= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ygert comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (592)
If it is possible to Imperius someone into making magic items/performing rituals... Well, it makes the Imperius Curse just that much more brokenly overpowered. (Not that it isn't brokenly overpowered already.) Imagine Imperioing a random person into being the binder for the Unbreakable Vow you want to make with someone. It completely removes the nerf EY gave the Unbreakable Vow. (At least for people willing to throw around the Imperius curse like that.)
So you're replacing 'lose a portion of magic' with 'risk being sent to Azkaban'? It changes the cost of binding but it certainly doesn't remove it.
Well, as Quirrell pointed out, the restrictions of the Unbreakable Vow are easy to get around if you're creative. They're simply the reason that it's so little used as a function of regular society.
Exactly! But if you could Imperius someone into being your binder, that would remove that cost, and so the Unbreakable Vow would be used a lot more. Therefore, it must not be possible to do that. (Or maybe everyone is just too stupid to think of the possibility, which actually is consistent with the wizarding world we've seen...)
The Imperius curse is one of the Unforgivables. Using it to coerce a binder for the Unbreakable Vow is Not Allowed. The fact that being convicted of using it carries an Azkaban sentence probably prevents people from using it casually.
At best, the Imperius curse could make the Unbreakable Vow common in irregular society, the segment that casually breaks laws that could get them put away for life if they're caught.
I was more thinking of the Lucius Malfoy type. It is well enough established that the way the Wizarding legal system works, with a little bit of effort he can get away with almost anything. In addition, he seems to be the type of person to most benefit from Unbreakable Vows: That is to say he deals with many contacts, and most of them are not the most trustworthy people in the world (and that is putting it mildly).
Lucius's social capital is limited. Some of the Wizengamot are his fast allies, some are simply biased in favor of the nobility, but if he was regularly being accused of imperiusing people, and showed signs of more and more people holding to agreements with him that were clearly not in their interests, he'd probably get the aurors on his trail. Except for the people who're Death Eaters themselves, or most of the way there, he'd go from "One of Us, even if he's involved in some sketchy stuff" to "A pressing threat."
Your points are good, and I understand what you are saying, and that probably is enough reason to accept why Lucius is not imperioing people in the story, without positing that you cannot bind an Unbreakable Vow while under an Imperius.
However, with that said, I don't think you understand just how powerful the Unbreakable Vow is. There is a reason why EY nefed it so much in HPMOR, and if you can simply get around that with a simple Imperius curse... Maybe in this alternate world the Imperius curse would still be illegal, but I doubt it. Because the people who use the Imperius curse have the full power of the Unbreakable Vow at their backs, and they would quickly have the laws changed to their whims.
("But how is the Unbreakable Vow that powerful?" some may ask. Well, it is a complete and utter solution to any game theoretic problem, at all. For example in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma, the Nash equilibrium is Defect-Defect. But if you use the Unbreakable Vow, you can get both sides to Cooperate. (And both sides will agree to the Unbreakable Vow because Cooperate-Cooperate gives them a better result than Defect-Defect.) And so much of your normal human interaction is that kind of game, which is trivially solvable if you have such a powerful commitment mechanism.)
A (non-nerfed) Unbreakable Vow is even more powerful than that. A person under an Unbreakable Vow is an AGI programmed in human wetware by a human using nothing more precise than ordinary words. Leaving aside FOOMs based on hardware speed and recursive self-improvement, the entire content of the sequences about AGIs and Friendliness applies.
I think you're overestimating how powerful the Unbreakable Vow is, on a social level. People who use the Imperius Curse do not automatically cooperate with each other as fellow imperiusers. They don't form a unified pro-Imperius voting bloc. Any individual who tries to bind people in this way is a social threat to anyone who doesn't trust them absolutely. Each person who behaves in such a way is a potential candidate trying to take over society, so anyone who tries it is practically inviting absolute war against themselves.
Aha! I think I spot the misunderstanding: In this scenario, no one is trying to "bind people in this way". I am not positing that you do use the Imperius curse to make other people make an Unbreakable Vow to you, but rather I am positing that pairs of people both agree to make an Unbreakable Vow between the pair of them (with the Imperius curse used on the binder), so that they can reap the benefits of mutual cooperation.
As such, it is absurd to say they wouldn't form a unified voting block. Their power comes from the fact that they are magically unified, so that they can trust one another absolutely.
In that case, they might be able to form a unified voting bloc, but even so they're going to appear as an active threat to everyone else. Things like this are among the reasons why the Imperius curse is as forbidden as it is. If the people attempting this were caught, it wouldn't matter if they were all voting in favor of its legality, any more than we would let convicted murdering congressmen try to pass a bill legalizing murder. It's not something that the rest of society is likely to be amenable to if a bunch of lawmakers stand up for it, the fact that they would vote for it at all would be highly suspicious and threatening to their social standings.