steps in the past, but mostly we reify. So the Industrial Revolution, my understanding from economic history is really more gradual and exponential than by, quote, revolution. Agriculture was probably like that as well. Peter Turchen's work with some of his collaborators indicates that the axial age was actually more gradual. Some of the coalescing of ideas, it wasn't like a step within one century, you know, around 600 BC or whatever. So, you know, this is just a situation where most of the time I think we tend to simplify it as a step. But, you know, right now, we live in an age of miracles that we don't take for granted because me, you, everybody, we're just scrambling, you know, we have super computers in our pockets. They're called phones. We're doing science fictional video stuff.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, I mean, some of these researchers who have like 30 papers a year, what? You know, I mean, you're not contributing, you're just not really contributing to it, you know?”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know what's going on here. I've talked to multiple friends who are in postdoc level, and they just talk about they can see over the last 10 years a massive inflation and publication where they're postdocs now and some of their graduate students have two or three publications coming in. Like, they didn't have any publications until their third, fourth year graduate school, and they went to the same university. So, what's happening here, you know, and I mean, you know this, like, okay, like in the past, they didn't publish as much, but they did a lot of science. So this is like one of those issues when you devise a metric. To measure something, eventually the metric gets distorted, right? It's just like a truism. The metric's getting distorted. There are people who are producing.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of science, then you know what is the point of where why are you here? Why aren't you an accountant or a CPA or something like that? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. You're supposed to be here for a higher calling. And so, okay, so the tweet was the parishioner, the parishioner would be like the person involved in the laboratory, a research institution, and God is the truth And if you're not there for the truth, Eventually, the institution's not going to make it. It's just going to kind of dissolve because at the end of the day, if you don't have passion for research, if you don't passion for the truth, what's the point?”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, so now I think they overcompensate. I think she overcompensates, to be honest. That's what everyone assumes privately. That's what they say. And I think it's probably true, you know, there's other people like that where, you know, online, there's one guy online who's super, super progressive, but a friend of mine told me he's like notorious dick to his to people in his lab where it's like he's a really bad boss. He's really mean, really demanding. So obviously he's just covering his butt like on social media. So anyway, like my tweet was basically alluding to the fact that like, well, if you're not there for the right reasons, if everyone's just there to collect a salary or they don't know what to do with their life or like they like hanging out with this crew and being on the same like, I don't know, ideological team kind of like, okay, like what is the what is the point?”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He never had a chance. So that is what on the margin it makes a big difference. I think this is why there's a lot of virtue signaling from some people who some of the most professor might name who it is explicitly, but people who follow academic Twitter probably know who I'm talking about. They work in biomedical science and they do periodic virtual signaling just like standard progressive stuff. But like, I think their uncle was a Nobel Prize winner and they did research and their uncle's lab when they were in high school. So, I mean, this is a person who got a huge leg up by family. I mean, they're smart, okay? But, okay, like they knew exactly how to succeed in science because they had all the family connections in the world.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's in his field, he's in a top 10 institution. He's not at Hoy Harvard, but he's in a top. So he's doing really well. So I don't want to undersell how much he's accomplished. But he literally told me, he's like, you know, I just thought to myself, I was like, I never had a chance. He did well, obviously, but like he never planned this way. He never optimized his own life because he didn't have that background, you know?”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fellow serge, which is after PhD before Professor, he was like talking to people and they were talking about their choices that they made as undergrads and blah blah blah and he just thought to himself and you know he's um”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, anyway, it's very class biased, but even people who come from professional managerial backgrounds, if they didn't come from academia, they don't always know everything. So I have a friend who came from very upper middle class background. And he admitted, like, yeah, like he had to learn some things in terms of what you do to make it in science because, you know, I think his dad's a lawyer. I think his dad's a lawyer. But, you know, so he knows, I mean, it's the same thing in medicine. Like, I have a friend he's in medicine. I think his parents are engineers. And, you know, he said that they told him for medical school interviews, it's going to count against you that your parents aren't doctors. Because they just assume you don't know as much about like how to make it the profession, right? And so there's tacit stuff that gets passed on. Like I have a friend. He has a research one professor. He does have tenure and he has succeeded, but he comes from very working class background. And by the time he got to the postdoctoral.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My dad was a professor, by the way. But anyway, I'm not, but I'm just saying that everybody who, so one thing is, so I have a friend So, people in science, people who go into graduate school and science, academic science, they, you know, read the first generation is a thing is because it's so skewed towards professional managerial class people in general. It's very, very class biased.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Professor Is that you? Yeah. I didn't, I mean, I'd probably retweeted it. I mean, that's not obvious. I didn't talk about it expensive because I was like, okay, everyone knows this Everybody in the science knows this”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know I've, you know, I've just seen things where it's like, oh, people are like, that's uncomfortable. You can't say that. That makes people. I'm just like. One, it's a very, very widowing profession. They haven't changed that, no matter what you say. Like, you can repeat these mantras, but it doesn't matter. A winnowing profession, and the other thing is. Ethic science was here for the truth. If that's not the primary focus, if you're here for quality of life. you. I don't know. Why are we funding it then? I don't know.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not like pediatrics or something, right? Yeah, there are superstar pediatricians, but look, the average pediatrician makes a difference, and pediatricians are pediatrician. In science, you have like a few superstars, I mean, like it's hyper Pareto principle, right? It's not like the 2080. It's like, you know, the 5 to 95, you know, so anyway, it's just looking a little strange there. And, you know, the whole idea is like truth and...”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, all this stuff about support, and it's just fake, right? Like 1% of 1% of incoming graduate students will have like a tenured R1 research one, like top research one position, like, you know, a relevant one, right? So all this stuff about how we were here to support you now, like we're here to separate the wheat from the chaff. So that's kind of like fake right there. But, you know, there's a lot of talk about, you know. Kind of the community and not making people uncomfortable and inclusion and equity. And I'm just like, science is like super inequitous.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was being Straussian. I was just having a discussion. I'll tell you what it was. Just having a discussion with scientists friend of mine. We were talking about collegiality and truth. And, you know, it's like sometimes it seems like in science today, and it's just not just online, but just in general, you know, like the community. And just like, you know, comfort, I guess, I don't know is like prioritized. And a lot of it's fake. Science is like... It's like management consulting. It's up or out, you know?”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I would say is it could be humans are special in some distinct ways. Because it's been studied in foxes and other organisms extensively, but it hasn't been, and dogs, you know, and there's a spackling and some of the things. Let's talk about what you're talking about. There's certain spackling patterns, floppy ears, just really, really common patterns across mammals because the same developmental pathways are tuned. We obviously don't have floppy ears and we don't show high bald patterning. So I think it's a great idea. I just don't know for sure how it operationalizes in humans, just put it that way. I mean, it's been a generation. We have genomic resources and it hasn't really, I haven't seen too much advancement in that direction.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it's a plausible. I think it hasn't really. It hasn't really panned out in terms of the genomics. Let's just put that way. Because this hypothesis has been around for a generation and it hasn't really panned out in terms of the genomics. I guess what I would say is it could be that, and let's see.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no link. I'm just saying there's been studies in selection. There's selection for resistance to cholera in Bengal. One of the canonical examples like the Vibrio, whatever, like that, the microbe. There's clearly strong selection because of the cholera over the last couple of centuries.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your parents, because my dad's short, your parents didn't need a lot of meat. I was just like, okay, but now that I know about genetics, nutrition, and class background, I'm like, no, my family were obese in my family. They had enough to eat. They didn't suffer from the Bengal famine. And also my family is Muslims. So they eat beef and they got protein. No, they're just short because it's genetics. Why? Well, we know the Bangladesh Bengali population is Bangladesh. They have cholera resistance, obviously because the issues with flooding and water, that's different than others as Indian subcontinental populations. There's some reasons why they're small too. I don't know why Bengalis are small, but that's obviously true.