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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 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...)

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?

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,

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.

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.

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... (read more)