Today I noticed that Harry is dealing with a lot of strikingly rational people compared to canon and it feels wrong. We can understand this because we know that Eliezer's subscribes to the first law of fan fiction ("You can't make Frodo a Jedi without giving Sauron the Death Star") but it seems that in this respect MoR is actually much less plausible than canon unless the "implicit demography" has been changed somehow. Its like the gold/silver exchange rate in canon... except this is brains.

Given a normally distributed trait (like intelligence?) the larger the population, the more spectacular you should expect the maximal outlier to be. And you shouldn't expect lots of similar outliers unless their production was non-linearly explained (like a bunch of students taught by a singularly great teacher or something). The smartest person in a village of 1000 is going to be (literally) "1 in a 1000" compared to the smartest person in China who is going to be (again literally) "1 in a billion". So those sorts of intuitions had me wondering about population sizes.

I googled it and came up with data and speculation. Roughly, it looks like Magical Britain (MB) has a population between 800 and 30,0000 with a median expectation somewhere around 5,000 depending on things like how many students are in Hogwarts (40/yr to 140/yr), whether Rowling's numerically implausible media pronouncements are to be taken seriously, whether everyone in MB really goes to Hogwarts, what the life expectancy is, and what the age pyramid is like due to murder and tribal warfare and magical diseases and so on.

Once I'm calibrated this way, and I look for size-equivalent institutions, the "Ministry of Magic" starts sounding to me like like the "Small Town Chamber of Commerce of Magic" and the "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" should be expected to work much more like an ordinary high school (tropes link tongue in cheek).

This contextual re-calibration makes it even more obvious that Rowling was (forgivably) pretending that the people at the top of a very tiny wizarding world would have anything like the political sophistication and infrastructure of the muggle world in order to say something meaningful about the muggle world by analogy.

A ministry with many departments makes me think of large buildings with complex hierarchies like in London or Washington DC or Beijing. In canon, the ministry can be similar to a modern government and enable the author to comment on non-fictional governments and the sociopolitical critique of reality can work symbolically and who cares about the sociology in a story for ten year olds :-)

But if the authorial physics changes (as per MoR) and analytical thinking is asserted to have some kind of mechanical reality in which to gain traction, then the wizarding world makes me think of, perhaps, a medium to large college campus. It could probably be run with a single office where anyone can stand in line for 30 minutes to see one of about 5 to 50 admins to personally get their stuff straightened out directly or to make an appointment to talk to the president of the school if something really unusual comes up. Obviously it wouldn't be a fee-for-service arrangement the way a school is, but I wouldn't expect the admin:student ratio to need to be that far off of the bureaucrat:citizen ratio of Magical Britain.

Following the re-calibrating further... Hogsmeade might contain 10% to 50% of the wizarding population... Why doesn't Hogsmeade have one elected sheriff with a handful of deputies, with Diagon Alley similarly protected, and then just be done with it? And what are all these appointed "Aurors" running around for? Is Magical Britain some kind of "totalitarian police village" or something?

Rita Skeeter probably isn't (or in MoR, wasn't) truly similar to a professional journalist in a "large news organization" that was so big to create institutional anonymity and strategically deploy tabloid tactics and so on. People are generally more polite in small towns because reputation matters a lot more than in cities. The newspapers are more "yay for our pancake fundraiser and boo for littering" than malicious gossip rags. Its almost plausible (following the "small town" economic insight) that Rita may have been the only journalist in magical Britain (other than Luna's farther, if you count him).

And politics wouldn't need to work by mass-media-spread ideological PR in Magical Britain. You could just write 10 letters per day, five days a week, and wander around Hogsmeade or Diagon alley on the weekends, and after 25 weeks you'd probably have had direct personal contact with the bulk of the adult population who cared to involve themselves in group decision making. Simple, easy, done. We're talking about a civilization way smaller than Athens, and look how big an impact Socrates appears to have had by wandering around talking to people!

In this light, all the trappings of muggle government kinda start to look like a cargo cult. The politics around who runs Hogwarts starts to look kind of pitiful... like a sociopathically deranged PTA squabble. And what happens if Harry notices this stuff? And comments on it to Hermione and explore the implications? And then insert "some explanation" that shows why the ministry is actually necessary (rather than a cargo cult) and have "whatever the need is" become a vivid plot mechanism?

In Chapter 36 Harry compares the world of muggles to a third world country relative to the wizarding world. Magic appears to be so powerful that this is true in some sense... but its pretty weird if they appear to be the one's with cargo cult versions of our political institutions...

And in the meantime, it really seems to make "Voldemort's Deathstar" (that is, his general rational turbocharge and massive preparation for conquering several thousand people) look really silly to me, because it is such overkill. If Voldemort really wanted political power over Magical Britain, and was being simply rational about it, and MB is little more than a two or three small villages... then why not apply social psychology to winning the hearts and minds of a bunch of unsophisticated "magical rubes" in a local election and just be done with it?

Which gets me back around to Harry, boy genius, and all the people he's interacting with in tiny little Magical Britain who have also somehow gotten rationality super powers. Maybe someone needs to plot wizard IQs and notice the weird bi-modal distribution caused by all the people just a bit less smart than Harry so he has people with whom to interact and thereby create a compelling story?

Maybe I'm overconfident in my ability to connect numerical population models with lived socio-political realities, but I'm thinking this is probably just me being more confused by fiction than by reality.