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Alsadius comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 - Less Wrong
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Idea: Making the money back will be much more difficult than most people anticipate, including Harry.
Reason: Many wizards are highly motivated towards finance and would exhaust every opportunity to generate infinite gold. The rich wizards of the Wizengamot considered 100,000 galleons to be a lot of money.
First, imagine all the ways a wizard could make effectively infinite amounts of muggle money. Arbitrage. Use a time turner and win at the stock market. Use a time turner and win the super-lotto. Imperius (or love potion, false memory charm, groundhog day attack, etc) any billionaire and take part of their fortune. Mind trick some bankers with fake documents (as Dumbledore does in book 6). Go rob some banks with invisibility and teleportation (and/or a time turner). Use magic to secure a job with a 50 million dollar golden parachute with very generous terms. Make huge amounts of drug money as a courier via teleportation/portkey. Sell 5 galleon trinkets to muggle collectors for millions of dollars each. Etc., etc., etc..
Some of them are more risky, some of them are less risky, but I bet that any member of these forums could get at least $50 million in a week if we were wizards.
And yet, when they mention a price of 100,000 galleons people are shocked. The reaction does not look like it's 1/15th of a week's worth of effort he's got to worry about. Dumbledore views it as a major problem that Harry is 60,000 galleons in debt. We know from chapter 70 that it's a known thing that witches and wizards will trick a muggle with a love potion and rape them. Yet nobody thinks to slip Bill Gates a love potion, convince him to part with $2 billion, and blow Lucius out of the water with 100 million galleons. And these are among the most financially motivated people in all of wizardry, not the common population, who consider 2 million pounds as more than weekend spending money. I notice I am confused.
I'll brainstorm some possible explanations:
Gringotts won't mint your gold for a nominal fee: Griphook could have been lying, mistaken, or omitted something. Maybe you bring in a ton of gold and they just laugh at it for not having a special magical signature. Unlikely but possible.
Gold isn't available to purchase with muggle money: Wizards could own the gold exchanges and gold mines. They do nominal trading for electronics and jewelry, but the vast share of gold goes to the wizarding world. Possible, but it would drastically change the face of the real world (eg World Reserves would be a lie, and Ron Paul is a wizard).
The Department of Magical Law Enforcement is way more effective than I imagine: They can find and intervene in not only all cases of magic misuse (eg imperius or bank robberies), but check other means like love potions. Seems unlikely, considering the current crime investigation and how the last war went. Result - Arbitrage and stock/lottery manipulation work.
The wizarding world is full of complete inverse-omega class idiots: Always a good theory. But it doesn't sound right for the entirety of the wizarding world (including a ton of muggle-born) to act so completely stupid.
The financial tycoons on Wizengamot actually do this: Maybe most of the Wizengamot fortunes exist due to questionable sources. That would explain the majority of evil people doing the voting. Still, that doesn't explain the reaction to the 100,000 galleons.
The people who would do this are not on the Wizengamot: Maybe this does happen. Perhaps all the muggle-born realize how easy it is to live a life of luxury in the muggle world and do exactly that, and only venture into the magical world when the want to go shopping. They have the best conveniences of both worlds and none of the dangers of either. This... actually sounds kinda plausible. Plus, there isn't a great job market for muggle-born.
Something doesn't add up. The Wizengamot is full of bright, ambitious people, most of whom have dedicated their lives to finance (makes 4 unlikely). If they're arguing over lucrative ink importation rights it means they've already figured out arbitrage. They wouldn't worry about importing ink, if they weren't leveraging different prices between the market where they're purchasing ink and the market where they're selling ink. Something as simple as triangle arbitrage should be figured out immediately. If wizards already discovered arbitrage, but they don't try and arbitrage in the muggle markets directly, it would be evidence that 1 or 2 is in play. 3 and 5 are already unlikely, so I guess 1&2 or 6 make sense.
I'd be interested to see if Harry actually manages to make infinite money, and if so what it means about the world.
