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ygert comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87 - Less Wrong
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Comments (592)
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.)
It could, in theory, have been prevented with unbreakable vows. It could also have been prevented with laws. The trouble was not that if we designed laws to prevent it, they wouldn't have been followed, or that nobody had any idea what sort of laws would have been necessary, but that the people who saw the problem in advance and called for those sorts of laws were in the minority, and even after the fact a lot of people still aren't on board with the sorts of laws that would have prevented it, because they believe it would stifle business interests, because of an ideological Regulation Bad mindset, or a combination of those.
Just because Unbreakable Vows could solve a problem, doesn't mean they would. We can solve all sorts of problems with government, but don't, because we're not that good at using government. You seem to assume that we would default to using Unbreakable Vows perfectly, and I see that as a highly burdensome component of your assertions that requires a lot of evidence.
I think civilization would make extensive use of Unbreakable Vows, and it would have a significant effect. It could, as you point out, prevent events such as Pettigrew betraying the Potters (unless he'd already made a Vow to Voldemort before then, in which case he'd probably have been caught as soon as they tried to put a conflicting Vow on him,) and that sort of thing could completely mangle the story.
But I don't think it would result in perfect coordination. I think the laws would in many cases continue to be poorly thought out and impractical, and the system would continue to be bad at quickly changing laws that proved to be ineffective for the purposes for which they were supposedly designed. Politics would continue to be influenced by people more driven by tribal ideology than by evidence of what makes their countries better off.
I think the core of these problems is not a lack of a sufficiently powerful enforcement mechanism on agreements, but that the sanity waterline simply isn't very high.
Perhaps. I see the way which you are looking at it, and while I don't agree, I want to say that I think I understand why you look at it this way.
I want to make the point that Unbreakable Vows are way better than laws in this form of situation. A law is something that is hard to get perfect, is costly to implement, and in general would cause the bad effects that you listed. On the other hand, Unbreakable Vows are not regulations, they would be the companies and people themselves agreeing to self-regulate, and while this might not be enforceable through normal contract law, it is with Unbreakable Vows. (They would arrange and agree to the Unbreakable Vows because they themselves do not want a crash. The companies and people involved did not want the crash after all...)
One might say though that no one predicted the crash upfront, so why would they have made the Unbreakable Vows? This is a valid point, and is perhaps the great weakness of the system. But all in all it is not insurmountable, as I think that in principle these things are predictable, (That is to say they are not truly random) and with the right incentives, people will choose to prepare for everything,
So the big question is how prevalent and powerful the effects would be. I think this boils down in essence to the most fundamental political divide. A libertarian would say that an all-powerful contract enforcement mechanism would obliviate the need for a government at all, as after all that is what a government really boils down to in a libertarian view, and Unbreakable Vows just do that better. On the other hand, someone who is more conservative/statist would say that while it would have a significant effect on the contract system, the government does do things that don't boil down to just enforcing contracts (from that viewpoint), and so there would still be a need for a government, which would continue in much the way governments do nowadays.
So I think that seems to be our main difference. You are said :
While on the other hand I am saying that there would be no such thing as politics or government as we know it in this situation, as with a perfect contract enforcement mechanism, they are completely unnecessary, and would be abandoned.
A society based on contracts based entirely on unbreakable wows would kill far too many people, or alternatively, would require fairly insane levels of OCD checking that no contract conflicts with any other. And, as a practical matter, asking people to submit to lethal enforcement of employment contracts, and other minor business is just not going to fly. A multi-million-galleon deal? Sure. Having someone fix your plumbing... eh. No.
On the other hand, the government would be warped completely out of recognition. Because oaths of office would be unbreakable, and based on a long tradition of very careful wording. So you get government by the utterly incorruptible oath bound. Which would look nothing like any government that has ever existed. Because it would have perfect trust from the citizenry, virtually no agency problems, and no need for any checks or balances other than the oaths whatsoever.
Wait, is the Unbreakable Vow really unbreakable, or does it just kill you when you break it? I thought it was the first.
The latter
This isn't a fact that distinguishes a law from a contract. Problems of interpretation are just as big an issue in contract litigation as in legal compliance.
True, but the main difference is one of choice: You get to choose what contracts you sign, but not what laws you follow. If you get screwed by a misinterpreted contract, well that's sad, but you are partially responsible for it, as you can view what happened as a slip in your foresight, you made a mistake, didn't plan for this eventuality, and you paid the price for that slip-up.
On the other hand, if it's a law, some dolt in wherever the capital of your country is made the mistake, but you have to suffer the consequences. You see the difference? If someone makes a bad choice and hurts themselves, it is sad, and they learn for next time, but it is an accepted basic moral fact that ultimately people should be able to make their own choices, for good or ill.
Maybe it's just me being too free market/libertarian, but it feels a lot sadder when someone screws something up for others then if that person makes a mistake that only hurts themselves.
I'm not trying to criticize your libertarian argument - I'm actually fairly sympathetic to those types of policy arguments. It's just that interpretive difficulty isn't a difference between statute and contract.
Writing text with a clear and unambiguous meaning is hard, even if one desires to write clearly. And the causes of interpretive difficulties are strongly parallel:
- differing policy preferences of individual legislators vs. different economic incentives of contract counter-parties.
- issues can be unanticipated by all parties, which means the outcome of a dispute is essentially random (from an ex ante perspective).
In short, it's just a fact about language that your choices don't really affect the clarity of your legal obligations (either statutory or contractual). The deadweight loss of regulation isn't a result of unclear regulation - even the clearest distortion of the market outcome costs some surplus value from the transaction.
