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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 can buy the initiative progressing as far as application of vows upon arrest (although at this point I'm not sure if Ygert is still talking about a system of MoR vows which require the sacrifice of some of a bonder's power, in which case I suspect it wouldn't get that far.) But I find it doubtful that it would progress to the point of everyone being bonded to commit no crimes.
The existence of real life government initiatives which have saved large amounts of money and lives have not led the public to conclude that government initiatives in general are trustworthy and should be expanded, so I'm not convinced that the success of such an initiative would be viewed as a mandate for its expansion.
The costs is an issue of friction; in a vacuum with a spherical Unbreakable Vow, would everyone be bound? Eventually. Why not?
Given the high reported cost, there will be lots of people it's not worth binding, but the exact trade-off will vary. Given the high cost of security and opportunity costs, the cost will have to be large to justify not binding quite a few people (consider how many scores of thousands of dollars it costs to keep an ordinary criminal in prison one year).
Look at what the public does, not what (some of) it says. Governments keep expanding.
Government keeps expanding in some respects, but countries often do not rush to implement programs even when they've proven effective in other countries.
I come back here and I find that gwern has made some of the points I wanted to make, and some point even beyond that. As gwern point out, programs similar in goal and expense although lesser in scope exist in the world today. They have been implemented, so saying that in some (or even most) circumstances countries don't implement this kind of program, is, if not a flawed argument, at least an incomplete one.
Remember how earlier in HPMOR (chapter 47) Harry swore to take as an enemy whoever it was that killed Narcissa Malfoy? It was no an unbreakable vow, but the same principle applies. Not only was he very careful, with many conditions laid upon the pledge, but the first condition said that Draco could release him from the pledge at any time. There is no danger of a vow like that being not perfectly thought out, because if something goes wrong, you can just have whoever you swore it too annul it. I understand that getting a perfect wording is not trivial, but if you just keep a human in the loop like that, you can avoid most errors.
And a clarification:
In a certain sense I am talking about them, as the whole thing started from a discussion of what would happen if we used a specific method to get around the disadvantage, but in practice I am not really talking about them, as with the downside basically gone, there is no real difference between them and an Unbreakable Vow like in canon, with no downside. In other words, I am talking about Unbreakable Vows with no downside, but that could either be the ones we were talking about (with the downside, but with it overcome) or the simpler version which does not have a downside to start out with, and it does not really matter which.
Harry is one of the most intelligent and rational people in the world, and took great care in designing that oath, (which, as you point out, is not unbreakable,) and he's still in a position for it to screw him over, since if Draco's father has been doing his best to change his son's sympathies, then Draco may not be inclined to release Harry from the Vow even if it turns out Dumbledore burned his mother for good reasons.
If Harry had taken an Unbreakable Vow, then even with the escape clause, he would probably be obligated to treat Dumbledore as his enemy right now, with no way to get Draco to release him from it.
There's plenty of danger in an imperfectly thought out vow, even if you add a clause that someone can release you from it. Having someone who could release you from your vow isn't much help if you're already dead due to having been unable to act in self defense, for instance. Supposing you have to go down to the equivalent of a local police station to get released from a Vow, I would suggest that this probably retains most of the problems of being unable to break the vows at all.
If you think it doesn't matter which, I have to suspect that you're not thinking very hard of the implications of the MoR method.
Not everyone can be easily imperiused, nor is everyone capable of casting the spell, and it is probably impossible for a single person to keep a large number of people imperiused at once (canon doesn't say whether it's possible to imperius more than one person at a time, but provides no evidence that it is, and if it were, we could expect people like Voldemort to make extensive use of this.)
If the people being used as binders are not controlled perpetually, then we have a segment of the population which is being victimized in what many humans would regard as one of the most abhorrent ways possible, being routinely mind controlled into performing acts to which they would not consent of their own volition. These people, to put it lightly, do not like the segment of the population which is doing this to them. The people exploiting them need to make arrangements to keep them safely under control, as with chattel slavery. If such arrangements aren't strong enough, they're likely to engage in violent uprisings (although unlikely to succeed if and when they do, they're less powerful and less well coordinated.)
