As a concrete larger scale example, see for instance the financial crash that happened in 2008. Now I don’t claim to know all the myriad reasons that caused it, but from what I hear of how people have been describing how it happened, it was exactly the sort of problem that could have been solved with Unbreakable Vows. (And it obviously was not solvable even by the most modern form of government, as it did happen, despite modern governments existing.)
It could, in theory, have been prevented with unbreakable vows. It could also have been prevented with laws. The trouble was not that if we designed laws to prevent it, they wouldn’t have been followed, or that nobody had any idea what sort of laws would have been necessary, but that the people who saw the problem in advance and called for those sorts of laws were in the minority, and even after the fact a lot of people still aren’t on board with the sorts of laws that would have prevented it, because they believe it would stifle business interests, because of an ideological Regulation Bad mindset, or a combination of those.
Just because Unbreakable Vows could solve a problem, doesn’t mean they would. We can solve all sorts of problems with government, but don’t, because we’re not that good at using government. You seem to assume that we would default to using Unbreakable Vows perfectly, and I see that as a highly burdensome component of your assertions that requires a lot of evidence.
But here I will ask you this question: Lets assume that we are in canon Harry Potter where the Unbreakable Vow is not nerfed. There is no cost to making a Vow, and no need for slaves. In this scenario, do you think that civilization would form in a system using the Unbreakable Vow in the ways I described? If not, why did EY nerf the Unbreakable Vow in HPMOR so much? If yes, look at the advantages such a system brings, and ask if those advantages are really outweighed by the disadvantages of having a slave system. (Remembering that most civilization through history have had some sort of slave system or another, and they did quite well in spite of that, so it cannot be that much of a disadvantage.)
I think civilization would make extensive use of Unbreakable Vows, and it would have a significant effect. It could, as you point out, prevent events such as Pettigrew betraying the Potters (unless he’d already made a Vow to Voldemort before then, in which case he’d probably have been caught as soon as they tried to put a conflicting Vow on him,) and that sort of thing could completely mangle the story.
But I don’t think it would result in perfect coordination. I think the laws would in many cases continue to be poorly thought out and impractical, and the system would continue to be bad at quickly changing laws that proved to be ineffective for the purposes for which they were supposedly designed. Politics would continue to be influenced by people more driven by tribal ideology than by evidence of what makes their countries better off.
I think the core of these problems is not a lack of a sufficiently powerful enforcement mechanism on agreements, but that the sanity waterline simply isn’t very high.
I think the core of these problems is not a lack of a sufficiently powerful enforcement mechanism on agreements, but that the sanity waterline simply isn’t very high.
Perhaps. I see the way which you are looking at it, and while I don’t agree, I want to say that I think I understand why you look at it this way.
It could, in theory, have been prevented with unbreakable vows. It could also have been prevented with laws. The trouble was not that if we designed laws to prevent it, they wouldn’t have been followed, or that nobody had any idea what sort of laws would have been necessary, but that the people who saw the problem in advance and called for those sorts of laws were in the minority, and even after the fact a lot of people still aren’t on board with the sorts of laws that would have prevented it, because they believe it would stifle business interests, because of an ideological Regulation Bad mindset, or a combination of those.
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...)
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,
I think civilization would make extensive use of Unbreakable Vows, and it would have a significant effect. It could, as you point out, prevent events such as Pettigrew betraying the Potters (unless he’d already made a Vow to Voldemort before then, in which case he’d probably have been caught as soon as they tried to put a conflicting Vow on him,) and that sort of thing could completely mangle the story.
So the big question is how prevalent and powerful the effects would be. I think this boils down in essence to the most fundamental political divide. A libertarian would say that an all-powerful contract enforcement mechanism would obliviate the need for a government at all, as after all that is what a government really boils down to in a libertarian view, and Unbreakable Vows just do that better. On the other hand, someone who is more conservative/statist would say that while it would have a significant effect on the contract system, the government does do things that don’t boil down to just enforcing contracts (from that viewpoint), and so there would still be a need for a government, which would continue in much the way governments do nowadays.
So I think that seems to be our main difference. You are said :
I think the laws would in many cases continue to be poorly thought out and impractical, and the system would continue to be bad at quickly changing laws that proved to be ineffective for the purposes for which they were supposedly designed. Politics would continue to be influenced by people more driven by tribal ideology than by evidence of what makes their countries better off.
While on the other hand I am saying that there would be no such thing as politics or government as we know it in this situation, as with a perfect contract enforcement mechanism, they are completely unnecessary, and would be abandoned.
This isn’t a fact that distinguishes a law from a contract. Problems of interpretation are just as big an issue in contract litigation as in legal compliance.
True, but the main difference is one of choice: You get to choose what contracts you sign, but not what laws you follow. If you get screwed by a misinterpreted contract, well that’s sad, but you are partially responsible for it, as you can view what happened as a slip in your foresight, you made a mistake, didn’t plan for this eventuality, and you paid the price for that slip-up.
On the other hand, if it’s a law, some dolt in wherever the capital of your country is made the mistake, but you have to suffer the consequences. You see the difference? If someone makes a bad choice and hurts themselves, it is sad, and they learn for next time, but it is an accepted basic moral fact that ultimately people should be able to make their own choices, for good or ill.
Maybe it’s just me being too free market/libertarian, but it feels a lot sadder when someone screws something up for others then if that person makes a mistake that only hurts themselves.
I’m not trying to criticize your libertarian argument—I’m actually fairly sympathetic to those types of policy arguments. It’s just that interpretive difficulty isn’t a difference between statute and contract.
Writing text with a clear and unambiguous meaning is hard, even if one desires to write clearly. And the causes of interpretive difficulties are strongly parallel:
differing policy preferences of individual legislators vs. different economic incentives of contract counter-parties.
issues can be unanticipated by all parties, which means the outcome of a dispute is essentially random (from an ex ante perspective).
In short, it’s just a fact about language that your choices don’t really affect the clarity of your legal obligations (either statutory or contractual). The deadweight loss of regulation isn’t a result of unclear regulation—even the clearest distortion of the market outcome costs some surplus value from the transaction.
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.
OK. I might be misunderstanding you. I thought you were saying that a problem with Unbreakable Vows is that they would go by a strict, literal, genie-like interpretation of whatever you say, which would cause bad results. But I might just have been thinking of that because Desrtopa raised an argument of that type a couple of posts ago. If that is not your objection, feel free to restate it in a clearer way. But ultimately, I do suspect we are mostly in agreement, and that there is no particularly major difference between our opinions.
Sure. I’m saying that it is extremely difficult to reduce intended outcome to words.
Both statutes and contracts are attempts to reduce intention to words, and they have a roughly equivalent failure rate. Thus, problems arising from mismatch of word and intent (i.e. interpretive problems) are not a reason to prefer contracts over statutes.
A society based on contracts based entirely on unbreakable wows would kill far too many people, or alternatively, would require fairly insane levels of OCD checking that no contract conflicts with any other. And, as a practical matter, asking people to submit to lethal enforcement of employment contracts, and other minor business is just not going to fly. A multi-million-galleon deal? Sure. Having someone fix your plumbing… eh. No.
On the other hand, the government would be warped completely out of recognition. Because oaths of office would be unbreakable, and based on a long tradition of very careful wording. So you get government by the utterly incorruptible oath bound. Which would look nothing like any government that has ever existed. Because it would have perfect trust from the citizenry, virtually no agency problems, and no need for any checks or balances other than the oaths whatsoever.
“The Unbreakable Vow is too useful to certain wealthy Houses to be outlawed entirely—even though to bind a man’s will through all his days is indeed a dread and terrible act, more fearsome than many lesser rituals that wizards shun. [...] The one who makes the Vow must be someone who could have chosen to do what the Vow demands of them, and they sacrifice that capacity for choice. And the third wizard, the binder, permanently sacrifices a small portion of their own magic, to sustain the Vow forever.
reads to me more like a sort of permanent, irresistible Imperius. I can see it could be meant the other way, though.
’This indeed a word, and it’s not impossible that it might be what ygert intended. But I think it’s much more likely that it was meant to be “obviate”.
Huh. My copy of the OED agrees with Merriam-Webster (and everything I can find online) that there’s no real word between “obliterative” and “oblivion”. What edition are you referencing?
Anyway, “obviate the need for” is such a common phrasing that I don’t feel terribly unjustified in my presumption. I suppose that’s for ygert to decide, though.
I am using the Windows Second Edition release from 2009. Screenshot of the ‘obliviate’ entry I was quoting, which certainly does not say anything about it not existing prior to Rowling: http://i.imgur.com/PFADb.png
Now I’m not sure if you’re serious. The last quote is from the mid-1800s, and the usage is synonymous with “forget” so it wouldn’t make sense in ygert’s context anyway.
So? I use words as rare as that all the time, and it could be an independent invention.
the usage is synonymous with “forget” so it wouldn’t make sense in ygert’s context anyway.
Committing government to oblivion as useless and a waste fits in nicely with quotes 2 and 3.
So to sum up: the word ‘obliviate’ exists before Rowling and you were wrong about it not being a real world; then, you were wrong about it not being in the OED; now, you are wrong that it does not fit the usage; and you are still trying to correct me!
You well deserve your username—the first half anyway.
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 of problem is a very common type of game theory problem, which has been analysed a lot. (It’s actually a close relative of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.)) The Nash equilibrium of this game is everyone defecting and acting irresponsibly, which leads to a bad result that no one wants, and everyone is unhappy.
So how do we solve it, we can make laws which give a negative incentive to acting irresponsibly, and thus move the equilibrium of the game. (And of course the players do want that, as it simply gives them a better outcome from the game.) And that’s fine, it sometimes works, but some other times the law’s negative incentives don’t work out, and the equilibrium is everyone acting irresponsibly again. This is because the law cannot perfectly control what people do, as one can always break the law, and often get away with it.
An Unbreakable Vow is unbreakable though, and so rather then have government regulations, which are clumsy and sometimes don’t work, if the companies have that much contractual power, that is they can make contracts that are actually and completely unbreakable… One of the simplest solutions in game theory to problems of this type is that you just allow the agents to precommit to their strategies.
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.
As you can see now, this is not the system I had in mind at all. Remember, what is the point of governments? To enforce the kind of thing that the Unbreakable Vows enforce much better. That is why in this scenario I very much doubt there would be any sort of government as we know it at all.
Remember, actually people are quite good at self regulating. In a roundabout way, of course, by establishing governments and empowering them to regulate. That whole roundabout method of having social contracts enforced by a government seems rather roundabout and convoluted if it could be bypassed and the contracts enforced directly by magic.
So how do we solve it, we can make laws which give a negative incentive to acting irresponsibly, and thus move the equilibrium of the game. (And of course the players do want that, as it simply gives them a better outcome from the game.) And that’s fine, it sometimes works, but some other times the law’s negative incentives don’t work out, and the equilibrium is everyone acting irresponsibly again. This is because the law cannot perfectly control what people do, as one can always break the law, and often get away with it.
But if breaking the law and getting away with it is unlikely, then the rational actors won’t try. What the companies would have wanted, had they been rational good predictors, was a well enforced law which heavily punished defection. This way they would all have had higher expected utility than the scenario in which there was no law.
But they did not push for this. In fact, all the lobbying action was in the other direction. The business practices that resulted in the crash were previously illegal. If you want to make a convincing case that they would have done better in a system with an unbreakable enforcement mechanism, you’ve got to demonstrate that in spite of appearances, an adequate enforcement mechanism, rather than adequate predictive power and rationality, was what was missing.
