I’m RazibKhan on Clubhouse. Follow me when you get on. I have a members-only “Club” I’m inviting my followers to. I’m going to use it to have conversations and “rooms”. But I can only add members in batches of 10-50 right now, so going through it manually. If you follow me on Clubhouse and want to be a member, just leave a comment with your handle, and I’ll add you manually.
I was busy. Then we lost power for days. So no updates on this blog. But a lot has happened while I’ve been trying to keep warm. Discuss. I have papers to read from what I can tell.
Follow me @razibkhan on Clubhouse. I have internet and plan on doing my usual 7 PM PDT event, this time on the genetics of Europe (and going to push through on the Substack post on Italy now).
See this report in WSJ, The NFL’s Covid-19 Finding That Saved the Season. “The virus, in some instances, traveled farther than six feet—especially in small, poorly ventilated areas. And masks, more than the duration of contact, seemed to matter a lot.”
This week I have a podcast with John Hawks up. It’s 1 hour and 40 minutes. We talk about a lot of issues, including what it was like to be multi-regionalism-friendly and arguing for adaptive introgression in humans in the 2000’s, to his stand against the Reich-Willerslev duopoly in ancient DNA. I’ve known John for fifteen years, so we had a lot to talk about.
Hinduism is not false consciousness , it is “Planet X”. Some Indians have the same fixation as modern Western elites on language as the key to reality, rather than language being a tool to describe reality. Hinduism wasn’t “invented” when it was named. The name put a label on something that was already there.
I was a guest on a YouTube show about ancient history. The episode is titled Sumerian Origins and Ancient DNA. Apparently, Reddit’s anthropology channel refused to post it because they didn’t want to platform me after reading the Undark hit piece. Journalism, isn’t it a great profession?
3-D PCA of world populations (one of the attendees of my recent workshop made this).
Taking a break from catching up with Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe to read Accounts of China and India. It’s a short book that compiles the experiences and recollections of Muslim merchants from the Persian Gulf who traveled to Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and China. There’s a lot of interesting stuff, but, many of the observations hold up.
There are some hilarious sections about how Indians won’t eat off each other’s plates. This is, in fact, a tendency of modern people from the subcontinent (of all religions).
Scott Alexander is back. I heard through a friend that last summer an academic got a call about Alexander, and it was clear that the reporter was a hostile (the academic refused to cooperate).
My podcast this week, American Civil War? Richard Hanania thinks it unlikely. Normally for Unsupervised Learning I don’t record anything that’s time-sensitive, but obviously, this week required an exception. Also, we talk about the fact that Jon Ossoff follows Scott Alexander on Twitter.
There are good political/social reasons for wanting SARS-CoV-2 to have entered humans directly from animals, and many pushing the WIV lab accident hypothesis have nefarious intent. I am nonetheless surprised at the degree of confidence people express in a natural origin.
So my Wikipedia page states that I’m “paleoconservative.” The citation goes to 2008, when my friend Reihan Salam termed me a “neo-paleoconservative.” 12.5 years is a long time, and I’m not sure I fit that bill. I’ve moved much further left on economics, and am no longer an immigration skeptic. But, I have become much more ‘socially conservative’ (3 kids will do that, sorry to be cliche).
A reader alerted me to Ronald F. Inglehart’s Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing it, and What Comes Next? Inglehart has been involved in the World Values Survey for decades. This book was published in December 2020, and Inglehart notes that it was necessary because a massive wave of secularization has occurred since 2007.
I skimmed a few chapters, and the general thesis of this short work seems to be that the Nordic states are the model for secularization. As people become more economically secure and the welfare state takes the role of civil society, the need for the social functions of religion diminishes.
The main question in 2021 I have is if COVID-19 serves as a natural experiment that drives reaffiliation of people who lose faith in government.
I’ve kind of fallen down on the job regarding the book club. But, I will catch up with Not Born Yesterday and Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom. My goal is to catch-up this week after a few calls tomorrow.
It’s been a busy last quarter of 2020 for various reasons. I will offer a bit of a personal note and admit that this has been a very nice Christmas with the family. The kids are not yet at the age where they hate me. yet.
A lot of my spare energy has been going into my Substack. Since you read this weblog you know all about it and are probably sick of hearing about it, but just to reiterate, I imagine it is a synthesis of a blog, a podcast, and a newsletter. Last week I recorded podcasts with Armand Leroi and Alina Chan. I’ll be posting Armand’s this week for subscribers, and then pushing in a few weeks to the ungated website.
In setting up the short conversation with Alina I feel like I’ve gotten a better sense of her. Perhaps she’s fooling me, but my initial impression that she’s sincere and earnest has been confirmed. I wish more young academics had her fire for truth above all else. There are more important things than truth, but if you are an academic in particular, why are you in the game if the truth isn’t number one?
Chinese Demography: China is shrinking, and is about to shrink more. These are structural forces we all know. I think they give the rest of the world an opportunity to constrain the dragon. The problem that I see is that the West seems to be engaging in some sort of cultural suicide, in particular the United States.
Democrats see grim prospects in final election results despite Biden’s win. The takeaway is what Kevin Drum observed: Democratic elites and base are very culturally liberal, and don’t want to concede an inch on cutting edge progressive values. Non-college educated America barely knows what they’re talking about half the time. I think this is a bit like the Republican fixation on cutting taxes to increase revenue and the cult of the “job-creator.” People on the Right are pretty bullish on 2022 and 2024.
That being said, the Left controls all the major cultural institutions. What does it matter if you win elections if in 2024 every member of Congress is mandated to state their pronoun on the directory?
I’ve been releasing some free content for my Substack this week. Even if you aren’t in the market for paid content right now, please sign up so that you’re on the mailing list when I push out occasional free content like this. The first two posts are out:
I’m trying to catch up on my book club. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom first. Will be doing the same for Not Born Yesterday next.
I’m going to be talking history, in particular Chinese history, with Samo Burja this week on my podcast. Only for subscribers to the Substack, but ungated after the holidays on the Unsupervised Learning podcast website.
Sorry about the spare “open thread”, but busy. I should mention I have a gated version of my David Shor interview up. Lots of talk about Miami and being Sephardic Jewish.
Also, the ungated Unsupervised Learning podcast site is up. I’ll do a delay before releasing it. Right now we’ve got Anders Bergstrom, Charles Murray, and Eric Cline. There are lots of more I prerecorded. As I have said before the goal with the new podcast is to have more ‘evergreen’ discussions, rather than what’s just “in the news.”
Obviously, thanks to all the paying subscribers, but I also suggest you subscribe free because I’m going to use it as my newsletter in general. If you subscribed via Mailchimp you are already in the system, so don’t worry.
I’m a little worried about Substack as a platform because who knows in this day and age? But as long as Andrew Sullivan is there, I assume I’ll be OK. Also, Colin Wright has started a Substack, Noah Smith has been cranking stuff out.
Still reading Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. The narrative is hard for me to keep track of. I wish there was more cultural/social commentary to scaffold the battles and forced marches. Will post on chapter 9 soon.
