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Harvard has three kinds of law people. First, it has its own lawyers. They're fine, but they're mostly not the court kind of lawyers. Second, it has law student
by CobrastanJorji 4y ago
Harvard has three kinds of law people. First, it has its own lawyers. They're fine, but they're mostly not the court kind of lawyers. Second, it has law students. Those aren't lawyers, so you don't want them either. Third, it has law professors, who are generally well known or renowned for past deeds or theoretical legal philosophy, but mostly they're either out of practice, never practiced, or they've got insane (for example, Alan Dershowitz is a professor there). You don't want any of those folks nearby when courtroom stuff needs to happen.
Hogwarts has a similar problem, now that I think about it. Hugely powerful wizards defending a school from a tiny number of adversaries, they've got all the time in the world to prepare, and yet they're terrible at it. They build a huge multilayered vault that's bypassed by three unprepared kids. They should've brought in professionals.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoNow I wonder what an elite wizard special forces would be like.
- suoduandao2 4y agoAurors? Would make for a great TV show...
- bee_rider 4y agoIf you went far enough in the direction of professionalized warfare in the Harry Potter universe, I have a sneaking suspicion it would turn pretty stupid. People with enchanted sniper rifles and invisibility cloaks playing “don’t move first” or something boring like that.
- twicetwice 4y agoYou can definitely get pretty creative and interesting—for example, transmuting a pile of primed hand grenades into a handful of confetti and then tossing it over your enemy right before the spell wears off. That said, you're right, it's highly likely that boring strategies would dominate. However, the Harry Potter magic system is so fast and loose that you can always make up some new spell to cancel out whatever OP strategy; the author has almost unlimited leeway.
- sandworm101 4y agoAll wizards seem limited by the speed of sound. They hear/see spells coming and react by waving arms and saying things. Bullets are faster than wands. Only Jedi have the prescience to react prior to the bullet being fired.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoDo they need to react though? Surely there's some sort of kinetic barrier spell they could use. Just checked and there's protego, a shield charm that blocks other spells and physical objects. A high mobility special forces wizard squad would have one person responsible for casting protego while all the others use avada kedavra on everything that moves. They could also use some sort of explosive spell to destroy cover, walls, obstacles and fortifications. All while shrugging off bullets, shrapnel and pretty much anything muggles could throw at them short of a nuclear missile.
- bee_rider 4y agoWe only really see up to, basically, the wizard version of a detective in Harry Potter. Maybe some of the aurors are like SWAT team members? In general the wizard society imagined seems to actively reject the idea of professionalizing things and work more as a collection of hobbyists so I suspect “professional soldier wizards” don’t even exist in universe, and there’s no Wizard Raytheon to really optimize Wizard Radar. So it is hard to speculate about what it would look like.
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago
- metadat 4y agoDon't forget #4: The littany of legal resources in the Harvard Alma Mater Alumni Network who became practicing courtroom lawyers
- vineyardmike 4y ago> who became practicing courtroom lawyers And judges. And politicians. And bureaucrats. And wealthy political donors. They’ve got an army of influence at every layer of society.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y agoI always hear this talk of condescension towards academics in favor of professionals but I don't get it. I've spent more than a decade in professional settings and """professionals""" screw up their jobs quite often and don't even experience everything there is to experience in their entire industry, so I don't get the sense of ascendancy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- koolba 4y agoProfessionals screw up their jobs more than academics for the same reason that professional baseball players strike out more than couch surfers: they’re actually playing the game
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y agoYou don't know that--it's possible (and in my experience this is the more likely cause) that they are not thinking enough on the abstract to recognize patterns across situations, which is why they keep making the same mistakes. The best professionals I've ever worked with don't even bother making this artificial distinction between professional practice and the academe, and instead continue to educate themselves even as they get farther in their careers. Professionals who are incapable of elevating their practice into theory are just as devoid of knowledge as academics who don't put their theory into practice. We need to stop glorifying this notion of "pure" professionals just as people are skeptical of "pure" academics--otherwise this is just letting anti-intellectualism creep in on HN.
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoThere is no ant—intellectualism here. Academics simply are not professionals. You can’t suddenly become good at something you don’t practice because you are a master at theory and being an academic doesn’t allow the time to practice.
- maxbond 4y agoTo be fair, my interpretation is that the multilayered security system was actually designed to be bypassed by precisely those 3 children, and the curriculum was designed to give them exactly the knowledge they'd need.