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DanArmak comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 11 - Less Wrong
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Should be able to, since enforcing honesty would seem to be on offer if ordinary Veritaserum can do as much... Now, the question is, does an Unbreakable Vow to tell the truth overcome obliviation/memory charming/pensieves etc? One might expect powerful sacrificial magic to be able to do that, but then again, if it did, you'd expect officials of some stripe to have such Vows as matters of course and we don't see that (on the gripping hand, wizarding society is not that efficient or imaginative).
I would expect a Vow only binds you to tell the truth as you know it at that moment. Nevertheless:
"I vow that to the best of my knowledge in the past XXX. I also vow that if I ever discover evidence that this is false and I had been Obliviated or Memory Charmed to enable me to make this vow today, I will come tell you all about it and submit to your judgement with a specified possible penalty."
So you can at least bind yourself irrevocably to your new position.
Of course not, the high-grade politician doesn't exist who could vow that they'd been honest upstanding citizens all their lives :-)
If IRL we discovered a really reliable neurological lie detector, it would be used by police and courts, but do you really think politicians and CEOs would ever submit to it?
If we did that, I think we would just end up selecting CEOs and politicians with firm self-deceptions instead of those who gave accurate information.
I think you may be being too cynical here.
I'm being too cynical about... politicians?
...Maybe I need to move to wherever you live...
I'm just saying that making lying extremely more difficult is also likely to cut down on lying. The advantage which you'd have to get from lying would have to be higher than the current threshold to bother.
Good point, and politicians could use it to avoid the test too.
I'd expect some CEOs would submit to it and their stock would be rewarded for it.
To boot, I would be very surprised if people elected politicians who hadn't submitted to the lie detector after it had the cultural time to sink in.
People with foresight would work very hard to discredit it before that happened though.
We might not know if they already had.