As you can see now, this is not the system I had in mind at all. Remember, what is the point of governments? To enforce the kind of thing that the Unbreakable Vows enforce much better. That is why in this scenario I very much doubt there would be any sort of government as we know it at all.
Remember, actually people are quite good at self regulating. In a roundabout way, of course, by establishing governments and empowering them to regulate. That whole roundabout method of having social contracts enforced by a government seems rather roundabout and convoluted if it could be bypassed and the contracts enforced directly by magic.
Government doesn’t just provide people with an enforcement mechanism for coordination problems, it also provides a workaround for lack of information, and ideally for irrationality, in coordination problems.
Suppose that chemical A which is used in a manufacturing process is highly toxic, and that chemical gets into the environment in the course of the process, and causes a lot of harm to people and wildlife. 0.2% of the population (those who understand the chemistry and have read the relevant studies) know this, and of those, all who are not employed by the manufacturing company agree that the chemical should not be used in that manufacturing process. The other 99.8% has no opinion. If the population has perfect enforcement for agreements, but no oversight body, and all agreements are worked out on an individual basis, then the manufacturing company will continue using the chemical, affecting everyone, not just the people who know enough to care. If there is an oversight body charged with creating rules for the population whose job it is to pass rules that are in the public’s interests, whether or not the public knows enough to care about them, the people who know about the effects of the chemical can go to the oversight body and say “as you can see, the evidence favors this chemical being harmful, and we all agree you should make a rule against using it,” and the oversight body can look at the evidence and pass the rule. By having a body whose full time job it is to look at issues that potentially warrant the creation of rules, judge evidence, and determine which rules would be good to pass, the population as a whole can review more issues which potentially impact the whole society, at less opportunity cost to the whole population. If everyone took the time to research every issue that might be worth making a rule about, they wouldn’t have time to do anything else.
The “irrational choices” and “lack of information” sections of Yvain’s Non-Libertarian FAQ are good reading on this topic.
But if breaking the law and getting away with it is unlikely, then the rational actors won’t try. What the companies would have wanted, had they been rational good predictors, was a well enforced law which heavily punished defection. This way they would all have had higher expected utility than the scenario in which there was no law.
Of course a well enforced law that heavily punished defection would be just as good as an Unbreakable Vow, but in a certain sense that’s my point. The best case scenario in the case of a law (that is, of the law being well enforced and with harsh penalties) is the default scenario if you are using Unbreakable Vows.
Government doesn’t just provide people with an enforcement mechanism for coordination problems, it also provides a workaround for lack of information, and ideally for irrationality, in coordination problems.
...
The “irrational choices” and “lack of information” sections of Yvain’s Non-Libertarian FAQ are good reading on this topic.
This is what I was saying earlier, the main difference between our points of views is one of the most basic political questions, of what viewpoint on the libertarian-statist axis you accept. In other words, how much of government should be workarounds for that sort of thing.
You know what, I honestly don’t know the real answer to that question. It is one of the biggest questions of that type, and so it is fitting not to know the exact answer to it. That said, I do slightly tend toward taking a more libertarian point of view. I do understand that what you said is in fact one of the main points against libertarianism and toward more government intervention. All in all, the answer is far from obvious, and here is not the best place to get into a big discussion about it.
So, all in all, I think that this discussion is a result of a much lower level and more subtle disagreement. Maybe I am being too idealistic and putting too much faith in human beings, and maybe you are being too cynical and putting too much faith in governments. In practice, the only way to see if this system works is to try it out, which is (sadly?) impossible seeing as the unbreakable Vow does not exist in the real world.
