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fubarobfusco comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 17, chapter 86 - Less Wrong
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Harry is slowly updating on the evidence that the wizarding community is not as grossly incompetent as he originally believed.
I agree and it is extremely fun to watch happen to a character. All Harry's private scenarios of how to take over magical Britain in five minutes are a perfect example of his main character flaw: arrogance, or, his dismissiveness of the realities of politics as superfluous, "people stuff." It should be clear to the reader, anyway, that liberal use of Imperius would NOT be sufficient to take over the government, at least not for any meaningful length of time. Harry is making the same type of error that led to Voldermort's original failure, that is, modeling people as being simpler and dumber than they are, likely due to his own sense of superiority.
Totally unrelated, but I wanted to mention somewhere (and didn't think it worth making a new comment) that I laughed harder at "I once arrested a young Japanese who tried a similar trick. He found out the hard way that his shadow replica technique was no match for this eye of mine." than I have at anything in recent memory. (It is a Naruto reference.)
Remember that, in canon, Voldemort does indeed take over the Ministry with a few Imperiuses and a few assassinations.
I think this is more Eliezer once again obliquely making fun of how shallowly Rowling imagined her own universe, that its government could be broken by essentially any individual wizard of moderate power.
Well, and the fact he had support form a number of rich high ranking people and his own terrorist group to deal with any resistance after the fact.
Moody has a magical eye. Therefore, Naruto has at some point fought him. QED.
Ohhhhh.
Not just that. I believe naruto has fought (or was it will fight?) all doujutsu. Word of God.
Yeah, but that one specifically is the best match for the Eye of Vance.
I tried to write a line with Harry misidentifying it as the Eye That Looks Toward The Sun but had to take it out.
Sorry, you lost me (and the term doesn't seem to be googleable). What's that a reference to?
Hyuuga = "Toward the Sun"
...Ah.
Damn. I already upvoted this, so now I've actually read that scene, I can't righteously upvote. Also, seconding moridinamael; Moody's Naruto line was pretty damn hilarious. Though now I'm wracking my brains trying to remember whether 'no match for this eye of mine' is lifted directly from Naruto, or you were just successfully emulating shonen braggadocio.
https://www.google.com/search?q=conic+frustum
Unless Eliezer has deliberately depowered Imperious - which isn't impossible - or given the Ministry some sort of get-out-of-Imperius-free-card - which is also possible, what with the Ministry being created almost exactly in it's present form by Merlin, a significant change from canon - then liberal use of Imperius cold absolutely take over the government. My theory is that "Voldemort" was deliberately playing the role of the Evil Monster who's about to take over the world, but never does; perhaps in an attempt to have Wizarding Britain unite against him.
Considering that Eliezer says in the notes that he "regret[s] that [he] could not come up with any reasonable way to have Harry shout 'Temporal fugue!' or 'Kage bunshin no jutsu!' before attacking", this is almost certainly a Naruto reference.
OK, so there are Moody and Voldemort, but pretty much every other wizard ever is grossly.incompetent. Any normal Moogle SF fan thinking for an hour, or Harry Potter thinking for five minutes, could run strategic circles around them and kill half of all Dark Lords who ever lived by owling them bombs. Better?
Harry thought he could figure out who the Death Eaters were by checking their arms for the Dark Mark. Turns out it's not that simple.
Now he (and you) still think that you get rid of a dangerous enemy by owling them bombs. Does either of you even have any reason to believe that there isn't a magical precaution against sending dangerous objects through the owl mail system?
Er, he broke that protection in about five minutes of thought. That's evidence for actually being able to run strategic circles around magical Britain.
Dumbledore did hand him the "You're wrong, think about it for 5 minutes" cue in a way that got him to do it. That kind of thing is crazy helpful.
And yet Dumbledore and everyone else he though of asking couldn't solve it themselves for twenty years. For the last ten years, Snape would have told them if they'd even made the right suggestion.
Like I said, Voldemort is one of the only two or three competent wizards shown.
It's more likely that there isn't than that there is, and it's something to be (quickly and easily) tested. This particular example aside, owling bombs isn't intended to be taken literally; it's a stand-in for a simple attack that wizards don't expect. Any particular such attack may not work, but I strongly expect that if Harry dedicated a whole day to thinking up and actually trying such "low-tech" attacks, vetting them with Dumbledore against known defenses to save time, then he could come up with enough attacks to take down at least half the Dark Lords in recent history.
On the one hand, the fact that owl bombs are not a common tactic is itself evidence against the being usable. On the other hand, in canon you could definitely send dangerous objects through the mail.
In the MoR!verse, at least, Dumbledore is screening Harry's mail instead of letting it go to him directly. So "owling hand grenades" won't work against someone who takes precautions to prevent it. The question is whether the target is taking precautions or is simply going to let owls deliver strange packages.
Dumbledore could also screen it for other reasons.
Indeed. Dumbledore told Harry that he would have a hard time (emotionally) dealing with his "fan mail" and Harry pretty much agreed. Whether Dumbledore has any other motive is left as an exercise for the reader.
No — they simply have not chosen to prove themselves to Harry, the viewpoint character.
I expect we'll find, soon, that Harry's model is wildly out of whack — adult wizards are, by and large, competent but flawed, especially the leaders and heroes. They simply do not let on to children everything they can do, nor their level of control over the world. Why? Because gifted children are not really all that rare, and teaching kids more magic than they are responsible enough to cope with is how you get Dark Lords — and dead kids.
Expanding on this — The purpose of magical education (e.g. Hogwarts) is not to teach kids as much magic as possible, to enable them to fix the world as Harry wants to do. The purpose of magical education is to safely and gradually expose them to magic, to maintain the current status quo and certainly to prevent any dumbass kids from destroying the world or killing each other. It also includes giving them chances to prove themselves responsible and skilled enough to wield more, and to put them in touch with adult wizards who might choose to individually teach more. But none of this is served by powerful wizards flaunting their top abilities in blatant and imitable fashion in front of the kiddies.
Nothing stays secret from teenage kids for long. No conspiracy of a large size can be maintained for very long (especially if it must admit everyone). And the Lucius Malfoys of the world would want to give their kids every advantage.
Parents in the real world want to give their kids every advantage too, but few sign their kids up for calculus class and gun-range time at age 6, you know? Parental conspiracies aimed at preteen children are remarkably resilient things(cf. Santa Claus). Teenagers are harder, but you can rely on most of them not actually wanting to be bothered learning any more than they have to.
Did Draco know about the Secret of Potions?
Did Lucius?
I got the impression it was common knowledge among powerful wizards. Am I misremembering?
If you look back at Chapter 78, it says that
Harry had not made an original magical discovery, but rediscovered a law so ancient that nobody knew who had first formulated it:
A potion spends that which is invested in the creation of its ingredients.
But conversely, it also says that
The fundamental principle of Potions-Making had no name and no standard phrasing, since then you might be tempted to write it down.
McGonagall and Flitwick seemed to at least be familiar with the idea, though, so there's a good chance that you're right.
Edit: I should probably also point out the obvious. If knowing the general rule is "WTF? Stop!" dangerous, like the professors seem to suggest it is when Harry tries it, then it's not generally the sort of thing you'd teach your 11 year old son. There's plenty of time to pass things like that along when the kid's closer to adulthood and mellowed out a bit.
Sure, that's why this is a story written by Eliezer and not (say) Piers Anthony. But still, an educational system does not last for long if it obviously gives every kid a nuclear bomb.
Well, that's true, at least.
Meh, Minerva mentions that a trained wizard can deal with a gun, I imagine explosive deactivating spells would be a standard part of your self defence/mail checking spells.
I think it was cannons, not guns :D
Magic bombs. Or other destructive artifacts.
</nitpick>
I may be unduly influenced by how its handled in the DAYD fan-verse, but my impression is that wizards understand the concept of a letterbomb and screen for them if circumstances (for example being Mad-Eye Moody) call for it. They just don't do it routinely anymore than normal people do.
P.S. I prepared explosive runes this morning.
DAYD?
And I wouldn't be surprised if wizards - at least those with know enemies - screen their mail (although this isn't mentioned, and it's apparently unavailable to students.) I was just nitpicking the idea that you couldn't send a Wizard something they would be unable to neutralize with magic once they had it.
Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness, one of the main stories involves anonymous owls.
