Ah, my mistake. Although I do see what you mean with what she says in interviews and what she's written in the books being vague and contradictory. What with her saying there's hundreds of students in the Great Hall and hundreds of students cheering for Slytherin at one of the matches. And then with her saying things like that she didn't put much thought into the population size. Lol. Which drive people to do essays like this...

http://www.hp-lexicon.org/essays/essay-hogwarts-how-many.html

 

Honestly 99% of people don't notice these things. Say what you want about canon, it's magical, that's what got and kept people reading. I think we've honestly just stretched the whole story too far and become jaded, having constant discussions about it and reading stories exploring other sides of the world. IT would be nice to be able to explain /something/ in the world without resorting to the "JKR didn't plan!" copout but I can't say that that affected my reading of the books (back when I could still read them).

It makes little difference to her audience imo.

As for Scifi writers, I lol when I think of them and the shit they catch if a single decimal for troop numbers in a theoretical galactic war is out of place (see: Karen Traviss) or they fuck up FTL speeds or whatever. But they are playing in a different arena. They sell their work as plausible while JKR can write everything off as magic, so it's more their fault really. You don't want to be called on your shit, don't give numbers.

 

Very true, Scrib. I must confess, half the time I see a canon debate on DLP I can barely muster up the interest to read it, because inevitably the answer will probably be "JKR is stupid" or "because magic". Just seems a bit pointless at times.

Not to say that this is always the case, by the way. But most of the time, that is the solution to any issue someone has with canon.

 

Ha. So we're all coming to the conclusion that Harry Potter is little more than the most insanely popular set of Magic Treehouse books ever written?

 

So I started rereading the books earlier this week, going through about one a day, currently on Goblet of Fire and I just finished reading the Portkey portion. 200,000 people attend the Quidditch World Cup. Even assuming a majority of attendees are foreign; unless you start getting into ridiculous ratios this seems to indicate a rather more significant sized population than the apparent class sizes for Hogwarts do, and that's without also taking into account the fact that not everyone necessarily goes to the Cup; Mrs. Weasley doesn't and she specifically mentions going to Diagon Alley to buy their school books while they are gone. This means that she can go to Diagon Alley and buy the books, which means that Flourish and Botts is open for business While it's possible, that due to magic stores just remain open without any real attention to potential customers, there's no real reason to assume so. At least a decent number of other people must not go to the Cup, enough at least to keep some shops open.


I think primarily though, this just shows once again how the contradictory information we have before us leads to wildly different possible population sizes. Still, it's an interesting thing to do, trying to make sense of this world with all its contradictions.

 

You must be writing a fic, else you wouldn't be so concerned with such trivial shit.

Here's my advice: If you want to say that Hogwarts is the only school in the British Isles and that attendance is mandatory for all wizarding children (which it's not), then you pretty much have to rationalize its low student population by posturing that two consecutive Dark Wars utterly fucking decimated the wizarding population. There's really no other feasible explanation granted by canon.

 

http://forums.darklordpotter.net/showthread.php?p=546401#post546401

Stop looking for the in-universe explanation. You won't find it.

 

I think SHE stretched the story too far, not us But she got her $$$ so...

 

Honestly, I'd be inclined to go with the small society idea, if only because it makes more sense, given what we know 'about' the wizarding world. They don't have much of a culture to call their own, which would make sense, given that there are so few of them, and the limited numbers also make sense given what we know about the pureblood families. If there was a large enough base of wizards to draw from, then there would not be a problem of inbreeding and stagnation that we know there is in canon.

It also makes sense in the context of keeping the statue a secret. It's one thing to be able to obliviate people who see things they shouldn't, but if there were large numbers of witches and wizards, it would create all sorts of anomalies in the mundane bureaucracies and paperwork. They can modify memories if they have to, but they can't go around MIB-flashing everybody who does the math, so it would have to be a small enough population that it could feasibly fit through the cracks with minimal fuss.

I'll grant you, there are some problems with the numbers Rowling throws around (consistency being the biggest one. Huge crowds for Quidditch matches,* but classes with twenty or so kids at most at a time?), but the general trends that we've seen point towards the smaller numbers.

The biggest argument against the idea is the size of the ministry, and honestly, I'm pretty sure that's more of a light-hearted joke than anything else. The intro to Fantastic Beasts makes it pretty clear that the wizard as a creature adores bureaucracy and tries to solve most problems with it, so it's entirely believable to me that the MoM is a Monty Python-esque arena of redundancy and inefficiency. You're not supposed to scowl at it and take it seriously while tallying up the numbers. It's there to be laughed at.


* Though personally, I've never understood why, if you wanted large crowds for the cinematic imagery, you couldn't just say that people who aren't students show up for them. Like Hogwarts alumni, friends and family of the players, and possibly fans of amateur Quidditch. It's not like they all have to be students.

 

I really don't think you understand what a statute is, matey.

