No wonder wizards have been pulling off international cooperation since the dark ages!
I always imagined that wizards are pretty much detached from the muggle world and their technological level and standards of living have been roughly constant for at least hundreds of years. And meanwhile their level of societal organization progressed gradually.
This is contradicted, at least slightly, within MOR if not in cannon. McGonagall mentions in her internal narrative that wizards never invented clocks or any form of magical time-keeping, and only starting using them after muggles invented them. There may will be many other such cases, certainly the extent to which a lot of magical objects superficially resemble their muggle counterparts is quite suspicious.
Update: Discussion has moved on to a new thread.
The hiatus is over with today's publication of chapter 73, and the previous thread is approaching the 500-comment threshold, so let's start a new Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread. This is the place to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic and anything related to it.
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: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The fanfiction.net author page is the central location for information about updates and links to HPMOR-related goodies, and AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
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: