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.
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".
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.
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...
In what ways, specifically, do you think this system would manage to more-than-account-for this loss of productivity?
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?
...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
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: