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Desrtopa comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87 - Less Wrong
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I think you're overestimating how powerful the Unbreakable Vow is, on a social level. People who use the Imperius Curse do not automatically cooperate with each other as fellow imperiusers. They don't form a unified pro-Imperius voting bloc. Any individual who tries to bind people in this way is a social threat to anyone who doesn't trust them absolutely. Each person who behaves in such a way is a potential candidate trying to take over society, so anyone who tries it is practically inviting absolute war against themselves.
Aha! I think I spot the misunderstanding: In this scenario, no one is trying to "bind people in this way". I am not positing that you do use the Imperius curse to make other people make an Unbreakable Vow to you, but rather I am positing that pairs of people both agree to make an Unbreakable Vow between the pair of them (with the Imperius curse used on the binder), so that they can reap the benefits of mutual cooperation.
As such, it is absurd to say they wouldn't form a unified voting block. Their power comes from the fact that they are magically unified, so that they can trust one another absolutely.
In that case, they might be able to form a unified voting bloc, but even so they're going to appear as an active threat to everyone else. Things like this are among the reasons why the Imperius curse is as forbidden as it is. If the people attempting this were caught, it wouldn't matter if they were all voting in favor of its legality, any more than we would let convicted murdering congressmen try to pass a bill legalizing murder. It's not something that the rest of society is likely to be amenable to if a bunch of lawmakers stand up for it, the fact that they would vote for it at all would be highly suspicious and threatening to their social standings.
They allowed lawmakers to legalize the Unforgivables during Voldemort's uprising; I have a hard time believing a great many people would object to a bill allowing a service where Aurors Imperius Azkaban inmates to bind vows.
The larger point being, any society could find or make an outgroup sufficiently unsympathetic to allow regulated use of the Imperius for the public good.
The use of the unforgivable curses was only legalized for a fairly brief period, I doubt they explored the space of possible uses very thoroughly And for all we know, they did imperius people to use as binders, but stopped after the war ended and the use of unforgivable curses became illegal again.
Also, just because a society could do that, doesn't mean they would. You might say that any society could find or make an outgroup sufficiently unsympathetic that they would be willing to impose slavery on them, and slavery is likely to be a public good if you discount the values of the enslaved, but that doesn't mean that all societies will gravitate to slavery.
This might be, and they might in fact succeed or they might fail. It seems the kind of thing someone could write a very interesting story about, and if that story is ever written, I would like to read it. But I find it unlikely in a world like this that there even would be a government with laws against this sort of thing in the first place. The propose of government is to provide a framework in which people can be sure of their fellows Cooperating in prisoner's dilemma type scenarios, and while it works most of the time, a network of Unbreakable Vows would work a lot better then any form of government. As such, it is probable that in this world, rather then there being a system of laws in the first place, it would be a system of Unbreakable Vows.
A world like that would be very different then the one described in canon Harry Potter or in HPMOR, and that is why EY nerfed it. In the end, I think it boils down to this: You have to think not in the form of some group trying to take over with their new but ethically dubious system, but rather think in the form of their existing form the beginning a much better system then the one we know, and so everyone uses that one instead, despite the ethical problems. (Human nature being what it is, people can accept even large amount of ethical wrongness if they benefit enough from it. Just look at the example of slavery in the real world.)
What do you mean by "this sort of thing?" There's no implication that Unbreakable Vows are illegal, although coercing a third party into being a binder for them is, for understandable reasons.
How do you envision a network of Unbreakable Vows coming into existence and being implemented in practice? Given a sufficiently sophisticated and insightful Vow drafting system, I can imagine that society would be better off under such a system than under traditional government, but society doesn't simply jump to optimums by default.
I meant using the Imperius for the purpose of forcing people be the binder to your Unbreakable Vows. More precisely, I would envision a society with some form of slavery, in which the slaves were made to serve as binder to the Unbreakable Vows of their masters.
As to how I envision this system coming into existence, I imagine that when the first hunter-gatherers were settling down and moving over to farming, rather then falling into the system which they fell into in our world (that is to say governments, which do work, although inefficiently), they used the much better alternative of networks of Unbreakable Vows.
(In fact, in any universe were there is such a powerful and easy to implement commitment mechanism I would expect it to be used instead of government, as it performs all the tasks governments to do, but better. Again, there is a reason why EY nerfed it so hard. Using a system of Unbreakable Vows is not just an optimum, it is miles and miles better then any possible other system at solving coordination problems, as it is quite literally perfect at solving those problems.)
Even if it is not obvious to everyone that this system is better then normal governance, at least one group/nation/city state of these farmers would use it, and they would out compete everyone else, seeing as they have this amazing magical power to avoid coordination problems, which is a very, very big deal. (As we discussed earlier.)
(Note that this is assuming wizards are around at this point in history, and that they settle down as farmers with everyone else. I think this is a pretty reasonable assumption, but even if it is not true, these same events will happen sooner or later when wizards do eventually come along and settle down.)
Well, it's worth keeping in mind that the Unbreakable Vow was probably not discovered until well after government had been invented; it wasn't around when people were hunter-gatherers. But I think that saying that people "fell into it" skips the interesting question of how it happened. Suffice to say I'm not convinced that it's as strong an attractor as you're making it out to be. You could as easily say we "fell into" a system where everybody in the world is bound by unbreakable vows to serve a single dictator; why do you think the former system is more likely than the latter?