Not only does the society have to invest labor and resources in keeping this segment of the population under wraps, any enemies who want to destabilize this society would do well to target this system. Kind of like the helot system, which was convenient for the Spartans in terms of productivity and military strength, except for the fact that any time they stayed away from home for too long, they were in danger of a revolt, and they had to make all the other city states they dealt with swear to support the system, since it would be so dangerous for them if anyone tried to destabilize it.
You can increase the security by keeping the people shut away somewhere, but then you lose the productivity of the people being used as binders.
Probably the most efficient method would be to force all the binders into unbreakable oaths not to rebel. You are, of course, still losing a significant portion of the total magical powers of the population by using unbreakable vows en-masse like this, and far from other countries seeing and wanting to copy this system, they're liable to see it as either an exploitable weakness or a human rights violation, in which case this society could be facing trade sanctions, embargoes, or even war.
And of course, you still have the issue of how society undergoes the steps to reach this point.
Look at how effective those are in the real world. You have countries ignoring sanctions and embargoes because there's a lot of money to be made that way. As for wars with large coalitions, you have the inevitable issues of members suspecting other members of not holding up their end of the war, or using the war to unfairly increase their power vis-a-vis the other members of the coalition.
Of course, it's not hard to solve all these problems using unbreakable vows, but well. ;)
But you also have success stories of sanctions and embargos inflicting serious pain: just to name the ones I know of off the top of my head, Japan apparently felt itself forced into WWII by a US embargo of necessary supplies, North Korea remains a hellhole and has trouble selling stuff like it used to which forced it to come to the negotiating table over the bank embargos, and Iran is currently grappling with uncontrollable inflation (which may result in hyperinflation) which is attributed to the existing relatively mild sanctions.
You are right, Harry did not add enough layers of precautions. As such, he is in a position for it to screw him over. A truly well thought out Vow would have several escape clauses like this, to different people, and also a clause temporarily suspending the Vow while you go to have it removed if you truly believe that the situation warrants its removal.
Even that might not be enough, but remember: Harry thought his oath out in less than a minute. I thought out my additions in not much more. I imagine that if someone smart brainstormed this for a couple of hours, they would figure out even more elaborate and foolproof mechanisms. And once it gets going, there will be people who spend their whole careers on the question, refining the answer even further.
I think we have a very large difference of opinions here. Remember that in the real world, most societies with slaves lasted quite a long while. Add onto that several additional factors that are greatly to the advantage of the masters and not to the advantage of the slaves, and you see why I think there is not much of a difference.
Numbers. In the example you gave, of the Helot system, please not that there were seven times as many helots as non-helots. That's right, seven times as many. In this system, you would not need even nearly a one-to one relationship. I would guess that there would be probably no more then one slave needed for every five or six people. This reduces their ability to revolt by so much that it is nearly impossible to compare it.
Magic. I would envision the slaves not having access to wands except when binding a Vow, giving access to wands to only a small fraction of the slave population at a time. Add on to that the fact the the slaves would not get much magical training, and that they have their magic reserves permanently depleted, and you will see that the masters have another insurmountable advantage.
The Imperius Curse. During the time when the slaves do have a wand, they would be under the Imperius Curse. This would not need more than one slave to be controlled by someone's Imperius Curse at any one point. And remember, when you say that not everyone can be controlled by this curse: In canon, it was a huge surprise that Harry managed to throw it off so easily, the kind of thing you can only get if you are the hero of the story. Most people resistant to it are only that way due to a large amount of willpower built up over the years. And you can just execute people like that.
Unbreakable Vows. I don't think these are needed, as the other factors cover the possibility of a revolt very well, but if needed, some slaves could be forced into an unbreakable vow not to rebel.
Remember that the concept of "human rights violations" are something very new, and they did not stop basically every nation that ever existed from keeping some sort sort of slaves. Remember that for thousands of years, there where, sadly, a lot of slaveholding and other human rights violations. And in no case did this result in the moral outrage from the surrounding countries, and certainly not to the point where they declared war or started trade embargos. (By the way, just thinking about it makes me very much appreciate the moral progress humanity has made in the last few hundred years. It truly is incredible if you think about it.)
We have discussed this a lot, and have provided a lot of explanation about how I do not really consider this an issue, and others have chimed in, adding their views on the subject. After all that, I believe we have provided many different angles of the explanation of why this is. If there is a specific part of it that you object to or want clarified, I am happy to discuss it further, but other than that I am not sure that there is more to discuss.