Your HPMoR-trained spellchecker has led you wrong, friend.
The Oxford English Dictionary on 'obliviate' (v.):
3 cited examples similar to ygert's usage. Go get yourself a real dictionary before you presume to correct other people.
'This indeed a word, and it's not impossible that it might be what ygert intended. But I think it's much more likely that it was meant to be "obviate".
Huh. My copy of the OED agrees with Merriam-Webster (and everything I can find online) that there's no real word between "obliterative" and "oblivion". What edition are you referencing?
Anyway, "obviate the need for" is such a common phrasing that I don't feel terribly unjustified in my presumption. I suppose that's for ygert to decide, though.
How does this distinguish an Unbreakable Vow from a law? If the companies had foreseen the effects of their business practices, they would have wanted a law against them, and adhered to the law so that they could avoid the crash. How do Unbreakable Vows solve the problem of the companies not acknowledging the danger of their practices and thus not wanting them to be regulated?
People did predict the crash up front in real life. It wasn't enough for people to pass laws to prevent it. In fact, a system of Unbreakable Vows as you describe could quite easily be harder to put in place than a law. A law can be passed if only the legislators are convinced it's a good idea, but the system of vows requires the businesspeople to be convinced it's a good idea.
I thought you had in mind a system where a body passes laws, and the whole population takes vows to obey all those laws. This would solve issues of noncompliance, but not issues of stupid laws. I suspect that the system you're recommending would be less well coordinated than what we already have, because the abundance of historical evidence suggests that people tend to be very bad at choosing when and how to self regulate, and it's not as if we don't have mechanisms in real life that people could use to prevent most defection.
It seems like your position is "If we had a mechanism to prevent all defection, people would become smart about self regulating." I think that's really, really unlikely.
No. False. Let's model it in game theory terms. There are a number of players (companies) and each one chooses to act responsibly or not. If all or most players act responsibly, they all reap the benefits of no crash. If some act irresponsibly, they reap a greater benefit. But if a high enough proportion of companies act irresponsibly, there is a crash and everybody loses. (This kind of problem is a very common type of game theory problem, which has been analysed a lot. (It's actually a close relative of the Prisoner's Dilemma.)) The Nash equilibrium of this game is everyone defecting and acting irresponsibly, which leads to a bad result that no one wants, and everyone is unhappy.
So how do we solve it, we can make laws which give a negative incentive to acting irresponsibly, and thus move the equilibrium of the game. (And of course the players do want that, as it simply gives them a better outcome from the game.) And that's fine, it sometimes works, but some other times the law's negative incentives don't work out, and the equilibrium is everyone acting irresponsibly again. This is because the law cannot perfectly control what people do, as one can always break the law, and often get away with it.
An Unbreakable Vow is unbreakable though, and so rather then have government regulations, which are clumsy and sometimes don't work, if the companies have that much contractual power, that is they can make contracts that are actually and completely unbreakable... One of the simplest solutions in game theory to problems of this type is that you just allow the agents to precommit to their strategies.
As you can see now, this is not the system I had in mind at all. Remember, what is the point of governments? To enforce the kind of thing that the Unbreakable Vows enforce much better. That is why in this scenario I very much doubt there would be any sort of government as we know it at all.
Remember, actually people are quite good at self regulating. In a roundabout way, of course, by establishing governments and empowering them to regulate. That whole roundabout method of having social contracts enforced by a government seems rather roundabout and convoluted if it could be bypassed and the contracts enforced directly by magic.
But if breaking the law and getting away with it is unlikely, then the rational actors won't try. What the companies would have wanted, had they been rational good predictors, was a well enforced law which heavily punished defection. This way they would all have had higher expected utility than the scenario in which there was no law.
But they did not push for this. In fact, all the lobbying action was in the other direction. The business practices that resulted in the crash were previously illegal. If you want to make a convincing case that they would have done better in a system with an unbreakable enforcement mechanism, you've got to demonstrate that in spite of appearances, an adequate enforcement mechanism, rather than adequate predictive power and rationality, was what was missing.
Government doesn't just provide people with an enforcement mechanism for coordination problems, it also provides a workaround for lack of information, and ideally for irrationality, in coordination problems.
Suppose that chemical A which is used in a manufacturing process is highly toxic, and that chemical gets into the environment in the course of the process, and causes a lot of harm to people and wildlife. 0.2% of the population (those who understand the chemistry and have read the relevant studies) know this, and of those, all who are not employed by the manufacturing company agree that the chemical should not be used in that manufacturing process. The other 99.8% has no opinion. If the population has perfect enforcement for agreements, but no oversight body, and all agreements are worked out on an individual basis, then the manufacturing company will continue using the chemical, affecting everyone, not just the people who know enough to care. If there is an oversight body charged with creating rules for the population whose job it is to pass rules that are in the public's interests, whether or not the public knows enough to care about them, the people who know about the effects of the chemical can go to the oversight body and say "as you can see, the evidence favors this chemical being harmful, and we all agree you should make a rule against using it," and the oversight body can look at the evidence and pass the rule. By having a body whose full time job it is to look at issues that potentially warrant the creation of rules, judge evidence, and determine which rules would be good to pass, the population as a whole can review more issues which potentially impact the whole society, at less opportunity cost to the whole population. If everyone took the time to research every issue that might be worth making a rule about, they wouldn't have time to do anything else.
The "irrational choices" and "lack of information" sections of Yvain's Non-Libertarian FAQ are good reading on this topic.