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Alicorn comments on When is further research needed? - Less Wrong
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Does it count if the paper started out as standard thickness, but through repeated erasure, has become thinner?
Paperclips are judged by counterfactual fastening of standard paper, so they are not judged by their performance against such heavily-erased-over paper. Such a sheet would, in any case, not adhere to standard paper specs, and so a paperclip could not claim credit for clippiness due to its counterfactual ability to fasten such substandard paper together.
This seems to imply that if an alleged paperclip can fasten standard paper but not eraser-thinned paper, possibly due to inferior tightness of the clamp, then this object would qualify as a paperclip. This seems counterintuitive to me, as such a clip would be less useful for the usual design purpose of paperclips.
A real paperclip is one that can fasten standard paper, which makes up most of the paper for which a human requester would want a paperclip. If a paperclip could handle that usagespace but not that of over-erased paper, it's not much of a loss of paperclip functionality, and therefore doesn't count as insufficient clippiness.
Certainly, paperclips could be made so that they could definitely fasten both standard and substandard paper together, but it would require more resources to satisfy this unnecessary task, and so would be wasteful.
Doesn't extended clippability increase the clippiness, so that a very slightly more expensive-to-manufacture clip might be worth producing?
No, that's a misconception.