It's not the statue of secrecy, and you do not keep a statue secret in order to keep it. It's a Statute of Secrecy, in which wizards have formally declared that they wish to keep the Magical world secret from the muggles.

 

Spelling/grammar derps aside, he does have a point that the smaller the wizarding population is, the easier it is to keep it relatively hidden from the rest of the world. The more wizards there are around, the greater the odds are that somebody is going to do something stupid that the Obliviators don't catch.

 

You know how the number of UFO sightings dropped when video cameras became commonplace? Canon is happening right at the time everyone gets a cellphone. A decade later millions of people have cloud connected video recorders in their pockets at all times. Destroying the phone won't delete the clip from youtube. Once it goes viral, experts will ask Google for the uploaded file (before it was transcoded using x264) and discover it's non-tampered camera-original. Where is your Statute now?

 

It is not inconceivable that a skilled wizard could literally use a Vanishing Charm to Vanish a video from the internet. I suggest taking a look at the final chapter of Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling, Taure's essay on magical theory, which deals with the possible applications of spells. One of his examples includes the possibility of using a Summoning Charm to Summon information to your computer screen rather than using Google for instance.

Not everyone agrees with Taure's theory, but it is certainly possible.

 

It is only possible in the sense that anything is possible because there are no rules. The way a "kill Voldemort now, no matter how many horcruxes he has or where he is located" spell is possible.

Spoiler

Achieving a link between the event as the wizard remembers it and bits in chunks on thousands of encrypted disks across a world wide distributed Content Delivery Network that represent arithmetically-coded discrete-cosine-transformed inter-frame motion-vectored matrices of YCbCr values that when transformed into RGB pixels look like what the CCD in a cameraphone "saw" from its angle through its lens is... hard.

I believe that memory charms work by putting the person into hypnosis and convincing them to forget something. That is what it looks like, at least. Thus, the wizard performing the spell only talks to the person on whom the spell is performed. The spell makes you very persuasive, but you express your desires using a medium you're familiar with. A wizard does not scan a brain, map all the individual neurons that collectively encode a memory and alters the state of those neurons somehow.

To perform "brain surgery" on Google, you need to make an Obliviate that communes with an inanimate object. If they had strong AI, then I would buy it. But with dumb hardware? You need to really know the details of what you're doing. Especially since the system doesn't even have a built-in "delete" functionality.

There exist tamper-proof cryptographically secure journaling filesystems. Not used for video storage, AFAIK. All new records are signed in a chain, using a key that is derived from the hash of previous records. If you alter any record in the chain, later records will show up "bad". The git distributed VCS is like that: tampering with a git tree in a way that will fool git is computationally hard. Now, you can say that magic produces a fast reverse function for SHA1 or that it can factor 2048 bit numbers, but if magic makes P=NP then

your protagonist is godlike and I don't like those fics.

EDIT: geeking out is behind spoiler tag.

 

I think that we have a fundamental and perhaps insurmountable disagreement about the nature of magic. For example, I simply disagree about the nature of an Obliviation. As far as I am concerned, the spell literally erases the memory from a person's mind. It could be magically recovered, because magic can do things outside of the natural laws of the universe, but any normal attempt to recover the memories would be doomed to failure, because they no longer exist

An Obliviation could never work on the internet, because it doesn't deal with memory. A Vanishing Charm, whose purpose is to erase something, could very easily remove a video from the internet. The scope of what is happening isn't a big deal, because why should magic care about scope? It certainly doesn't care about even the most basic laws of the universe.

Now, I doubt that any wizard would have the necessary understanding of electronics in general to even cast a Vanishing Charm at that level, but it isn't impossible. After all, this is magic we are talking about.

 

Canon disagrees. If memory charms were hypnosis Lockhart wouldn't have completely wiped his own memory with a backfired memory charm.

Magic being magic, it tends to ignore a lot of those pesky details of real life physics and such. Seeing as HP magic can do stuff lie create enchantments that trigger whenever anyone speaks a specific word out loud or turn inanimate objects into living creatures, finding/removing electronically encoded information doesn't seem like a big stretch.

 

Look, can a wizard conjure a 4 inch diameter ball of Pu-239? It doesn't have to last long...

The magic (or the magic users) in canon is useless exactly because all the problems in the world would be solved in one minute if your character was actually capable of magic at the level you say is ok. If space-time is not a problem, you can cast a spell that kills Voldemort in his mother's womb. That's it, end of story. Or, you know, conjure food.

 

I always thought that that was a piece of BS pulled by Rowling.

On the flip side, you can apply any arbitrary rules to magic that you wish, like being unable to conjure food or gold, or true Time Travel being impossible, because it is magic and the rules don't have to make logical sense. The fact that it is magic allows you to place any limits you wish or remove any limits you wish.

Freedom goes both ways in this case.

 

It's now the "It's magic" thing that gives you that freedom. It's the "Rowling never accurately defined what it could and couldn't do" thing that does.

 

And the few things she established are impossible are, one by one, proved possible.