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FiftyTwo comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 17, chapter 86 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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?"
A better patch would be to say time turners only work in Hogwarts as an additional class attendence spell built into the general spells of the school (which canonically does weird things to space anyway).
Yeah, that's obviously the motivation, as is evident from the fact that Time-Turners essentially don't appear outside of one scene in PoA. That doesn't affect the point of their canonical fragility, though.
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.