Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Over the last hundred years Western universities have become bicameral. The eponymous universality of academia is gone and has been split down the middle into the "sciences" and the "arts". Of course this distinction is old, but the two schools of Western thought have diverged further than ever and now teach almost opposing ideals of what "truth" means, although the manifestations of them sometimes seem contradictory.
I was a student of "science" during my time at university. In undergraduate science degrees they do occasionally teach through the scientific theory, but this is generally a rarity until you are actually doing research. What the scientific theory asserts is that the truth can be obtained through systematic empiricism, that is constructing experiments to determine the truth via trial and error hypothesising. At what temperature does a frog boil? Well lets keep heating frogs up to incremental temperatures until we find when it boils. That's the scientific method. But obviously it is impractical to have each student of science uncover the truths of the world for themselves: its much simpler just to declare the accepted conclusion and merely describe the experiment that was made to confirm it. But science experiments mean little through description alone, and the real crux of understanding a scientific theory is to arrive at the conclusion by logic. Why does a frog boil at 100C? Well that's because a frog is mostly water. That is logic, not science, but knowledge gained by science alone is almost worthless to an academic. How can one extrapolate on a theory and build it into a cohesive world view if there is no logic behind it? For this reason most students of "science" really become students of "reason": learning the rules by which the universe fundamentally works (at least from the perspective of their chosen discipline) and being able to deduce the results of a hypothetical situation following those rules.
A student of the "arts" should feel right at home with logic. Theology, geography, philosophy, literature. All of these subjects are founded on the work of logicians. Why do frogs live in caves? Frogs live in caves because they are afraid of clouds. But the modern university seems to curtail the use of too much reason in regards to the arts: new knowledge should never be created, only old knowledge regurgitated. The modern art student spends the entirety of their education referencing others: no original thought can go unpunished. A perfectly reasoned argument for the existence of fully subterranean frogs will be cast aside if you cannot provide a citation to where someone has made this claim before. And if you can find such a citation, you best hope the university accepts his credibility! This backwards approach to reason has strangled these subjects in the West. The arts have become feeble and repetitive: unable to assert themselves against the pride of science nor the weight of history.
This may be why we have started to see the "sciencification" of certain disciplines that by rights are an art. Philosophy has been the first. Much of the student of "philosophy"'s time is now spent conducting surveys and inane psychological experiments, attempting to uncover the mysteries of the human soul at the bottom of an excel spreadsheet. But its all just a facade. Since "psychological science" has been around it has suffered the intractable "replication crisis", where the vast majority of conclusions made from experiments cannot be replicated when the experiment is taken again. A study into the repeatability of psychology studies found that only 36% had results which were reproducible. But then another study a few years later found 58%, and then another 23%... This is because they're all lies, and the psychologists know that. These surveys and experiments are only there to satisfy the everhungry appetite of the citator looking for reputable, science-backed sources. In reality all psychologists rely purely on reason and intuition (as they should), we start running into real trouble once the artists start forgetting they were ever artists at all. For no one ever blamed an artist for being wrong, but when you attempt to wield science to prove your point, your theories come into the merciless gaze of scientific autism: unable to understand or comprehend, only to mark you against a strict ruleset which, by the very nature of the subject, you can never fulfil.
So what should be done? Can the academics of the West be saved? Does it need to be? As the old manifestations of power in the West turn themselves inside out for their own amusement, other powers are growing to take their place. Capitalist industry, politically funded think-tanks, foreign owned global corporations. These great beasts cannot be contained for good or for ill, and the state of the modern university rightly pushes those of intelligence away and into the clutches of less meek and well-meaning overlords. Its seems ironic that the era when universities are accessible to the most people in history is also the era when their importance seems to be in such decline. But should the university fall, and I can't say I believe it will, it will leave a hole in the heart of Western culture that will be as hard to fill as that widening hole that is religion.
