u/RelentlessPencil

Suppose a criminal has been sentenced to death. There are three possible executioners:

- the sadist: gains pleasure from performing the execution

- the robot: performing the execution has no particular effect on the robot

- the empath: will be horribly traumatised by performing the execution

Suppose the method of execution is that the executioner pulls a switch which causes the prisoner to drop through a trap door and be hanged, so the prisoner has the same experience regardless of who their executioner is.

Who should we pick as the executioner? Also what if the robot is not an option, who should we pick between the sadist and the empath?

This thought experiment had me grappling with moral philosophy in a way I'd like your thoughts on. My intuitions lead to a different answer to what I thought I believed.

Here it is:

original = input_list.copy()

while True:

if input_list.is_sorted() and same_elements(input_list, original):

return input_list

Throughout the universe there are neutrinos which can interact with computers in such a way that they cause their data to mutate. Neutrino sort waits for this to cause input_list to mutate to the correctly sorted version of original, then outputs the result.

How do I collect my Turing Award?

https://preview.redd.it/zx2gw7ip3ijh1.png?width=839&format=png&auto=webp&s=93a7204e5f69c21a678d4ffcb0205f02fe138fda

The toaster is plugged in and on. It is imperative that the cylinder remains unharmed.

I'm about to finish a PhD in computer science and I'm basically an expert in simulation and machine learning. I have two masters degrees in computer science also.

My undergraduate degree was in theoretical physics and I have a decent, though somewhat rusty, understanding of quantum mechanics. I think my thermodynamics and statistical mechanics are much stronger and less patchy.

The last time I did chemistry in any formal sense was chemistry A-Level 12 years ago, I got a C.

I'd like to learn chemistry, and I'm particularly interested in computational chemistry and simulations related to chemistry. What are some books or solo projects I could dive into to really set that foundation for chemistry?

Ideally I'd like to be able to predict and optimize reactions, and maybe come up with a hypothetical synthesis route. But I'm very much in the "spherical chickens in a vacuum" mode of physics and computer science, I'm very unlikely to try to actually make anything.

Alex talks about pleasure and suffering a lot. In the problem of evil, in consequentialism, in antinatalism, this stuff comes up a lot in philosophy.

But like, what even is pleasure? Like we might say we get pleasure from working very hard to get a degree, or to climb a mountain, but it's a very different kind of pleasure to like, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

So what's the difference? I'm trying to come up with like, a taxonomy of pleasures and suffering

My girlfriend is vegan and uses a particular salt to make tofu scramble taste like eggs, I looked it up and the internet thinks it's Himalayan black salt so I tried it and my tofu scramble tastes so much more like eggs now.

Are there other spices which are like this? Like use spice X to imitate taste Y or whatever? Feel free to spam me with as many of these as you have!

Thanks in advance!

Friendly neighbourhood support main here. I adore Kindred, I have the mark of the Kindred tattooed over my heart. I'd like to learn them but it's my understanding that they're one of the hardest champs in the game.

My current skill level is like, high silver / low gold on support, but jungle I'm more like top of bronze or bottom of silver when I play like Yi/Warwick/Amumu

I want to learn Kindred, but am I better off learning how to jungle on an easier champ first? Or do I just commit, take the hit to my LP/MMR short term, and be all in on just Kindred?

Every government has actual secrets that they hide from the public. As a security measure to protect their secrets if they are leaked by a whistleblower, they deliberately make up conspiracy theories. They make up plausible but false conspiracies to distract people into wasting their energy, and also insane sounding ones to discredit whistleblowers by association.

So the canonical zero knowledge proof is something like this:

Suppose I am speaking with someone who is colourblind and who doesn't believe me that I can tell the difference between red and green things, and I want to prove to them that I can tell the difference without actually telling them whether any specific object is red or green.

We could follow a procedure like:

- I give the observer of my proof two shirts, and I claim they are different colours

- we want a procedure where the observer is at least probability P sure that I actually can tell the difference

- so they put on a shirt at random, then go into a room and flip a fair coin.

- if heads, switch the shirts. If tails, don't.

- they come out and I tell them whether they switched the shirts or not.

- we pick a number N such that P > 1 - (1/2)\^N

- once I have correctly predicted whether they switched shirts N times, they are at least P sure that I can tell the difference between the shirts

So importantly we have:

- 1: soundness: I can only prove that I know something if I do in fact know it

- 2: completeness: if I do know something, I can prove it

- 3: zero knowledge: the proof does not give the observer any information about some important factor, in this case which shirt is red and which is green

And I am interested in ways we can extend this.

Suppose we have some group of people X who have knowledge x, Y who do not know x, and Z is just everyone in either X or Y.

Can members of X come up with an interaction procedure which allows them to prove to other members of X that they also know x, without allowing people in Y to know that a proof is happening at all?

For the shirts example they can, for example if every day I bring one red shirt and one green shirt and swap between them at 1pm, the people I'm interacting with won't notice anything is happening if they can't distinguish red from green, but will notice this pattern if they can distinguish them and after each day of me doing this they become more and more convinced that I can also distinguish red from green.

So this procedure has:

- 1: soundness: I can only prove I can distinguish red from green if I actually can

- 2: completeness: anyone who can distinguish red from green can understand my proof and can reproduce it

- 3: zero knowledge: no one who didn't already know how to distinguish red from green gains knowledge about which objects are red or green

- 4: hiddenness: to people in Y the behaviour of people in X is indistinguishable from the behaviour of people in Y.

- 5: no prior knowledge: people in X were able to reach arbitrary confidence that someone else is in X without needing to set up some code first. No "if you can tell red from green then scratch your elbow every time anyone sneezes", the proof only relies on knowing information x.

So okay this was possible in this setup, but can it be done in general? If you and I both agree on proposition x can we always come up with a procedure that allows us to reach arbitrary confidence that the other really does know x without letting anyone who doesn't know x know that this is what we're doing?

So the canonical zero knowledge proof is something like this:

Suppose I am speaking with someone who is colourblind and who doesn't believe me that I can tell the difference between red and green things, and I want to prove to them that I can tell the difference without actually telling them whether any specific object is red or green.

We could follow a procedure like:

- I give the observer of my proof two shirts, and I claim they are different colours

- we want a procedure where the observer is at least probability P sure that I actually can tell the difference

- so they put on a shirt at random, then go into a room and flip a fair coin.

- if heads, switch the shirts. If tails, don't.

- they come out and I tell them whether they switched the shirts or not.

- we pick a number N such that P > 1 - (1/2)^N

- once I have correctly predicted whether they switched shirts N times, they are at least P sure that I can tell the difference between the shirts

So importantly we have:

- 1: soundness: I can only prove that I know something if I do in fact know it

- 2: completeness: if I do know something, I can prove it

- 3: zero knowledge: the proof does not give the observer any information about some important factor, in this case which shirt is red and which is green

And I am interested in ways we can extend this.

Suppose we have some group of people X who have knowledge x, Y who do not know x, and Z is just everyone in either X or Y.

Can members of X come up with an interaction procedure which allows them to prove to other members of X that they also know x, without allowing people in Y to know that a proof is happening at all?

For the shirts example they can, for example if every day I bring one red shirt and one green shirt and swap between them at 1pm, the people I'm interacting with won't notice anything is happening if they can't distinguish red from green, but will notice this pattern if they can distinguish them and after each day of me doing this they become more and more convinced that I can also distinguish red from green.

So this procedure has:

- 1: soundness: I can only prove I can distinguish red from green if I actually can

- 2: completeness: anyone who can distinguish red from green can understand my proof

- 3: zero knowledge: no one who didn't already know how to distinguish red from green gains knowledge about

- 4: hiddenness: to people in Y the behaviour of people in X is indistinguishable from the behaviour of people in Y.

- 5: no prior knowledge: people in X were able to reach arbitrary confidence that someone else is in X without needing to set up some code first. No "if you can tell red from green then scratch your elbow every time anyone sneezes", the proof only relies on knowing information x.

So okay this was possible in this setup, but can it be done in general? If you and I both agree on proposition x can we always come up with a procedure that allows us to reach arbitrary confidence that the other really does know x without letting anyone who doesn't know x know that this is what we're doing?

I'm looking for books with psychopaths as major characters. By "psychopaths" I don't mean stereotypical serial killer or evil characters, I mean individuals who lack empathy and and are just, wired differently. Books which depict them as neutral are ideal, but anywhere on the good/bad spectrum. Also not strictly just psychopaths, just any POV character with a very atypical psychology I suppose

I really liked:-

- I Am Not A Serial Killer

- Never Saw Me Coming

- Perfume

- Dexter

- You

- The Girls I've Been

- pretty much anything by AR Torre

- Villainelle

Female psychopaths are particularly interesting to me