Thank you for pointing out this aspect. It is a valid argument, and so the question is, how do you phrase it to avoid that. (A similar point was also made by Eugine_Nier) In a certain sense, this is the exact same problem as the one of FAI. (Which we all know is very hard.) Upon reflection, I don't think the Unbreakable Vow is so strict in its interpretation of Vows, because if it were, safe Unbreakable Vows at all would be next to impossible. We do see Unbreakable Vows happening in the story though, so that is evidence for magic being slightly flexible in its interpretation of Vows.
Of course, magic does not exist in real life, and so we cannot do experiments on it to see how "strict" and literal the Unbreakable Vow is, so we cannot fully tell if such a system would actually work or not. It just depends on the author, really.
But if Unbreakable Vows are loose enough to be used the way they are both in canon and in HPMOR without screwing the participants over, I think it probably is good enough to work in our scenario, at least if we make sure to use very user-dependent wording. In other words, I think that a Vow something like " I vow that I under a reasonable human interpretation of it" would probably be OK. (Remember in canon and HPMOR we see people making such Vows without the last clause, and the Vows don't seem to screw them over, so if we are extra careful and add on extra clauses like that, it seems likely that it could work.)
But, of course, what we really want to do before putting these Vows into mass production is to do some experiments, see how they actually work in practice, see if they are safe. Sadly, they do not exist in real life, so this question might never be solved.
Um . . . I think you are still misunderstanding my objection. From the same sentence as the point I'm criticizing:
[A law] is costly to implement, and in general would cause . . . bad effects
Those are good points in favor of a libertarian perspective on public policy. Interpretive difficulties don't belong on that list. To quote Sesame Street, one thing on your list just isn't like the others.
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: