= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Oscar_Cunningham comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 9 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (718)
BTW, we're told in canon there are other schools for wizards and witches, but everyone famous seems to have gone to Hogwarts. Why? There isn't even an entrance exam, and most of the teachers are incompetent; so it can't be either their selectiveness or the quality of their education.
How can we estimate the number of witches and wizards in the world from canon? And, also, the number of students at Hogwarts?
J. K. Rowling was never too bothered with the numbers (by her own admission). In particular the total number of students in Hogwarts is portrayed as much greater than the number of students per year multiplied by seven, and the wizarding world is absurdly small but still far too large to account for the fact that there appears to be only one school in Britain.
The sadder thing is that Eliezer doesn't seem particularly bothered with numbers either. The "armies" each of the generals have are mentioned to have 24 soldiers each.
24x3=72 students in the first year. This would only make sense if the size of the classes in MoR were about twice as big as in canon. But MoR has never mentioned a single non-canonical first-year student, as far as I can remember, which would imply the opposite, that the sizes of the classes must be about as big as in canon (namely about 40 students in the first year, all houses combined).
EDIT TO ADD: above comment now retracted as factually false, see comments below.
I beg your pardon. Check Ch. 30 and you should see some non-canonical first-year student cameos in Draco's army. For, may I mention, exactly that reason - I was explicitly familiar with the dilemma of the discordant Rowling statements and decided to resolve in favor of Hogwarts having around a thousand students, so that having around half the students sign up for the armies would give you 72 first-year soldiers.
Ah, nice. I also see some names like "Melvin Coote of Gryffindor" and "Allen Flint" of Slytherin, in the Chaos army.
Apologies for the mistake.