Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87

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8 Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87

22nd Dec 2012

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87 — LessWrong

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Desrtopa13y10

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.

pedanterrific13y20

They allowed lawmakers to legalize the Unforgivables during Voldemort's uprising; I have a hard time believing a great many people would object to a bill allowing a service where Aurors Imperius Azkaban inmates to bind vows.

The larger point being, any society could find or make an outgroup sufficiently unsympathetic to allow regulated use of the Imperius for the public good.

0ygert13y

This might be, and they might in fact succeed or they might fail. It seems the kind of thing someone could write a very interesting story about, and if that story is ever written, I would like to read it. But I find it unlikely in a world like this that there even would be a government with laws against this sort of thing in the first place. The propose of government is to provide a framework in which people can be sure of their fellows Cooperating in prisoner's dilemma type scenarios, and while it works most of the time, a network of Unbreakable Vows would work a lot better then any form of government. As such, it is probable that in this world, rather then there being a system of laws in the first place, it would be a system of Unbreakable Vows. A world like that would be very different then the one described in canon Harry Potter or in HPMOR, and that is why EY nerfed it. In the end, I think it boils down to this: You have to think not in the form of some group trying to take over with their new but ethically dubious system, but rather think in the form of their existing form the beginning a much better system then the one we know, and so everyone uses that one instead, despite the ethical problems. (Human nature being what it is, people can accept even large amount of ethical wrongness if they benefit enough from it. Just look at the example of slavery in the real world.)

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