Also, how specifically do you think that a system running by unbreakable vows would outcompete ones that don't? "Avoid coordination problems" is a black box here. In the starting scenario, we have a society bound by sets of Unbreakable Vows between masters, where slaves (who necessarily have some degree of magical powers, otherwise they couldn't act as binders by giving a fraction of them up) are imperiused into binding the vows, among other societies with different forms of government (probably monarchistic, oligarchic, etc.) The proposed endpoint is that eventually, all societies use this system of governments, because it outcompetes them by being better at solving coordination problems. By what process do you expect this to happen? What coordination problems do you expect them to solve, this way, and how (if you posit that they outcompete other countries in war, for example, what specifically do the people in this society do that makes them more effective in war than what other societies are doing, and why do they do it?)
It sounds to me like the devil of such a system is in the details. "Perfect cooperation, solve all coordination problems" sounds good, but if I think in terms of actual people behaving in characteristic ways, I don't see them taking steps to a particularly effective system by default.
Yes, you make good points. You are probably correct in saying that the scenario could go any number of ways. But my most essential point is this: The Unbreakable Vow is literally a perfect coordination system. That is to say, there is no way of Defecting when you made an Unbreakable Vow to Cooperate. Looking at governments around us, compared to a system like that, they look like nothing more then a hodgepodge of inefficient hacks. People hacked up that (comparative) kludge of a system, because there is nothing better. If there was, I think it's unlikely that they would ignore it and set up a kludgy government like ours instead. In fact, someone from that world would probably find our notions of "government" insane and laughable. (And that person would be right. Compared to a network of Unbreakable Vows, it is.)
My point is, this system is not only better then ours, but so much better that ours pales in comparison. Yes, the devil is in the details, but still,what you are proposing is that that everyone ignores the much better option and settles for the kludgey system that we have. May I suggest that perhaps that is nothing more than status quo bias?
And yes, if the Unbreakable Vow was invented after governments were, the government would try to crack down on this system, to preserve its own power if nothing else. But throughout history, many governments have cracked down on many good ideas, and often the good ideas eventually are accepted. I think that it would be especially true for this system, which is, as I said earlier, simply better then any other possible way of solving coordination problems.
(Although, please note that the system we are discussing (with imperiused binders) is actually a bit more complex, and so a bit worse than a form of the Unbreakable Vow which had no cost to the binder or did not require a binder. But my points still stand, as even though this system is not quite perfect, it still is heads and tails better than the systems of governments.)
One last thing: You asked for details of how society with this network would be better than society with a normal government. It is better in a lot of ways, and here I can not give a full listing of them, but think back for a moment in HPMOR to the chapters entitled "Coordination Problems". I think those chapters give a good feel of just how hard coordination problems are to deal with. For some examples of cooperating problems that would affect a nation, here is a short and incomplete list. (By the way, please note that we have for the most part solved these problems pretty decently with laws and governments. But look at the huge room for improvement. Remember that under a system like this one, these all would be absolutely and completely solved problems. There would be nothing left to discus about them.)
And I am sure that given this list to start with you can think of many more.
But on the other hand, you also can't break a vow that turns out after the fact to be a bad idea. Without it, you can adapt to circumstances and then justify your actions as having been appropriate at the time. With it, if you've made a Vow that doesn't adapt well, you're in trouble. A system of Unbreakable Vows is only a perfect coordination system if the vows themselves are perfectly thought out, which people do not achieve by default.
My issue is that you seem to be assuming that people can just "fall into" a perfect system without giving any details for how they reach that optimum rather than getting stalled at some messy hacks where they are likely to remain due to status quo bias.
What I asked for is not simply a list of ways that such a society, if perfected, would have advantages over our own. I can think of those perfectly well myself. What I asked for was an explanation of the specific steps by which you expect a society would achieve those implementations. For instance, you start out with a regular society, with crime. The Unbreakable Vow is discovered. What steps, specifically, do you believe will occur which result in the endpoint of a society where everyone is bound by a network of Unbreakable Vows to commit no crime?
Just because it seems obvious to you that the end result would be better doesn't mean that people would implement it. In a Tragedy of the Commons, there are often ways that the agents involved could arrange to cooperate among each other (each one could provide collateral which will be returned after a given period if they cooperate, but confiscated if they defect, for instance,) so that everyone will have a greater expected utility if they cooperate than if they do not cooperate, and a higher expected utility than if they did not implement a cooperation scheme. But in practice, people don't usually implement such schemes when left to their own devices. To show that people would be likely to adopt such a system, it's not sufficient to demonstrate its advantages.
Words of honor for parole (think prisoners of war etc.) have historically often served as punishments or forms of security, with the major advantage of being light-weight and minimizing costs and suffering. A huge chunk of all crime is committed by repeat offenders. Hence, crime could be cut by something like an order of magnitude just by making UVs a prerequisite for parole.
This requires no special societal shifts, and is in line with existing jurisprudence using things like ankle monitors to deter breaking terms of parole or committing additional crimes.
From this visible success which will save billions of dollars and millions of lives in the long run, can come acceptance and a slippery slope down to more widespread use - perhaps beginning with application upon simple arrest, much like criminal records can begin compilation these days without anyone whining about state security agencies tracking them (as our ancestors surely would have been angry about, but these days no one can even think of why anyone would object to such state tracking).