It could, in theory, have been prevented with unbreakable vows. It could also have been prevented with laws. The trouble was not that if we designed laws to prevent it, they wouldn’t have been followed, or that nobody had any idea what sort of laws would have been necessary, but that the people who saw the problem in advance and called for those sorts of laws were in the minority, and even after the fact a lot of people still aren’t on board with the sorts of laws that would have prevented it, because they believe it would stifle business interests, because of an ideological Regulation Bad mindset, or a combination of those.
Just because Unbreakable Vows could solve a problem, doesn’t mean they would. We can solve all sorts of problems with government, but don’t, because we’re not that good at using government. You seem to assume that we would default to using Unbreakable Vows perfectly, and I see that as a highly burdensome component of your assertions that requires a lot of evidence.
I think civilization would make extensive use of Unbreakable Vows, and it would have a significant effect. It could, as you point out, prevent events such as Pettigrew betraying the Potters (unless he’d already made a Vow to Voldemort before then, in which case he’d probably have been caught as soon as they tried to put a conflicting Vow on him,) and that sort of thing could completely mangle the story.
But I don’t think it would result in perfect coordination. I think the laws would in many cases continue to be poorly thought out and impractical, and the system would continue to be bad at quickly changing laws that proved to be ineffective for the purposes for which they were supposedly designed. Politics would continue to be influenced by people more driven by tribal ideology than by evidence of what makes their countries better off.
I think the core of these problems is not a lack of a sufficiently powerful enforcement mechanism on agreements, but that the sanity waterline simply isn’t very high.
Perhaps. I see the way which you are looking at it, and while I don’t agree, I want to say that I think I understand why you look at it this way.
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...)
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,
So the big question is how prevalent and powerful the effects would be. I think this boils down in essence to the most fundamental political divide. A libertarian would say that an all-powerful contract enforcement mechanism would obliviate the need for a government at all, as after all that is what a government really boils down to in a libertarian view, and Unbreakable Vows just do that better. On the other hand, someone who is more conservative/statist would say that while it would have a significant effect on the contract system, the government does do things that don’t boil down to just enforcing contracts (from that viewpoint), and so there would still be a need for a government, which would continue in much the way governments do nowadays.
So I think that seems to be our main difference. You are said :
While on the other hand I am saying that there would be no such thing as politics or government as we know it in this situation, as with a perfect contract enforcement mechanism, they are completely unnecessary, and would be abandoned.
This isn’t a fact that distinguishes a law from a contract. Problems of interpretation are just as big an issue in contract litigation as in legal compliance.
True, but the main difference is one of choice: You get to choose what contracts you sign, but not what laws you follow. If you get screwed by a misinterpreted contract, well that’s sad, but you are partially responsible for it, as you can view what happened as a slip in your foresight, you made a mistake, didn’t plan for this eventuality, and you paid the price for that slip-up.
On the other hand, if it’s a law, some dolt in wherever the capital of your country is made the mistake, but you have to suffer the consequences. You see the difference? If someone makes a bad choice and hurts themselves, it is sad, and they learn for next time, but it is an accepted basic moral fact that ultimately people should be able to make their own choices, for good or ill.
Maybe it’s just me being too free market/libertarian, but it feels a lot sadder when someone screws something up for others then if that person makes a mistake that only hurts themselves.
I’m not trying to criticize your libertarian argument—I’m actually fairly sympathetic to those types of policy arguments. It’s just that interpretive difficulty isn’t a difference between statute and contract.
Writing text with a clear and unambiguous meaning is hard, even if one desires to write clearly. And the causes of interpretive difficulties are strongly parallel:
differing policy preferences of individual legislators vs. different economic incentives of contract counter-parties.
issues can be unanticipated by all parties, which means the outcome of a dispute is essentially random (from an ex ante perspective).
In short, it’s just a fact about language that your choices don’t really affect the clarity of your legal obligations (either statutory or contractual). The deadweight loss of regulation isn’t a result of unclear regulation—even the clearest distortion of the market outcome costs some surplus value from the transaction.
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:
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.
