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so let’s say you’re reading/watching some fantasy thing and you hear the phrase “dark magic”. yes, it’s cheesy, but you inherently understand what it means: someone is using a magic ritual that will give him power while hurting innocent people. an unfair magic ritual. it’s inherently understood as morally bad.

now, let’s turn that around. think of the phrase “dark mathematics”. doesn’t work, does it? the brain automatically goes “no, that’s stupid, mathematics is amoral, it’s how you use it”.

so why does magic have an inherent morality while mathematics doesn’t? what about other words?

• dark physics – no
• dark engineering – no
• dark science – maybe
• dark experiments – yes
• dark acts – very yes
• dark programming – lolno

so the rule appears to be “things that are understood as implying action are inherently moral, things that don’t, aren’t” even when the logic makes no sense (programming, after all, is in fact an action, ditto chemistry).

not really going anywhere with this one. i came up with the phrase “towers where adepts practice dark mathematics” while in the shower, thought it was hilarious, pondered why, and needed to write it down in over 140 characters.

stephen hawking, in a lecture is saying that the human race has ‘entered a new stage of evolution’, in that we are now taking control of our genetics directly. yes and no, his point is entirely accurate and valid, but his word choice is wrong. people abuse the word evolution because it’s the only one they know to describe change (perhaps ‘improvement’) of a population over time.

look, you wouldn’t say “bob has entered a new stage of walking, he has a bike now”, you would say “bob doesn’t walk places as much, he now bikes”. similarly we’re no longer evolving, we’re now doing something else. coin a word, or just say ‘custom designing ourselves’. evolution requires natural selection and that force nowadays has very little effect on humans, in a world with health care and birth control.

we can’t understand the future by simply blindly shoehorning our reality into outdated concepts and terms. so yes, partially this is me just being a stickler on word choice, but partly we also need to be aware that we shape our thinking in terms of things we know, and there’s no reason to give people wrong conceptions on what’s going on.