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Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I 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.

Professionals 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

You 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.

There 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.

This. It's one thing to know the theory of digging trenches, it's another to successfully fight from them.

Sorry if my joke came across as anti-intellectual. I think "law professor" and "lawyer" are really different jobs, though, in the same way a doctor does a different job from a PhD in medicine. Sure, those "head of research" MD-PhD folks running research labs are technically doctors, but you don't want them to be your doctor simply for the reason that they haven't actually seen any patients in a long time.

Industry and academia are totally different environments. I don’t see any indication that people in industry “screw up their jobs” more than academics. How do you even define “screw up” and “more?”

The academic’s job is to understand the state of the art well enough to improve on it, implementing a standard solution is below bare minimum.

In industry the goal is to get near enough an approximation to the state of the art such that the thing they are working on doesn’t provide the company a noticeable disadvantage vs the competition, and then move on to something else.

It's extremely common for many scientists (nuclear physicists, neuroscientists, biochemists, etc.) to spend a few years in the industry and either teach for a while or publish a paper on the side and then come back to full-time work when they feel like it again. This obsession on drawing a hard line between the two is utter nonsense and reeks of classic HN techbro simple-mindedness. You would easily make the mistake of dismissing a professional in the middle of an academic stint as someone who has no experience at all, just to feed your sense of self-superiority.

Err, did you mean to respond to a different post? I was pointing out that the jobs (not the people) are fundamentally different. As a result, denigrating academics for not “playing the game” makes no sense. They are “playing” a different “game.”

It is like complaining that Wayne Gretzky sucked at getting points — compare his scores to, like, any vaguely offense-focused basketball player!

In this description, who is building what you call "state of the art"?

It's because academics are spectacularly incompetent compared to professionals.

They have no actual practice doing anything. But worse, they think they know what they're doing.

Honestly, be thankful you've never worked with an academic, they're honestly the worst work experience you will ever have, arrogant, utterly incompetent and can waste huge amounts of your time by saying intellectually appealing things to management that are a practical disaster.

There is a good reason for spherical cow in vacuum to exist as a concept.

I have seen brilliant people pass through CS with flying colors and they enter their first job and don't know how to debug something.

Think of it that way - a material science professor will know everything there is about welding. And yet probably for a complex weld you will call a welder. Tricks of the trade matter.

The whole point of the academy is that you can abstract a bit the whole messiness of the world so you can focus on the grander things.

To 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.

Don't forget #4: The littany of legal resources in the Harvard Alma Mater Alumni Network who became practicing courtroom lawyers

> 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.

Now I wonder what an elite wizard special forces would be like.

If 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.

You 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.

All 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.

Do 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.

We 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.

Aurors?

Would make for a great TV show...

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