OK. I might be misunderstanding you. I thought you were saying that a problem with Unbreakable Vows is that they would go by a strict, literal, genie-like interpretation of whatever you say, which would cause bad results. But I might just have been thinking of that because Desrtopa raised an argument of that type a couple of posts ago. If that is not your objection, feel free to restate it in a clearer way. But ultimately, I do suspect we are mostly in agreement, and that there is no particularly major difference between our opinions.
Sure. I’m saying that it is extremely difficult to reduce intended outcome to words.
Both statutes and contracts are attempts to reduce intention to words, and they have a roughly equivalent failure rate. Thus, problems arising from mismatch of word and intent (i.e. interpretive problems) are not a reason to prefer contracts over statutes.
Well, I suppose the question is how the unbreakable-vow magic interprets it.
A society based on contracts based entirely on unbreakable wows would kill far too many people, or alternatively, would require fairly insane levels of OCD checking that no contract conflicts with any other. And, as a practical matter, asking people to submit to lethal enforcement of employment contracts, and other minor business is just not going to fly. A multi-million-galleon deal? Sure. Having someone fix your plumbing… eh. No.
On the other hand, the government would be warped completely out of recognition. Because oaths of office would be unbreakable, and based on a long tradition of very careful wording. So you get government by the utterly incorruptible oath bound. Which would look nothing like any government that has ever existed. Because it would have perfect trust from the citizenry, virtually no agency problems, and no need for any checks or balances other than the oaths whatsoever.
Wait, is the Unbreakable Vow really unbreakable, or does it just kill you when you break it? I thought it was the first.
The latter
That’s true in canon, yes, but this
reads to me more like a sort of permanent, irresistible Imperius. I can see it could be meant the other way, though.
Your HPMoR-trained spellchecker has led you wrong, friend.
The Oxford English Dictionary on ‘obliviate’ (v.):
3 cited examples similar to ygert’s usage. Go get yourself a real dictionary before you presume to correct other people.
’This indeed a word, and it’s not impossible that it might be what ygert intended. But I think it’s much more likely that it was meant to be “obviate”.
Huh. My copy of the OED agrees with Merriam-Webster (and everything I can find online) that there’s no real word between “obliterative” and “oblivion”. What edition are you referencing?
Anyway, “obviate the need for” is such a common phrasing that I don’t feel terribly unjustified in my presumption. I suppose that’s for ygert to decide, though.
I am using the Windows Second Edition release from 2009. Screenshot of the ‘obliviate’ entry I was quoting, which certainly does not say anything about it not existing prior to Rowling: http://i.imgur.com/PFADb.png
Now I’m not sure if you’re serious. The last quote is from the mid-1800s, and the usage is synonymous with “forget” so it wouldn’t make sense in ygert’s context anyway.
So? I use words as rare as that all the time, and it could be an independent invention.
Committing government to oblivion as useless and a waste fits in nicely with quotes 2 and 3.
So to sum up: the word ‘obliviate’ exists before Rowling and you were wrong about it not being a real world; then, you were wrong about it not being in the OED; now, you are wrong that it does not fit the usage; and you are still trying to correct me!
You well deserve your username—the first half anyway.
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?
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.
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 of problem is a very common type of game theory problem, which has been analysed a lot. (It’s actually a close relative of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.)) The Nash equilibrium of this game is everyone defecting and acting irresponsibly, which leads to a bad result that no one wants, and everyone is unhappy.
So how do we solve it, we can make laws which give a negative incentive to acting irresponsibly, and thus move the equilibrium of the game. (And of course the players do want that, as it simply gives them a better outcome from the game.) And that’s fine, it sometimes works, but some other times the law’s negative incentives don’t work out, and the equilibrium is everyone acting irresponsibly again. This is because the law cannot perfectly control what people do, as one can always break the law, and often get away with it.
An Unbreakable Vow is unbreakable though, and so rather then have government regulations, which are clumsy and sometimes don’t work, if the companies have that much contractual power, that is they can make contracts that are actually and completely unbreakable… One of the simplest solutions in game theory to problems of this type is that you just allow the agents to precommit to their strategies.
As you can see now, this is not the system I had in mind at all. Remember, what is the point of governments? To enforce the kind of thing that the Unbreakable Vows enforce much better. That is why in this scenario I very much doubt there would be any sort of government as we know it at all.
Remember, actually people are quite good at self regulating. In a roundabout way, of course, by establishing governments and empowering them to regulate. That whole roundabout method of having social contracts enforced by a government seems rather roundabout and convoluted if it could be bypassed and the contracts enforced directly by magic.
But if breaking the law and getting away with it is unlikely, then the rational actors won’t try. What the companies would have wanted, had they been rational good predictors, was a well enforced law which heavily punished defection. This way they would all have had higher expected utility than the scenario in which there was no law.
But they did not push for this. In fact, all the lobbying action was in the other direction. The business practices that resulted in the crash were previously illegal. If you want to make a convincing case that they would have done better in a system with an unbreakable enforcement mechanism, you’ve got to demonstrate that in spite of appearances, an adequate enforcement mechanism, rather than adequate predictive power and rationality, was what was missing.
Government doesn’t just provide people with an enforcement mechanism for coordination problems, it also provides a workaround for lack of information, and ideally for irrationality, in coordination problems.
Suppose that chemical A which is used in a manufacturing process is highly toxic, and that chemical gets into the environment in the course of the process, and causes a lot of harm to people and wildlife. 0.2% of the population (those who understand the chemistry and have read the relevant studies) know this, and of those, all who are not employed by the manufacturing company agree that the chemical should not be used in that manufacturing process. The other 99.8% has no opinion. If the population has perfect enforcement for agreements, but no oversight body, and all agreements are worked out on an individual basis, then the manufacturing company will continue using the chemical, affecting everyone, not just the people who know enough to care. If there is an oversight body charged with creating rules for the population whose job it is to pass rules that are in the public’s interests, whether or not the public knows enough to care about them, the people who know about the effects of the chemical can go to the oversight body and say “as you can see, the evidence favors this chemical being harmful, and we all agree you should make a rule against using it,” and the oversight body can look at the evidence and pass the rule. By having a body whose full time job it is to look at issues that potentially warrant the creation of rules, judge evidence, and determine which rules would be good to pass, the population as a whole can review more issues which potentially impact the whole society, at less opportunity cost to the whole population. If everyone took the time to research every issue that might be worth making a rule about, they wouldn’t have time to do anything else.
The “irrational choices” and “lack of information” sections of Yvain’s Non-Libertarian FAQ are good reading on this topic.
Of course a well enforced law that heavily punished defection would be just as good as an Unbreakable Vow, but in a certain sense that’s my point. The best case scenario in the case of a law (that is, of the law being well enforced and with harsh penalties) is the default scenario if you are using Unbreakable Vows.
This is what I was saying earlier, the main difference between our points of views is one of the most basic political questions, of what viewpoint on the libertarian-statist axis you accept. In other words, how much of government should be workarounds for that sort of thing.
You know what, I honestly don’t know the real answer to that question. It is one of the biggest questions of that type, and so it is fitting not to know the exact answer to it. That said, I do slightly tend toward taking a more libertarian point of view. I do understand that what you said is in fact one of the main points against libertarianism and toward more government intervention. All in all, the answer is far from obvious, and here is not the best place to get into a big discussion about it.
So, all in all, I think that this discussion is a result of a much lower level and more subtle disagreement. Maybe I am being too idealistic and putting too much faith in human beings, and maybe you are being too cynical and putting too much faith in governments. In practice, the only way to see if this system works is to try it out, which is (sadly?) impossible seeing as the unbreakable Vow does not exist in the real world.