Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2

dclayh

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 — LessWrong

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There seems to be a consensus that if there were war between wizards and muggles, the wizards would lose.

This isn't obvious to me, but I might be assuming more intelligence (both information and skill at using it) on the wizard side than they've got.

However, if we assume that wizards are reasonably competent (insert bitter laughter from anyone who's read the original books), what could they do?

My impression is that wizards don't need human civilization. It seems to me that their ability to pass unseen and destroy memories would be enough to destroy a lot of infrastructure. Would it be that hard for wizards to rule what was left?

What's the use of human weapons if you need magic just to enter wizard population centers?

Anyone who remembers the books better than I do, go ahead and tell me if there's some way for humans to resist.

ewbrownv16y10

A muggle society that doesn't know about wizards is vulnerable to sneaky tactics involving mind control and memory alteration. But in an open battle cannon!wizards don't stand a chance against a competent military force - they have superior mobility and medical care, but in every other respect magic is hopelessly inferior to technology.

Of course, a war isn't a battle. To predict how the war would go we have to explain why the muggles don't already know about wizards, which requires a drastic re-write of large sections of cannon. Any adequate justification is going to require giving the wizards god-like abilities of information control, which could easily give them the ability to win a wizard-muggle war as well.

0Unnamed16y

Muggles could just destroy the planet rather than conquering the wizards. Note the "heap of ash" comment in Quirrell's speech, which echoes what he said in chp. 20 about nukes.

5Alicorn16y

One reasonably powerful wizard defector to the Muggle side could enlist other wizards via subterfuge or magical control, and such wizards could create magical items to aid the Muggles. If the Muggles were sure that they could trust such a defector, they could hand em a nuke and have em wipe Hogsmeade off the map in spite of all its anti-Muggle protections. There are plenty of Muggle-borns, half-bloods, wizards married to Muggles, and wizards merely fond of Muggles a la Arthur Weasley, that in an all-out war, there would be considerable numbers of potential defectors. By contrast, a Muggle defector to the wizarding side would be harder to come by per capita, and also less useful, as Muggles don't have special abilities that let them be particularly useful to wizards.

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