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Anubhav comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 9 - Less Wrong
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Chapter 17.
I know it's supposed to be a joke, but.... How? Is Dumbledore monitoring every wizard and witch's sex life? And how did he manage to crunch that data? Do wizards have calculating machines?
Or maybe he meant to say "the documentation took a lot of work to find and decipher"?
ETA: If it was Rowling writing this, the 'device with the golden wibblers' mentioned in the very next sentence would become a major plot point later in the series.
Eh, it was probably a given from the start that it was counting something.
Then immediately after the French Ministry of Magic authorizes/legalizes a new "Give yourself multiple orgasms" charm, or even just a new magical Viagra, the device's count jumps up. At that point Dumbledore knows it's counting something that correlates strongly with sexual satisfaction, but the count is a bit too low to be counting the orgasms of the entire French female magical population. Turns out the inventor was a jealous French wizard who tried to keep tabs on his left-handed wife, but keyed in the criteria too weakly, so that any left-handed witch within the borders of France would do.
I find it more likely that he tinkered with the object itself, if that's even true.
I wonder if Quirrell could have managed to get a fiddly thing of his own invention into the headmaster's office before Dumbledore took over for Dipot. Perhaps as a gift to the old headmaster. It'd be an incredibly useful source of knowledge, if Wizards do in fact have magical listening devices.
You'd expect the Headmaster's office to be laced with anti-eavesdropping charms.
How would that work, exactly? Would the Sorting Hat be unable to hear anything said in there? I should think not. And whatever doesn't work on the sorting hat probably wouldn't work on the instruments. Or what about all the portraits? There's some definite spying potential in the slytherin headmasters.
Exactly. A recording device doesn't have to be actively broadcasting every thing; it could be just that Quirrel gets updates any time he is summoned to the headmaster's office. Untimely intel is better than no intel.
Although when the Headmaster is Dumbledore who can control such things without aids with less than a flick of the finger or someone with the cunning to want to be selectively overheard the expectation is not quite so clear.
..... what
What are you trying to say? Looks like a 'damn you autocorrect' moment to me... ('canny' isn't a noun, for instance)
Eek. Somehow I changed from 'cunning' to 'savvy' mid-word!
From context, I got the strong impression that the gadgets came with the office and Dumbledore is speaking about the work of deciphering what each one is measuring. If he was creating that device, why would he speak of the 8 hands as one of 'them', the 'they' that 'came with the Headmaster's office', most of which he has not figured out - except this one which records X...
Um.... No, he didn't create them. It says right in the quote that they came with the office.
Question is.... How did he figure that one out? 'Number of orgasms by left-handed witches in France'; that isn't the kind of data you'd find written down somewhere.
Not in 1993, anyway. You could probably find data to that effect today.
I wonder if this is a reference to the movie "Amelie," with her seemingly supernatural ability to correctly guess how many orgasms are taking place in Paris at any given moment.
Considering the ridiculous context of the rest of the conversation, (i.e. Dumbledore either pretending to be insane or actually letting some real insanity slip through) is it too far outside the realm of possibility for that comment to be a joke? It seemed like Dumbledore was going out of his way to screw with Harry in this chapter. Even if the machine actually does what he said it does, I could easily see the comment about "how much work it took to nail that down" being a joke Dumbledore told for his own amusement, knowing that Harry was too young to "get it".
Now I get it!
...(Yuck.)
rofl
Hadn't caught that before.
There are certainly some analytical charms that give you some sort of idea how magical objects work. For example where Harry offers Dumbledore and Quirrel some Comed Tea, they both analyze it before drinking.
The complexity of such analytics probably scales withe complexity of the magical object that is being analyzed, so finding out about the dial was probably immensely difficult, but not by collecting and correlating data, but by inspecting the device rather closely.
Not that I disagree, precisely, but I'm not sure you can use the Comed-Tea thing as evidence that it's possible to analyze how magical objects work: Quirrell and Dumbledore both seemed taken by surprise by the actual effect, after all. The charm(s) they used seem more likely to be poison/biologically-interactive-potion detectors.
Or maybe they both decided to fake being caught off guard. That seems like Dumbledore's style, anyway.
So was Draco, who had been told the effect; unlike Harry, he probably didn’t doubt that the thing worked, he probably just thought that it’d be lame.