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Jonathan_Elmer comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 9 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I find myself wondering about the supposed safety of Hogwarts. The wards are given as an explanation for this but if students are able to constantly hex each other in the halls, Quirrel is able to cast extremely powerful spells, and an unnamed 6th year replicated the Sectumsempra incident from cannon without any apparent interference from the wards I cant imagine what it is exactly that the wards are supposed to do to insure the safety of the students.
Consider that the school is full of 11-18 year olds with access to weapons of mass destruction and it seems to me that the apparent safety of the place for the past 50 years is due to luck rather then anything inherent in system.
Perhaps luck is inherent in the system. The canon storyline does include a literal luck potion, so similar things are plausible. They also have and use a seer, and short-range time travel. The latter two could be used in ways that prevent deaths without a corresponding reduction in close calls.
Ya, If current generation wizards can brew a potion of luck then why not an ancient ward of luck? Sounds reasonable to me.
From Ch. 36:
Now the "all spells are stunners" isn't always true, but for the most part (at least in canon) the hexes they use aren't really powerful. But I think that most of the safety record is due to the latter two factors. How many times in canon have characters had injuries that would have required many months of physical therapy in the real world, and been fine a week later?
All external threats (without internal assistance) for a start. As for internal threats there is the old "If you kill your fellow students with either spells or via garrotting them with your shoelaces like any mortal could do then Dumbledore, Snape, Quirrel and McG will @#%@ you up!", and anything less than actually killing them and the staff can heal you.
None of this helps vs the "Students learn transfiguration. Everybody dies." problem but that was outside the scope of authorial comprehension.
In my understanding, the wards serve mostly two purposes: prevent harm from the outside (by mostly isolating Hogwarts magically from the outside), and analytical wards that inform the school authorities if something really bad happens.
So if you want to murder someone inside of Hogwards, you face the problem that the murder is immediately detected, and then you're sealed off from the outside -- the chances of escaping aren't very high.
You are right that the wards don't seem to prevent any accidents, but it seems that most "school magic" doesn't go horribly wrong without prior warnings. For example in potions, people seem to know which potions are dangerous, and those are only done under supervision.
There are almost certainly enchantments to detect the use of deadly magic within the school, and Madam Pommfery can fix pretty much anything a Hogwarts student could be expected to cast without murderous intent.
Transfiguration?
Wizards are ignorant, but not really stupid. I think the vice-headmistress is quite effective with her warnings.
Risk taking, irrationality, and emotional volatility are pretty common traits of children in that age range. I don't think that is necessarily the case, but for children brought up in the environment of magical Briton that is certainly true for the majority of them. There were times around that age when I felt like setting the world on fire and if I had access to "the button" I might have pressed it. I think I would not have, but I cant be sure.
I think it would be quite incongruous to talk in confident tones about the safety of a junior high-school that stored weapons of mass destruction in an unlocked utility closet.
This is actually an interesting point to bear in mind: the average wizard's ability to cause large numbers of deaths is a lot greater than the average muggle's. It doesn't take a genius on the level of Voldemort to transfigure a hundred pounds of bleach (or name your poison) into air and release it inconspicuously in Diagon Alley.
The average muggle's ability to cause a large number of deaths is pretty high too (at least in America, where guns aren't too hard to get). My former high school has been around for 43 years now, and has never had a mass murder, and had quite a few more students than Hogwarts does. Columbine-level events are nearly unheard of, even though they wouldn't be much harder to execute than the hundred-pounds-of-bleach plan. The wards are probably just there to prevent outside attack from political opponents, and the children are assumed to be as well adjusted as anyone else in society.
One: I wasn't thinking in reference to Hogwarts students, just wizards in general. (Hence 'Diagon Alley' rather than 'the Great Hall'.)
Two:
Except that the "hundred pounds of bleach" plan requires only a single, irreversible action, so it's more like pressing a button.
It kind of does. In how many fanfics is anything like this suggested?
It really doesn't. They teach transfiguration to the children from about 8 years old and some of them do not completely fail. They tell the students a bunch of things that are really dangerous to do. There are many people below the level of Voldemort who have both the knowledge and skill to kill people effectively with transfiguration if they so desire. It really isn't that much of a genius feat of creativity.
Relatively few fan-fictions are based around the crude exploitation of basic magic for the purpose of terrorism. This says a lot more about what makes a good story than about how hard it is for average wizards to play terrorist. Significant plot arcs about magical terrorists sound cooler if they use fancy dramatic magic that sounds mysterious and hard to acquire rather than the simplest thing that would work.
They go further than that: the standard textbook includes a horrifying animated photograph of a murder victim. The idea that Transfiguration can be used as a weapon is taught in the very first class session.
In the wood-shop class which I took when I was a year or two older than a Hogwarts first-year, we were taught that the tools are dangerous. We were taught that you can cut your arm off with a bandsaw if you behave foolishly near it; and that if you lower the drill on the drill-press against your hand, it will put a hole through your hand. However, we were not specifically taught about the possibilities of shop tools for intentional murder. It was assumed that any accidents would be just that: accidents.
Now, Transfiguration is more dangerous than shop tools; Transfiguring a brick to air or water could sicken or kill quite a few people, whereas a belt-sander is really only dangerous to those within shoving distance. But a shop-class student casting around for a weapon would probably seize upon a chair-leg or two-by-four much more readily than a saw-blade. The Transfiguration student — having been explicitly instructed that the art has been used to intentionally kill — would much more likely bring that to mind.
kind of tangential, but would an arbitrary wizard even know what bleach is?
I suppose the question would be "Is the typical magical cleaning potion harmful when dispersed in small amounts throughout the body?"
