prestidigitation

We do, it's prestidigitation but no one really uses it.

Then I would be extremely good at spelling "prestidigitation", that's for sure.

Impressive feats of prestidigitation but no soul to it.

You can even add some prestidigitation by having them take 30 seconds to Google it and your name comes up. Play it off as a joke and now everyone has a little smirk/chuckle over it.

That's what happens to people who prefer prestidigitation to honest thaumaturgy.

But in terms of advancing the art form and of classic prestidigitation, I can think of no better current practitioner than Ricky Jay.

It's not all show-and-tell prestidigitation, but some areas are heavier in that regard than others -- like machine learning, for instance. Your response is rational, however, in its critique of many fields and forums.

My perspective as detailed in the full message is that the sense in which meta-programming in Ruby is magic is more akin metaphorically to prestidigitation than to the supernatural. In that sense, it does not imply "stop asking questions," nor does it imply "there is no answer."

With respect to programming, meta-programming is not indistinguishable from a spell cast by a mage in D&D. A better comparison is to prestidigitation, the entertainment art of doing a thing that appears to be impossible, even though everyone in the audience knows that there is a trick to it that can be explained and understood. It's really that simple."

For the record, I don't think the slide was as bad as some people are making it out to be, but to dismiss concerns over it as motivated by sexism is rhetorical prestidigitation and not an actual argument.

Unless you are actually trying to build an apparatus to measure entanglement, and then you get a much better sense of appreciation for the nature of your belief in something that is nearly impossible to conclusively demonstrate above the noise floor, and feels a lot more like prestidigitation and luck than it should.