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TheOtherDave comments on Natural Laws Are Descriptions, not Rules - Less Wrong
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I don't know too much about Tegmark, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't have your second meaning in mind.
That said, I'm not sure your first meaning is actually tautological, given that for Tegmark's idea to be an answer as WeiDai suggests, _whatever "exist" means it has to encompass the kind of thing that you are doing right now.
The idea that things which "exist in an abstract mathematical sense" can, solely by virtue of that, do what you're doing right now is perhaps tautological, but if so the tautology is not one that most humans will readily recognize as one.
Yes, I was unintentionally implicitly assuming that this universe is a mathematical structure. (OTOH, ISTM that this is a somewhat standard assumption on LW, e.g. Solomonoff induction wouldn't make that much sense without it.)
Perhaps. But the connotations of saying that something exists in an abstract, mathematical sense tend to run counter to that.
Escape the first underscore by putting a backslash before it. (Why does the MarkDown italics mark-up work even within words, anyway? I think the situations where someone would want to italicize only part of a word are far fewer than those where one would want to use a word with an underscore in the middle of it.)
I would think a lot less of a language that introduced an arbitrary limitation on its syntax like that. Italics of parts of a word come up occasionally and bold letters of a word more frequently than that. The language arbitrarily deciding it doesn't want to execute the formatting commands unless you do whole words the same would be irritating, confusing and inelegant.
It's probably less work to read character-by-character than to split on words and read the first and last character of each.
And it makes the rare-but-still-occasionally-desired case doable without escaping into HTML (which is not possible in LW's no-HTML subset of Markdown).
You'd only need, whenever you see an underscore, to check whether the previous character is whitespace (or punctuation, e.g. a left parenthesis). Arundelo's point seems more valid to me (though you might allow to escape spaces, e.g.
_n_\ th... but that'd be more complicated).True! I do not know why MarkDown italics works within words.