Most civilizations though, did have rules about how you were allowed to treat slaves. The treatment of slaves in antebellum America was worse than in Babylon circa 1700 BC. To get people whose rights are that disregarded by society, you generally need people who're already regarded as an outgroup unworthy of basic respect.
If we're positing that the legal system started in a society with a caste system containing something comparable to the Paraiahs, I could buy this as a natural progression. But what you're suggesting entails rather worse treatment than most civilizations have allowed with respect to their slaves. I find it very strange that you think this is something that would happen so naturally as to need no explanation.
Do you think that nobody in this community could think up ways to restructure society that would be more practical than what we have now, without positing elements that don't exist in real life? That nobody could come up with a better education system, or public works system, or so forth? If you think that the fact that a system would be advantageous is sufficient to explain its adoption, that's a natural conclusion, but it's one that I find awfully doubtful.
We have some very suboptimal systems in our world, not just for lack of some fantasy element that would make our job easier, but because humans are not naturally that good at optimizing.
Keep in mind also that these people who have their magic drained and their wands kept away, who're not trusted to be willing contributors to society, are lost productivity from society's perspective. If we say that the binders, plus the people who're employed in overseeing them, add up to a fifth of the population, that's a significant reduction in productivity. Probably not quite 20%, since there's still some work they could do without magic, but considering how magic dependent wizarding society is, it would be pretty minimal compared to what ordinary citizens do.
In what ways, specifically, do you think this system would manage to more-than-account-for this loss of productivity?
You yourself provided an answer to this. It could be a natural progression from a caste system like that. I disagree that these slaves are treated worse than most civilizations through history have kept their slaves. While in the real world slaves had all sorts of horrible things happen to them, here the only bad thing that happens to them is that they don't get to use magic. Throughout human history, most people lived perfectly fine and happily without magic. While yes, there would be the aspect of having to live in a society where everyone else gets to use magic and you don't, I don't think that just that means that this system gives the slaves "rather worse treatment than most civilizations have allowed with respect to their slaves".
I think that you are comparing this to the wrong things. This is not just a better education system or a public works system, this is the absolute removal of a set problems that has plagued humanity since there was such a thing as humanity.
I would prefer to offer the analogy as something like this: This (Unbreakable Vow based) system is to the current system as democracy is to a dictatorship (or some other form of pre-democratic government). In the world, many societies found that democratic forms of government where just better than what they had, and so they changed. I am not saying that it was easy or instantaneous, and in many countries the change has not happened (yet). But democracy overwhelmed the entrenched systems (in some nations at least) simply because the people of these countries decided it was better at fulfilling their needs.
And I would say that the difference between a democracy and any other form of government is tiny in comparison to the difference between any form of government and this system. After all, this system is perfect at solving coordination problems, and democracy is not really a very good form of government, it just is better then all other forms of government that have been tried...
I think we already settled this. I gave a laundry list of problems that could easily be solved by this system of Unbreakable Vows, and of course that is just a small subset of the worlds coordination problems. On the other hand, with magic, everyone already basically has whatever they need. Remember how Harry described it as a "zeroth world country"? The wizarding world is already basically a post-scarcity economy. As such, thier is a lot less meaning to a drop in productivity.
But even without that, what proportion of wizardry jobs actually need magic to do? Most wizarding workers we have seen are shopkeepers, bureaucrats and the like, which don't really need magic in their activities. And yes, there has to be someone to make the magic items, but even if we assume that there are indeed out of sight magical sweatshops filled with workers making magic items, it would be silly to assume they make up more than 80% of the population, would it not?
I doubt that "the only bad thing that happens to them is that they don't get to use magic." After all, these are people who're regularly mind-controlled into sacrificing their power against their will. They're kept from using magic because they're not trusted not to be enemies of the system. Do you seriously expect that they'll be well treated aside from the fact that they have no legal right to their own mental autonomy?
This sort of system could arise from a preexisting caste system with a sufficiently low caste already available, but if you're positing something as a historical inevitability, then you can't just handwave something like that away; it's not as if this is something you could get in just any civilization. The Paraiah class itself isn't nearly large enough to account for the proportion of the population we're already discussing.