What about the other Aurors during TSPE? I thought they did pretty well overall.
Madam Bones, yes. The others seem average. Not owl-bomb-proof unless they're given regulations about it.
Fortunately, things like that are why bureaucracy exists.
Bureaucracy is self-preserving. It doesn't really have other builtin goals than that.
That sounds like a cached thought. Bureaucracies can be programmed to have relatively well-understood side-effects of their survival. For instance, McDonald's is a bureaucracy that has a side-effect of producing hamburgers; a military is a bureaucracy that has a side-effect of politically inconvenient people getting dead.
That's a good point. My comment was overbroad and oversimplified.
Avoiding assassination is generally considered to assist with self-preservation.
Reminds me of Competent elites. I suspect we'll get some display of the order, Aurors and/or ministry civil service behaving competently soon and Harry updating his beliefs on them.
Outside the school setting what evidence do we actually have that the wizarding world is incompetent? [Not just operating self interestedly or on different values.]
Note, the link in your comment is currently a Google link rather than a link directly to the post.
I don't see the issue, shouldn't it redirect instantly? Changed it anyway.
The issue is just that unnecessary intermediaries should be avoided; it wasn't anything more serious than that.
Another one:
I would say that's more reflective of ignorance than incompetence. Though failing to sufficiently inform themselves about dangerous muggle technology would be incompetence at a meta level.
Putting Arthur Weasley in charge of Misuse of Muggle Artifacts, rather than an actual Muggleborn/halfblood, strikes me as incompetence of the highest order.
We even see that Minerva took top marks in her Muggle Studies class, but still thinks of herself as ignorant, and she happens to be fairly competent.
Quiditch, the lack of adequate protection on time turners before Harry gave them the idea put protective shell on them... Seriously, just reread the fic.
Like there's no RL sports with silly rules. And do time-turners actually need protection? The seem to require pretty deliberate action to use, and I assume they're hard to break.
They're hard to break now that they put protection on them. They were rather fragile before.
Admittedly, it says that in HPMOR, but does it in canon? Do we have any examples of them being damaged or destroyed, or any special care being taken with them? It seems odd that Eliezer would change canon to make the ministry stupider, given how they weren't exactly mental heavyweights in canon and his stated goal is to make a plot where everybody is at least generally competent.
First: MoR is what the conversation was about, wasn't it?
Second: Yes, in canon they were fragile enough that all of them- all of them- were destroyed by a few stray spells, in the Department of Mysteries Battle.
1) I was wondering whether the implied mockery of canon was reasonable. Apparently it is.
2) Huh, I never noticed that detail reading through. Not sure a protective shell would help with that sort of destruction, though.
I just went and looked up the exact wording in OotP. A missed Stupefy hits a glass cabinet, which falls to the floor, which shatters all the Time-Turners inside (causing some weird stable time loop thing). If the shell can withstand being dropped on the ground, it's a useful improvement.
I always thought of that as more of a retcon than a plot point, JKR telling us "Yeah, ok, in retrospect the time turners were a bad idea, but I'd like to write the rest of the series without having to incorporate or work around them so just roll with it, ok?"
Oh lord. Okay, you win.
My point is that the examples we've seen are mainly from Harry's perceptions, he hasn't actually tested any of them. The only one was the partial transfiguration which isn't exactly obvious to anyone else.
The possibility of gold-silver arbitrage with the Muggle world and the lack of fractional-reserve banking.
There's folks in the Muggle world who think that fractional-reserve should be avoided like the plague, too. Perhaps goblins are all Austrian.
Wouldn't this allow others to set up competing banks, or just competing lending agencies, and make good profits?
Mostly, the Austrian response to that seems to be "Go ahead, but I'd never use them". Apparently, full-reserve banks are a service people are willing to pay for. (And they do. They're called "safety deposit boxes".)
I'm very sceptical since the beginning of gold-silver arbitrage with the Muggle, I'm pretty sure it'll be forbidden under the Statue of Secrecy. Interaction with Muggles are not taken lightly. And since you've to go through a goblin bank to get your gold minted, you could hardly do it in a stealthy way.
I suspect galleons are actually a fiat currency controlled by the minstry/goblins, who keep a very close eye on the amounts of Gold in private hands and limit how many new Galleons can be minted.