In Chapter 16, Quirrelmort instructed the class in a very simple hex that caused a small amount of pain and no lasting harm called Ma-Ha-Su. He then selects three students, Hermoine, Draco, and Harry Potter, and then requires them to select a student and fire Ma-Ha-Su at them, taking Quirrel and later House points for non-compliance. The comparisons to the Millgram Experiments become explicit in chapter 63. Hermoine refuses, Draco fires on Hermoine, and Harry fires on himself.
Harry explicitly beats Quirrelmort’s plans, here : “Yes, quite ingenious, but there was a lesson to be taught and you dodged it.” It’s not clear he ever gets the intended lesson, given that Quirrelmort seemed to intend to teach Harry to harm Draco on obedient command.
Interestingly, this could have not just failed but have gone horribly wrong for Quirrelmort, and he wouldn’t have even understood why. One of the common responses to Millgram-like actions in the last few years of science fiction is to turn on the person giving illegal orders. Harry wouldn’t do that because of his upbringing, but other possible Riddle-clones would wanted to fire Ma-Ha-Su on Quirrelmort and claimed he counted as a student—and either required he flinch or dodge from a trivial spell, or risked publicly triggering the resonance that would have brought Dumbledore down on Quirrelmort’s head. The man’s not exactly been known for his happy subservience, after all.
Even without reaching that unlikely but disastrous possibility, ‘success’ would have had dramatically different results than Quirrelmort expected, given Quirrelmort’s difficulty understanding what Harry was trying to do with Draco even at that point. Blunt, blunt stupidity.
What does this mean?
Command Push is set of force philosophy where commanders give direct orders involving not only a mission’s goal, but also its execution, tools, and specific tactics. It’s very common historically, where communication is slow, or where the commander has much greater understanding of the field than individuals, but it’s highly dependent on commander skill and knowledge, and very vulnerable to subterfuge. Quirrelmort is hugely prone to this, as are Harry Potter and (to a lesser extent) Draco.
This is usually contrasted with Recon Pull, Mission-type Tactics, or Command By Negation, where commanders provide goals, time constraints, and resources, but allow units to develop their own strategies to achieve those goals. This requires more training, faster communications technology, and higher levels of trust in subordinates (less so in Command By Negation, where you at least double-check with a commander), but puts more minds on a problem and can more readily adapt when lines of communication are cut or when situations on the ground change.
((Command Push and Recon Pull are video game terms from the Civilization series: different armies have different terms for these philosophies, usually subdivided into separate generations or divided by recent inspirations. Modern armies tend to use more modernized techniques derived from combinations of the two branches and further IT developments, though they’d not really be practicable in the time frame present here.))
In Chapter 16, Quirrelmort instructed the class in a very simple hex that caused a small amount of pain and no lasting harm called Ma-Ha-Su. He then selects three students, Hermoine, Draco, and Harry Potter, and then requires them to select a student and fire Ma-Ha-Su at them, taking Quirrel and later House points for non-compliance. The comparisons to the Millgram Experiments become explicit in chapter 63. Hermoine refuses, Draco fires on Hermoine, and Harry fires on himself.
Harry explicitly beats Quirrelmort’s plans, here : “Yes, quite ingenious, but there was a lesson to be taught and you dodged it.” It’s not clear he ever gets the intended lesson, given that Quirrelmort seemed to intend to teach Harry to harm Draco on obedient command.
Interestingly, this could have not just failed but have gone horribly wrong for Quirrelmort, and he wouldn’t have even understood why. One of the common responses to Millgram-like actions in the last few years of science fiction is to turn on the person giving illegal orders. Harry wouldn’t do that because of his upbringing, but other possible Riddle-clones would wanted to fire Ma-Ha-Su on Quirrelmort and claimed he counted as a student—and either required he flinch or dodge from a trivial spell, or risked publicly triggering the resonance that would have brought Dumbledore down on Quirrelmort’s head. The man’s not exactly been known for his happy subservience, after all.
Even without reaching that unlikely but disastrous possibility, ‘success’ would have had dramatically different results than Quirrelmort expected, given Quirrelmort’s difficulty understanding what Harry was trying to do with Draco even at that point. Blunt, blunt stupidity.
Command Push is set of force philosophy where commanders give direct orders involving not only a mission’s goal, but also its execution, tools, and specific tactics. It’s very common historically, where communication is slow, or where the commander has much greater understanding of the field than individuals, but it’s highly dependent on commander skill and knowledge, and very vulnerable to subterfuge. Quirrelmort is hugely prone to this, as are Harry Potter and (to a lesser extent) Draco.
This is usually contrasted with Recon Pull, Mission-type Tactics, or Command By Negation, where commanders provide goals, time constraints, and resources, but allow units to develop their own strategies to achieve those goals. This requires more training, faster communications technology, and higher levels of trust in subordinates (less so in Command By Negation, where you at least double-check with a commander), but puts more minds on a problem and can more readily adapt when lines of communication are cut or when situations on the ground change.
((Command Push and Recon Pull are video game terms from the Civilization series: different armies have different terms for these philosophies, usually subdivided into separate generations or divided by recent inspirations. Modern armies tend to use more modernized techniques derived from combinations of the two branches and further IT developments, though they’d not really be practicable in the time frame present here.))
That was very interesting, thanks.