If transfiguration can only result in non-magical substances, then science would help to transfigure to CBW agents - ending up too close for comfort. Wards cast in transfiguration classrooms and dormitories to detect intent to violate transfiguration rules would catch those, a wise expansive interpretation would catch the worst I can think of (critical mass of fissile material => will generate gas). The Hogwarts House system should force conformity and channel risk-taking into known paths. If failing to attempt homework would lose points, depression and mental illness could be caught early. Would the wizarding world have something of the culture of manners of the Diamond Ages's Victorians, with wards and parlours working as firewalls and time for threat assessment/decontamination?
This question occurred to me partway through writing the great-grandparent, hence the 'or some other poison' clause. I'd expect naturally unpleasant chemicals to have lower lethal dosage requirements than, say, argon. (Although maybe the mapping involved interacts with molecules such that you'd be better off with mercury. Who knows?)
Most fanfics don't lean hard on dangerous!transfiguration...
I don't see the replies you previously posted to my comment... I may have clicked "report" instead of "context" on accident. If so, I apologize.
Here's a thought: Hogwarts is described as being the only magical school with a zero percent fatality rate, and it's implied that the last time a student died was Myrtle, fifty years ago. Except all students are taught within the first week enough about Transfiguration to know how to kill someone with it. I can believe the murder rate is that low, but what about the suicide rate? Not one teenager in fifty years?
These two things are incompatible with each other. Perhaps Hogwarts is lying about the former.
Or, you know, they were talking about averages over the last few decades, not FOREVER.
That doesn't make much sense; Myrtle was described as the first fatality in a long time, which is why it was so shocking and nearly closed down Hogwarts completely - the consequence which caused Tom Riddle to back off and seal off the basilisk again. 5 decades is quite long enough for this to be a somewhat bizarrely low rate.
On the other hand, wizards are described as having very long lives on average, which is not very consistent with a high accident or suicide or homicide rate overall, and Hogwarts is a pretty small school, as the estimates go. Add in the claims of extraordinary Wizarding physical resilience (book 1, IIRC), and maybe that's enough to give the very low death rate.
Myrtle was a murder from an unknown assailant who could evade the protective wards of the school, and probably murder at will again -- "there's an uncaught murderer among your children" is a much more scary thing than an accidental fatality of the sort that I assume are still occasionally happening in other magical schools through negligence/etc.
When there's an accidental poisoning because some kid tried to brew an anti-acme potion, parents can just advise their children not to ever try anything as foolish as that -- and they even have the accidental death of the other kid as a warning for such foolishness...
I forget my Chamber of Secrets exactly, but wasn't Hagrid made the scapegoat for a fatal 'accident' and that was how Myrtle's death was explained away publicly?
Ehh... that seems kind of hard to cover up. Myrtle's death caused a panic and nearly resulted in closing the school. Technically, "0% fatality rate" could mean four out of every thousand students die.
If I remember right, it's implied that botched Transfiguration is a painful way to go -- it's compared to a severe illness. If its consequences are sufficiently well-known and unpleasant, it could be that it's not attractive as a suicide method.
On the other hand, Transfiguring your brain into aspic or something like that sounds pretty quick and reliable to me. Perhaps that's difficult for technical reasons.
Most likely Transfiguring only your brain or a single organ would fall under partial Transfiguration, which presents the obvious challenge.
Chapter 15:
According to a random Google first-page result, the annual suicide rate amongst teens is about 0.01%. While HPMOR's Hogwarts has a higher population, in canon (Word of God, really) the population was around 100 students per year, which suggests we'd see a teen suicide at Hogwarts about every century.
Rough figures say 20% of teens attempting suicide end up killing themselves; assuming all Hogwarts attempted suicides are successful, you'd still only have one every 20 years. And I'd suspect teens would be less suicidal at Hogwarts, and despite warnings would not try effective things like transfiguration very often.
Except that students stay at Hogwarts for 7 years, not one, which would put the suicide rate at Hogwarts at one per 14 years, not one per century (if wizards commit suicide at the same rate as muggles). If you assumed that Wizarding suicide attempts were 5 times as likely to be successful, that would put the rate at one suicide every 3 years.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the wizarding resilience to illness and injury also makes them more resilient to mental illness, and that's why suicide rates are lower.
If I'm not mistaken, that rate was based on the number of people who live to teenage years and then kill themselves during their teenage years, not the number of teenagers who kill themselves per year.
Interesting idea.
No, it's an annual rate. You quote it as an annual rate, and it matches the annual rate I found by repeating your search. So you need to multiply by seven to get the rate of people committing suicide during the years they would, if a Hogwarts student, be attending Hogwarts.
Hmm... it looks like you're correct.
Interestingly this site seems to say that the US suicide rate for teenagers is .01%, and the US suicide rate is also .01%. Curioser and curioser.
I don't understand why you think that. Having increasingly comfortable lives hasn't reduced the suicide rate in the developed world (as far as I know), and the Hogwarts school/prison system doesn't seem very different from our own.
Not sure about that one. Though comparing gdp to suicide rate (via Wikipedia) seems to suggest nothing in particular.
As much as humans have the ability to become blase about anything (thus double-witches), I would think having magical powers (or at least access to the cheering charm) would tend to decrease depression and such.
Also, Magical Britain went through a period of civil war / domestic terrorism in the sixties and seventies intense enough that ten years later, most children have lost one or both parents. One would expect this to have an effect.
Sorry, run that one by me again. Assuming 20% of teens attempt suicide, and that in Hogwarts all attempted suicides are successful. Wouldn't that mean a 20% fatality rate, not one every twenty years?
And you know, I just looked up some of the research myself, and I'm wondering where my impression of a high suicide rate came from, exactly.
From what I've seen, suicide rates for teens are generally higher than for older or younger people.
Wow, epic fail writing that sentence. Editing. Thanks.
Like, say, magic.