Angus Fletcher

speaker

2,582 appearances 3 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 8 Jul

Angus Fletcher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin · Angus Fletcher · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

So industrial science is basically what happens when scientists get rewarded for publishing more papers.

So it starts to become, oh, like how do we manufacture more science?

How do we do it faster?

And then what they start to think is, well, the way we do it faster

faster is instead of spending a long time observing individual interesting things we start to use statistics we start to develop this mathematical approach of vacuuming up data and then using a calculator to tell us what the average is and

And when you use math, you're using logic.

You don't have to learn the story of each individual place you're going to.

You don't have to treat it with curiosity and care.

You instead say everything in the world operates on math.

So as long as I understand math, I can just plug all the data into it and that'll tell me the truth.

So stars operate on math.

Emotions operate on math.

Fish operate on math.

And so you get the rise of this industrial science really starting in the later 20th century.

And what has happened now is there's been this spectacular explosion of scientific articles.

And there are literally millions of scientific articles.

And we don't understand the world any better than we did before this stuff happened.

Maybe less well.

Maybe less well, yeah, exactly.

And so what I started to wonder is if it was possible to go back to be a natural historian and to just spend a lot of time dwelling on

Showing 981–1000 of 2,582 · page 50 of 130