If you try to expand the sector of the population that's sufficiently low on the totem pole as to receive no right to mental autonomy, then you could be looking at large scale class revolts before you have a chance to implement the vows on more than a small sector of the population.
Democracy was invented about 2500 years ago. It gave the ancient Greeks such a profound sociological advantage over other countries that they outcompeted all their local neighbors until, in short order, other countries were either adopting the system or being subsumed by them. Except, no, that didn't happen, they were dominated by various autocracies, and democracy vanished from the region for more than a millennium. The Roman Empire expanded far beyond the reaches of the Roman Republic.
Democracy has become so successful in the last few centuries not because provides countries with an innate competitive advantage, but because a) in recent history, some of the most powerful countries in the world have made a deliberate effort to export or impose democracy, and b) it's an appealing memeplex.
You can call this system "The absolute removal of a set of problems that has plagued humanity since there was a such thing as humanity," but that doesn't really say much about how useful it is. The eradication of sneezing would be the absolute removal of a problem that has plagued humanity since there was a such thing as humanity, but that doesn't mean it would be tremendously helpful. The specific examples you gave for how such a system would be useful were
In a country like, say, Finland, these aren't especially pressing problems. Yes, there's crime, but the rates are pretty low. It's not as if it subtracts even 10% of the country's productivity. When a Finnish person pays their taxes for public works, they don't have to worry that not enough people will pitch in and the work won't be paid for. A Finnish person can safely assume that when they deal with a business, they'll get the good or service they paid for. The chances of a coup in Finland are practically nil, and treason is not a significant danger.
These are problems that existing societies on earth have already managed to mostly solve. A better education system, where, for instance, every child of at least average intelligence comes out really understanding empiricism, rationality, and their own comparative advantage, is likely to be considerably more useful to such a society, without raising any tricky ethical issues.
Every character we've seen in the series uses magic in their daily lives. Even assuming that abilities such as being able to clean objects that would take several minutes of manual labor in a second with a spell, or organize a stockroom in seconds by waving a wand around, do not account for a large proportion of the productivity of the labor force, keep in mind that the magical abilities of the populace are largely responsible for the wizarding world being a "zeroth world country," as Harry puts it. The longevity of the populace, and much of their medical technology, relies on the innate healing and magical reservoirs of the magically gifted population. You're costing a significant proportion of the population about half their lifespans, in addition to a large portion of their quality of life (by losing their magical powers and having no right to mental autonomy, they're forced way, way down the totem pole status-wise, as well as being unable to access many of the conveniences of the magical population,) and a significant part of their productivity, in exchange for solving problems that other societies on earth have already managed to mostly solve.
OK. I think our main disagreement is simply that we have different notions of how advantageous such a system actually is, and if it is advantageous enough to overcome the disadvantages of having a slave system. You seem skeptical that this system really is that broken. I think it is.
The list I gave was a list of the small scale social problems that would be directly resolved, as that was what you asked for. Yes, those are ones which modern government has mostly solved, but there are many more. The Unbreakable Vow solves one of the key parts of human interaction. It's the cure to many human problems.
As a concrete larger scale example, see for instance the financial crash that happened in 2008. Now I don't claim to know all the myriad reasons that caused it, but from what I hear of how people have been describing how it happened, it was exactly the sort of problem that could have been solved with Unbreakable Vows. (And it obviously was not solvable even by the most modern form of government, as it did happen, despite modern governments existing.)
Or if you would prefer a fictional example: What if Peter Pettigrew had made an Unbreakable Vow not to betray the Potters? That would utterly have changed the story of the Harry Potter books, and in a way that could not be replicated by any form of government.
You can see cases like these all the time on various scales if you look, and government does not seem to be solving them. (That is not to say that government is useless, government solves some of them, but not all of them.)
But here I will ask you this question: Lets assume that we are in canon Harry Potter where the Unbreakable Vow is not nerfed. There is no cost to making a Vow, and no need for slaves. In this scenario, do you think that civilization would form in a system using the Unbreakable Vow in the ways I described? If not, why did EY nerf the Unbreakable Vow in HPMOR so much? If yes, look at the advantages such a system brings, and ask if those advantages are really outweighed by the disadvantages of having a slave system. (Remembering that most civilization through history have had some sort of slave system or another, and they did quite well in spite of that, so it cannot be that much of a disadvantage.)