I don't think this is counterintuitive for most people. The most basic encryption scheme that everyone knows is the Caesar cipher. It's easy to see that shifts of the cipher text will cause shifts in the plain text.
Once someone explains the idea, and provides a few examples it is very natural.
I also don’t like the text explaining zero knowledge proof. It needs the phrase “practically speaking” somewhere or “for practical purposes” since it’s not true in a strict sense
But overall there were some fun ideas on the list!
Ideally the reader should fully understand the statement and still feel amazed, rather than doubting the statement for a valid reason: perfect zero knowledge proof systems (which do not fail sometimes) are impossible and a reader would be right to think so
This is counter intuitive to me. For one, I don't consider the Caesar Cipher to be an encryption scheme that I would actually use for data.
In addition, when I want to "compute" data, I want to do things like identify sentiment analysis in free form text or identify key themes in a paragraph - and I'm not sure this actually IS possible with data that is encrypted
Doing computations on cipher text is very limited which is why it's not very efficient to do complicated operations.
Now, "multiplication" of letters is, well, dodgy as a concept. But, the thing is that you can build encryption systems where D(E(k) op V) is equal to k op V, and op contains both addition and multiplication.