morally grey/evil scientist characters are always like biochemical engineers or nuclear physicists or whatever but the people want VARIETY give me a story about a fucked up geologist for once
this is not fucked up this is delightful.
also: if you want fucked up scientists, please consider the branch of scientists by far the most likely to perform unsanctioned experiments on their own children (linguistics)
…IMO the fucked up part of that type of experiment is not just the fact that linguist parents will do things like “never tell your kid the sky is blue and then see if he decides to call it that on his own”
it’s that these linguist parents will come to the conclusion, based on their results, that “sky-blue is not within the natural definition of blue, i have proven this, because my kid did not independently come up with calling the sky blue”
which means one of three things
you not only avoided talking to your kid about sky colors, you taught your kid a whole different definition of the word “blue” which did not include the color of a blue sky. This proves nothing except that it’s possible to teach kids different dialects of a language. good fucking job
you taught your kid about the color blue in the normal way, except you never mentioned it’s the color of the sky. and then one day you asked him (indoors, away from windows) what color the sky is, and he said “how should I fucking know” because he couldn’t actually see whether it was blue or dark or cloudy right then. This only proves that a kid who didn’t get taught the phrase “the sky is blue” as shorthand for “undeniable fact” will grow up actually thinking about how the sky can be different colors. Good job, this time unironically. but it still proves nothing about the definition of blue.
your kid learned the color blue in the normal way but was unable to reliably identify a blue sky as that color. your kid could be yellow-blue colorblind. please get that checked.
