Do you really think the existence of oppression is a figment of Marxist ideology?

The specific oppressions you led off with: yes.

I'm fairly confident that confessing to poisoning someone else's food usually gets you incarcerated, and occasionally gets you killed (think feudal society or mob-ridden areas)

I thought we were talking about Oppenheimer and Cambridge? It looks like if Oppenheimer hadn't had rich parents who lobbied on his behalf, he might have gotten probation instead of not. Given his instability, that might have pushed him into a self-destructive spiral, or maybe he just would have progressed a little slower through the system. So, yes, jumping from "the university is unhappy" to "the state hangs you" is a gross exaggeration. (Universities are used to graduate students being under a ton of stress, and so do cut them slack; the response to Oppenheimer of "we think you need to go on vacation, for everyone's safety" was 'normal'.)

Oppenheimer's conjugate was jailed or executed for attempted murder, instead of being threatened with academic probation.

A gross exaggeration; execution was never in the cards for a poisoned apple which was never eaten.

Gödel's conjugate added a postscript to his proof warning that the British Royal Family were possible Nazi collaborators, which got it binned, which convinced him that all British mathematicians were in on the conspiracy.

Likewise. Goedel didn't go crazy until long after he was famous, and so your conjugate is in no way showing 'privilege'.

Newton and Turing's conjugates were murdered as teenagers on suspicion of homosexuality.

Likewise. You have some strange Whiggish conception of history where all periods were ones where gays would be lynched; Turing would not have been lynched anymore than President Buchanan would have, because so many upper-class Englishmen were notorious practicing gays and their boarding schools Sodoms and Gomorrahs. To remember the context of Turing's homosexuality conviction, this was in the same period where highly-placed gay Englishman after gay Englishman was turning out to be Soviet moles (see the Cambridge Five and how the bisexual Kim Philby nearly became head of MI6!) EDIT: pg137-144 of the Ramanujan book I've been quoting discusses the extensive homosexuality at Cambridge and its elite, and how tolerance of homosexuality ebbed and flowed, with the close of the Victorian age being particularly intolerant.

The right conjugate for Newton, by the way, reads 'and his heretical Christian views were discovered, he was fired from Cambridge - like his successor as Lucasian Professor - and died a martyr'.

I have to make these stories up because if you're poor and at all weird, flawed, or unlucky your story is rarely recorded.

The problem is, we have these stories. We have Ramanujan who by his own testimony was on the verge of starvation - and if that is not poor, then you are not using the word as I understand it - and we have William Shakespeare (no aristocrat he), and we have Epicurus who was a slave. There is no censorship of poor and middle-class Einsteins. And this is exactly what we would expect when we consider what it takes to be a genius like Einstein, to be gifted in multiple ways, to be far out on multiple distributions (giving us a highly skewed distribution of accomplishment, see the Lotka curve): we would expect a handful of outliers who come from populations with low means, and otherwise our lists to be dominated by outliers from populations with higher means, without any appeal to Marxian oppression or discrimination necessary.

I chose Ramanujan as my example because mathematics is extremely meritocratic, as proven by how he went from poor/middle-class Indian on the verge of starving to England on the strength of his correspondence & papers. If there really were countless such people, we would see many many examples of starving farmers banging out some impressive proofs and achieving levels of fame somewhat comparable to Einstein; hence the reference class of peasant-Einsteins must be very small since we see so few people using sheer brainpower to become famous like Ramanujan.

(Or we could simply point out that with average IQs in the 70s and 80s, average mathematician IQs closer to 140s - or 4 standard deviations away, even in a population of billions we still would only expect a small handful of Ramanujans - consistent with the evidence. Gould, of course, being a Marxist who denies any intelligence, would not agree.)

Upvoted because it is an interesting parallel, but this is unlikely to be an explanation of Quirrell's actions. See Chapter 86:

More than the question of whom the prophecy spoke - who was meant to hear it? It is said that fates are spoken to those with the power to cause them or avert them.

Quirrell believes that he can cause or prevent the "end of the world" prophecy, and is gambling that helping Harry increases the chance of "prevent" rather than "cause". A better chance was to dissuade Harry - that would increase the chance of "prevent" even more - but Quirrell's just realized that he can't do that.

Quirrell seems to have been counterfactually mugged by hearing the prophecy of the end of the world...which would mean his decision theory, and psychological commitment to it, are very advanced.

Assume Quirrell believes that the only possible explanation of the prophecy he heard is that the apocalypse is nigh. This makes sense: prophecies don't occur for trivial events like a visitor to Hogwarts destroying books in the library named "Stars in Heaven" and "The World," and the idea of "the end of the world" being a eucatastrophe hasn't occurred to him. Assume Quirrell believes that prophecies are inevitable once spoken. Then why is Quirrell bothering to try to save the world?

Given that he hears the prophecy, Quirrell can either try T or not try ~T to avert it. Given that he tries, Quirrell is either capable C or incapable ~C of averting it. If T and C, by inevitability Quirrell will never hear the prophecy, which means that it is less likely the end of the world will occur (massive events always produce a prophecy that is heard by a wizard, so either Time finds some way to stop the end of the world or someone else hears it but fails to avert it). Say the end of the world causes -100 utility to Quirrell, and trying to stop it causes -1 utility. Then if C, a Quirrell that would try never hears the prophecy, so he never loses any utility, while a Quirrell that would not try hears the prophecy, goes out in a blaze of hedonism rather than fighting the inevitable, and loses 100 utility from the end of the world. Unfortunately, the actual world is the ~C world, where T brings -101 utility and ~T brings -100. So T looks like an irrational choice, but actually maximizes Quirrell's utility across counterfactuals.

This isn't the only explanation for Quirrell's actions; he could just prefer to go out fighting, or be betting on the slim chance that prophecies actually can be averted, or just trying to delay the end of the world as long as possible, or acting on other, weirder motives. But it's an interesting illustration of how alien a being that has truly internalized a really sophisticated decision theory might be.

I checked the behavior of all the bots that cooperated with K, and all but two (T and Q) would have always cooperated with a defectBot. Specifically the defect bot:

(lambda (opp) 'D)

Sometimes they cooperated for different reasons. For example, U cooperates with K because it has "quine" in the code, while it cooperates with defectBot because it doesn't have "quine", "eval", or "thread" in it.

Q, of course, acts randomly. T is the only one that doesn't cooperate with defectBot but was tricked by K into cooperating. Though I'm having trouble figuring out why because I'm not sure what T is doing.

Anyway, it looks like K is reasonable proxy for how defectBot would have done here.

Where is reality's corresponding utility gain?

What would be such adversarial assumptions in your street-crossing example?

This seems like a good sketch of the endgame for histocracy, my own pie-in-the-sky organizational scheme. If you start with people voluntarily transitioning management of a resource they own to an open histocratic system with themselves as the judges, and then iterate and nest and stuff, you get something like this in the limit. I hadn't been able to envision it quite as elegantly as you do here.

In my discipline? I guess

Write code that's easy to update without breaking dependent code.

That'll save the ancient programmers of the 1950's some time.

If I were trying to build up programming from scratch, it'd get pretty hairy.

Build a machine that, when "x = 1.1; while (10. - x*x > .0001) x = x - ((x * x - 10.) / (10.*x)); display x" is entered into it, displays a value close to the ratio of the longest side of a right triangle to another side expressed as the sum of 0 or 1 times the lengths of successive bisections.