Remember, most of wizarding Britain is either people who were taken out of the muggle world at age 10-11 and don't come back, or people who never lived there at all. How many of them are actually going to understand finance well enough to have a sense of how to exploit it? And the ones who actually have money at Gringott's are almost by definition the ones who never even spent those 11 years in the muggle world, so they may well not have any idea that finance exists. And even if they do, the ignorance and prejudice is rather overpowering, and may well prevent proper use of it. Someone who has both seed capital and the knowledge of how to exploit the crap out of it is going to be rare, and the DMLE is likely going to step on anyone who gets too egregious about using wizarding advantages to do so.
(Edited first sentence for accuracy)
I don't believe this is correct. In fact, isn't there a section in MoR where McGonagall relates to Harry that less than 10 "muggleborn" Wizards are being inducted into Hogwarts that year? (With Harry being one of them?)
Right, I meant to edit that and got distracted. Replace with "Remember, most of wizarding Britain is either people who were taken out of the muggle world at age 10-11 and don't come back or people who never lived there at all".
Halfbloods are more populous, and their Muggle parents probably give them some nontrivial connection to the Muggle world.
"Halfbloods" the way you're thinking don't actually exist in MoR. Wizard + muggle = all their children are squibs. Yeah, half the children of a wizard/squib pair are wizards, but how often do you think that occurs? Canonically Harry is referred to as a halfblood because his mother was muggleborn; that sort of thing- not muggleborn, but not "pure"blood either- probably accounts for most of the population.
We don't know if this is the case. Looking at squib/wizard descent rates from wizard/muggle marriages would be an obvious additional test of Harry's genetic hypothesis, which he hasn't done. We don't know if Harry is correct about there being a single wizard gene.
I really don't get how the genetics works in either MOR or canon. In canon, there are wizards with one wizard parent and one muggle parent, who aren't squibs (Snape and Riddle for two). That implies it's dominant. Also, squibs in canon are born to 2 wizard parents (Neville's pure-blood and was thought to be one, and it's mentioned in the definition), and squibs are implied to be pretty uncommon, which they wouldn't be if they were all heterozygotes. In the end, though, I support EY's right to make it work out however he feels like, because canon is confused and self-contradictory and MOR's point about complex adaptations being either ubiquitous or absent is true.
In canon they call “squib” the non-magic-capable child of two wizards.
In MoR, that means the child has only one copy of the recessive magic gene. (Either mommy didn’t love only daddy, or one copy of the gene got messed up somehow.) But in MoR you need to distinguish between genetic|squib (has one copy of the gene), and genealogic|squib (can’t do magic but has wizard/witch parents).
All genealogical|squibs are genetic|squibs, but wizards use the word “squib” only for the former, since wizards don’t know much about genetics, and about the magic gene in particular. They call anybody who isn’t a part of magic Britain a muggle (genealogical |muggle), even though they might actually be genetic|squibs.
An example: Wizard Nasty Pants does the nasty with lots of muggle women a couple of centuries ago. He doesn’t like commitments, so he abandons the women to raise their children alone.
All his children are genetic|squibs, but they’re raised by muggles and—after Mr. Nasty dies because he tried that with a witch married to a Gryffindor—nobody knows they had a wizard parent.
Mr. and Mrs. Ancient Robes have a squib (Mr. Robes was often away on ancient business), and Mrs. Robes leaves him to be raised by a muggle family, because she doesn’t have the heart to see him killed (Mr. Robes is kind of old-fashioned that way), and claims he died at birth or something.
A couple of generations later the magic gene still exists in a lot of Mr. Pants’ and Mrs. Robes’ muggle-raised descendants: half a genetic|squib’s children are also genetic|squibs, if the other parent is genetic|muggle, and people used to have lots of kids until recently. But they’ll be genealogic|muggles, and any wizard will call them muggles, because they’re not known to have a magic parent.
And then, two of these genetic|squib descendants marry (either the two trees intersect, or a couple of kissing cousins decide to do more than kiss), and a quarter of their kids are wizards. Magic Britain will call them muggle-born (or mudbloods, depending on political inclination), although in fact they’re lost descendants of wizards.
Similarly, when Ms. Broad Horizons, a witch of liberal inclination, falls in love with young muggle (but genetic|squib) Bendsinister McPants, half her kids will be wizards, and Magic Britain will call them half-bloods.
Since there is a single magic gene (apparently), it is also possible that a mutation will toggle between the magic and non-magic alleles. So it is also possible, though probably much rarer, that a squib (or, even less likely, a wizard) appears from completely non-magical parents, or that two magic users have a squib or non-magic child, due to simple mutation. How likely that is depends on the complexity of the gene, but it’d have to be much rarer than the above scenarios, unless there’s magical interference in mutation rates for that specific gene.
Also, we cannot completely ignore the possibility of the "magic machinery" (the one that recognize the genetic marker) to have some kind of shuffling process that'll occasionally turn on or off the magical marker when an egg is fertilized. Either randomly, or based on events (triggers like "an egg fertilized exactly at the second where the moon is the fullest will have a high probability of having the magical marked added").
We have no hints towards that, so Occam's Razor would tend to give it a low probability, but it would seem coherent to me with the twisted, not really occamian, way magic seems to work. Harry's and Draco's experiment on the genes was low-scale enough so they had no chance of detecting any such shuffling.
But sure, adultery is a much more plausible explanation of why squibs would occasionally appear in pure magical couples, and why there are "muggleborn".
Or that there is no genetic marker at all and the machinery uses some algorithm of its own to determine who should have magic which is heavily biased towards children of wizards.
I agree with most of this. However, I think it is worth noting that JKR's understanding of biology is about as good as her understanding of math or astronomy so I don't expect her to have even thought of this sort of thing. I don't think the nature of complex adaptations is a great argument in this context given that we've already found that magic doesn't seem to act very much like what science tells us to expect in general.
While I support Eliezer's right to do what he wants, I suspect that Harry will turn out to be wrong about this, and that we'll find out in the story.
Wasn't "muggleborn" a term that referred not to blood-purity ("mudblood") but rather to where you were born-and-raised?
I'm not up on my canonical!HP.
In canonical!HP, halfbloods are wizards/witches with one witch/wizard parent and one Muggle parent. "Dad's a Muggle, Mum's a witch. Bit of a nasty shock for him when he found out." Muggleborns have two Muggle parents.
Sometimes people with a Muggleborn and a pureblood for parents are called halfbloods (Harry is one of these). Finer gradations aren't referred to (I'm not sure what Harry and Ginny's kids would be called).
I'm familiar with "pureblood", "squib"/"halfblood", and "muggle"/"mudblood".
I was under the impression that "muggleborn" wasn't a synonym for "mudblood". I guess I'm mistaken about that, but in reading your response I don't seem to be able to put a pin on coming to that conclusion.
"Squib" is a nonmagical child of magical parents, at least in canon. MoR seems to be using it as a genetic marker, which I'm honestly not sure is compatible with canon.
(Now that I think about it, if Harry's genetic theory is correct, doesn't a squib child of a wizarding couple imply that Mom was getting some on the side?)
.. Not nessesarily. I just had an amusing thought. The number one use of polyjuice is quite obviously as a sex toy, right? Depending on how deep the transformation goes, it is entirely possible that the genetic lines of wizardry if anyone ever tested them would be enormously confusing, and a lot of squibs are technically the decendants of Jane Russell and Rudolph Valentino.
Probably! That or a mutation, anyway. But a few weeks ago I read about an interesting situation * in which a parent with AB blood and one with A blood can have an O child without adultery, because of another gene that sometimes suppresses the A and B antigens. That wouldn't allow for varying power levels with blood purity, and would sort of be still "one thing that makes you a wizard."
Go, Mom.
Not necessarily. Genetic code changes in ways that do not make an nonviable specimen now and then.
Adultery is more likely, though.
Accurate deduction! Here, have a cookie.
Mudblood means non-pure ancestry, and is thus broader than muggleborn; the children of two muggleborns would still be considered to be mudblooded, despite both parents being wizards.
Where did you get this idea?
No.