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know smaller body sizes are. There's been a lot of negative selection in Southern Europe and in Asia for small body size. And last I checked seems pretty clear that people in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent are shorter genetically. Some of it is like East Asian ancestry, but I mean, clearly Bengalis are just short people, you know, if you just meet people from Bangladesh or West Bengal in the West and like they're chubby AF because they get a lot to eat. So it's not like genetics, you know? Like I usually when I was not genetics, but like environment. When I was little people would say like, oh, well, you know.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really hard to track miscarriages early on, right? And so that explains the downward, the low end in terms of why there might be more quote geniuses. I think the way you might want to look at it is There's really no reproductive value at the high end. It's just kind of like a freak thing. And if we're less developmentally stable, we can go off target a little bit more is the way I think of it. There's no reason you need to have your IQB. There's no reason you need to be able to do algebraic topology easily. There's no reason. There is some evidence in the genomic literature now with the most recent work that there is some enrichment for schizophrenia and other things with some of these educational attainment genes. There's some evidence”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we also have higher testosterone, testosterone is antagonistic to immune response. So there are more males born than females, probably because the Y chromosome of the male, the sperm of a male Y chromosome is lighter than when it has an X chromosome. So probably male sperm male sperm have an advantage in speed. There's about 104 males born for 100 females. But in utero, there's a strong suspicion from people that have done like sampling on miscarried fetuses that males are overrepresented. So we actually start out with a bigger advantage. And we're already culled because of our genetic abnormality, something on the order of like 10 to 50 percent of fetuses miscarry. It's still kind of not clear with the total numbers.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the males are ZZ. Anyway, so that's one issue. And when you think developmentally, you know, we all start out as females. The female is the template. And so men have to go through extra processes. So the end of life is the opposite. Like women go through menopause, which is a proactive physiological shutdown, not just like a long, slow decline like we go through in our reproductive processes. But at the beginning of life, I think it's the end of the first trimester. We go through this testosterone burst, right? SRY, the sex, you know, the sex chromosome, you know, the sex determining region kicks in and we become male, we become masculized. So when you have a situation when you have extra developmental steps, hey, guess what? That can mess things up.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So obviously, that's limiting the degree of freedom, right? And so if that's good copy, if it's got some good stuff going on there, well, that's good. But if it's got bad stuff going on there, well, you're screwed. So, I mean, the easiest explanation for why at the low end, men have problems is probably, okay, well, we have a load of deleterious alleles on our X chromosomes that are not masked because we only have one of them, right? So that's one thing. In terms of we are the heterogametic sex, so we're the sex that has like, so in birds, I think it's the opposite. I know it is the opposite. Females are the heterogametic sex. The sex determination happens through them.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like euchromatic, people are going to be like, oh my God, he's getting euchromatic and heterochromatic. I was getting messed up. Okay, I'm not a molecular geneticist. But anyway, so one of the X chromosomes has to inactivate, and that's random. Okay, so let's say a woman has a major mutation in the X chromosome. You know that she has another copy, right? But it could be that that cell, there's a malfunction because the other copy is the one that's inactivated, the one that's functional. Now, if you're a man, there's no choice. It's only one X chromosome.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you got to BS a little bit about the molecular mechanism. I haven't looked at it in detail in a while, but one of the hypotheses is, for example, we have one X chromosome. So with X chromosomes normally with women, inactivation of one X chromosome randomly in the cell, right? Or in the tissue or whatever, in the tissue region, bar bodies, right? So every cell has an X chromosome, and they tend to clump. where it's like they're these like bar bodies like X chromosomes that are inactivated. They're not expressing like”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not a conspiracy between us. Like, he literally, I didn't know that question was going to be asked. I actually didn't have any. I just looked at him and I was just like, this is my educated guess.”
2022-04-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source