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DanielLC comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119 - Less Wrong
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The unbreakable vow is basically giving people the death penalty with no way to ask for any kind of exemption due to unforeseen circumstances. It's not something to be used lightly. Also, in Methods of Rationality someone permanently has to lose some magic, which is also something not to be used lightly.
Don't follow. You see "making an actually binding promise" as equivalent to dying?
I suspect the Unbreakable Vow is being parsed here as adding high-level terms to someone's utility function, and that that's being interpreted as equivalent to erasing the previous personality.
I'm not so convinced, myself, neither that that's the right way to look at the spell nor that values are that tightly linked to... not sure what I want to call it. Personhood? Unique agency? Whatever we actually care about when we object to murder, anyway.
EDIT: Never mind, after looking through a page or so of DanielLC's comments I think that sentence actually expands to "[presumptively] giving people the death penalty [for breaking their Vow] with no way to ask for [...] exemption[s..., etc]." Pretty sure that's not how the Vow works in Eliezer's world, though, after reading the bit where Harry undergoes it.
No. I'm saying Unbreakable Vows kill people who break them.
I interpreted it to mean that people could no longer kill in self-defense, and there was no guarantee that they could be safe without ever killing in self-defense.
Hence the example I suggest - whatever price the Unbreakable Vow exacts, there will be things that are worth it, like not going to Azkaban.
Except people are cruel and many of them would rather see criminals in Azkaban than living a relatively normal life. Although to be honest, making criminals chose between Azkaban and the last part of A Clockwork Orangeis pretty awful already in my opinion.
People precommit to punishing criminals because having a precommitment discourages crime--if the criminal can figure out that you'll change your mind once the crime is over with, and not punish them, the prospect of punishment won't work as a deterrent. But if you have to follow through on the precommitment, that may mean you just "cruelly" punished a criminal "even though at this point causing the criminal harm doesn't benefit anyone".
Most people don't consciously think of it this way, but people don't usually know why their own memes spread.