Dwarkesh Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
22 published records
01 / uncertainty
“We’re getting about 7,200 positions in the DNA that have 50% confidence of being real. Only half of those are real—we don’t know which ones—so 3,600 of them are real.”
02 / belief
“I think the reason he was interested in our laboratory rather than other places was that a focus of our lab has been generating truly large amounts of data from ancient humans.”
03 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. This is actively what I’m thinking about all the time right now. There’s a big transformation in terms of the culture of humans 300,000 or 400,000 years ago: this invention of Levallois technology, the ability to make stone tools out of cores.”
04 / belief
“I think we would see their archaeology. There are extraordinary developments in the Americas which are entirely Stone Age.”
05 / belief
“The differences we see between different groups of people, especially if this group 50,000 to 100,000 years ago had a very small population size… I think last time we were discussing on the order of 10,000 people.”
06 / belief
“I think there’s more room at the top for a lot of these traits. You can move height extremely in one direction, much more than it is today.”
07 / belief
“I think the model that we’ve put together collectively about the relationships between archaic and modern humans has accreted over time.”
08 / belief
“Obviously, the thing we care about is not direct performance on an IQ test, especially in the past.”
09 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if we talked about it before, but I remain very confused about the relationships between archaic and modern humans.”
10 / belief
“The Middle Stone Age and Middle Paleolithic Revolution that they share with modern humans is more fundamentally a part of who they are, in some sense, than we think.”
11 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. Nobody’s thinking about this model right now. It just seems obviously a very natural model to me.”
12 / uncertainty
“Interesting. But we don’t know what exactly happens, if anything, between 200,000 years ago and 50,000 years ago that goes from just anatomical modernity to behavioral modernity.”
13 / evaluation
“The common story is that hunter-gatherers actually had much more stable diets because they were more varied, and they weren’t reliant on a single cereal or crop for their calories.”
14 / evaluation
“That’s obviously relevant when you move from a diet of meat as a hunter-gatherer to a diet of cereals. That is also one I think you found was under especially high selection 5,000 to 3,000 years ago.”
15 / evaluation
“When you have a single person’s DNA, it provides a tremendous amount of information about history. That’s because when you look at one person’s DNA, it’s not a single person.”
16 / evaluation
“As a result, it’s super hard to detect the signals of adaptive natural selection because they’re a tiny fraction of the total frequency change.”
17 / evaluation
“The reason we think we see much weaker signals for behavioral traits is that behavioral traits, we know from medical studies, are underpinned by much larger numbers of genes than immune traits, which are underpinned by relatively small numbers of genes of strong effect.”
18 / prediction
“We’re in a period of intensified selection. That’s not implausible, because this is a population that went through a huge shock in terms of the way people live and the culture.”
19 / prediction
“I think if you asked Joe prior to this work what the hunter-gatherer selection would be and where their set point for this particular trait would have been… I think he probably wouldn’t have made a very strong prediction, but he would have said, “Maybe you would have expected it to have a high predicted value of this trait because these people were really having to do a lot of things and figure a lot of stuff out.”
20 / evaluation
“The way we think about the history of Europe and the Middle East for the purpose of this study is as an archipelago of little populations in space and time, each pretty isolated from each other.”
21 / evaluation
“I think people found it really compelling that there’s so much about human history we don’t know and are just learning about now as a result of the kinds of techniques your lab is using.”
22 / commitment
“I think we have to assume that there’s a linkage between the cultural transformations in Africa and Eurasia at this time, and that’s not something the community has really put together with the genetic data.”