Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87

Alsadius

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

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 fo... (read more)