Sure, that’s reasonable. And it makes the prison/maze much more general—there could be all sorts of rationalist/moral traps in it, and then one could make the pure prisoner’s dilemma the final obstacle before escape.
I suppose the hard part is justifying in-universe the master rationalists who could create such a prison/maze—EY has clearly set Harry up in the fanfic as being the first master rationalist, and we can hardly postulate a hidden master when EY went to such pains with Draco to demonstrate the wizarding world’s general moral bankruptcy (a hidden master would, one think, manage to bring the wizarding world up to at least muggle levels, if maybe not past it).
Presumably Harry himself will be bringing about some drastic reforms.
There’s also the issue that wizards of the distant past might have been better rationalists than the current crop, but had less to work with, and the arts have simply been lost over time.
That’s not a bad idea. It actually works well—the general loss of wizarding power is then due not to any genetic dilution by mudbloods, but because they’re ignorant or lazy. It goes a little against the LW grain (we despise Golden Age myths), but since Rowling insists on a wizarding Golden Age, it’s a good subversion.
They don’t have systems or habits for preserving knowledge reliably, and there’s enough competition between wizards that a lot of the best spells (not to mention methods for developing powerful spells) won’t be recorded, and might not even be taught.
Actually, genetic dilution might still be a factor… if the rationalism of the founders was imperfect, and they didn’t know much about heredity, the inability of most people to duplicate magical feats might have been interpreted as the result of an error in those finicky incantations. Emphasis on rote memorization of reliable effects would then come at the expense of higher-level invention and item creation techniques.
There are some possibly-relevant discussions of a history of magic in Tales of MU.
There are some possibly-relevant discussions of a history of magic in Tales of MU.
You’ll have to link them, then (unless you mean the very funny section about the science cultists); I read a bit of Tales of MU, but got weirded out after a while.
“The first codified definition of a ‘wizard’ as opposed to other less formal and implicitly inferior magic-users was someone who did ‘name-workings’. Nowadays, the formal definition of ‘wizard’ is somebody who uses spells, whether they invoke true names or not, as opposed to sorcerers, who throw around raw techniques…
I couldn’t help but think how close this approach was to the old “scientific” method of formalizing spells that had been left behind in the dark ages, the way that resulted in spells that only worked at all under highly select circumstances and could rarely be duplicated by more than a handful of people.
In that case, the points would have to be associated with a task rather than simply cooperation.
Edit: also http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20070727
Sure, that’s reasonable. And it makes the prison/maze much more general—there could be all sorts of rationalist/moral traps in it, and then one could make the pure prisoner’s dilemma the final obstacle before escape.
I suppose the hard part is justifying in-universe the master rationalists who could create such a prison/maze—EY has clearly set Harry up in the fanfic as being the first master rationalist, and we can hardly postulate a hidden master when EY went to such pains with Draco to demonstrate the wizarding world’s general moral bankruptcy (a hidden master would, one think, manage to bring the wizarding world up to at least muggle levels, if maybe not past it).
Why would one think that? This hidden master could be a total jerk-face.
Presumably Harry himself will be bringing about some drastic reforms.
There’s also the issue that wizards of the distant past might have been better rationalists than the current crop, but had less to work with, and the arts have simply been lost over time.
That’s not a bad idea. It actually works well—the general loss of wizarding power is then due not to any genetic dilution by mudbloods, but because they’re ignorant or lazy. It goes a little against the LW grain (we despise Golden Age myths), but since Rowling insists on a wizarding Golden Age, it’s a good subversion.
They don’t have systems or habits for preserving knowledge reliably, and there’s enough competition between wizards that a lot of the best spells (not to mention methods for developing powerful spells) won’t be recorded, and might not even be taught.
Actually, genetic dilution might still be a factor… if the rationalism of the founders was imperfect, and they didn’t know much about heredity, the inability of most people to duplicate magical feats might have been interpreted as the result of an error in those finicky incantations. Emphasis on rote memorization of reliable effects would then come at the expense of higher-level invention and item creation techniques.
There are some possibly-relevant discussions of a history of magic in Tales of MU.
You’ll have to link them, then (unless you mean the very funny section about the science cultists); I read a bit of Tales of MU, but got weirded out after a while.
http://www.talesofmu.com/story/book0x/378
http://www.talesofmu.com/story/book0x/235