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.
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.
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:
(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.)
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.
...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
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: