All universal programming languages (assembler, C, CLIP, Lisp, Cobol, Python, Java) can parse perl as well.

Only if they implement Perl, perfectly mimicking the functionality of perl (the only spec for Perl). Amongst other difficulties, Perl has available the full power of Perl at the preprocessing stage.

Oh, I see -- a specification in the style of "only perl can parse perl."

But then these "most implementations" are not implementations of "standard Markdown," hence my confusion.

"With freedom, and justice, for all except the children

or the prisoners, or the mentally retarded, or the civilians in the freedoms of war, or the soldiers in those of peace, or those merely bound by their necessities in a worse way than what we consider normal.

Actually, now that I think about it, exposing kids to more pragmatism is probably a good idea.

Robbing things in general has consequences - but it's harder to detect the robbery of social trust than the robbery of a sofa.

My favourite example of that is “the sperm cell Dante Alighieri was conceived with originated in his father's left testicle” (vaguely inspired by an idea in a thought experiment by Douglas Hofstadter).

You may also attend.

Humans only?

I'm happy to have one of the most well-loved LW celebrities respond to a post I made!

In the counterfactual world where you did murder someone you disliked, and later found that they were planning on instigating paperclip production, how would you feel out of "good" or "bad"?

Of course, maybe you don't have something you call "feelings," but rather think of things purely in terms of expected paperclips. Humans, on the other hand, have difficulty thinking strictly in terms of expected paperclips, but rather learn to associate expected paperclips with good feelings, and negative expected paperclips with bad feelings.

In humans, we have a set of primitive mental actions (like feelings, intuitions, and similar system-one things) that we can sometimes compose into more sophisticated ones (like computing expected paperclips yielded by an action).

As such, you can always say "I wouldn't kill someone I disliked because I might feel regret for taking a life," or "I wouldn't kill someone I disliked because I would be imprisoned and unable to accomplish my goals," but ultimately, all those things boil down to the general explanation of "feeling bad."

"Feeling bad" is the default human state of not accomplishing their goal.

(As an aside, this is why I think that you, clippy, can be said to have emotions like humans -- because I don't think there's a difference between your expectation of negative paperclips as a result of a possible future event and fear or dread, nor do I think there's a difference between a realization that you created fewer paperclips and sadness, loss, or regret.)

Thank you again for replying, Clippy -- I'll go down to my supply room at my earliest convenience and take most of the paperclips as a token for me to remember this interaction, and in the process, causing my employer to purchase paperclips sooner, raising demand and thus causing more paperclips to be produced.

I would like people doing bad things to stop doing those things

How would you like this to occur?

To put it another way, what stops you from murdering somebody you dislike? The (bad feeling of) fear of getting caught? The (bad feeling of) remorse from taking a human's life?

Or do you really think you're a Hollywood rationalist, making a cold and precise computation of negative utility as a result of your potential action, and choosing another path?

Like the other poster who said roughly the same thing as you, you seem entirely ignorant to the massive amount of bad feelings present in reality, and the usefulness of those feelings. Nowhere in the fun theory sequence does EY advocate getting rid of bad feelings, and in fact EY argues against that.

That's a really good point I didn't think of. Hopeful something like not allowing more than one register per IP adress per day would fix it...