Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2024 September 9

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September 9

Harry Potter sorting hat

The sorting hat classified incoming Hogwarts students as brave (Gryffindor), hardworking (Hufflepuff), intellectually curious (Ravenclaw), or ambitious (Slytherin). Maybe I'm reading too much fanfiction but I find myself applying those patterns to real life, e.g. "such-and-such jerk [politician or tech tycoon] is a real Slytherin".

Just how stupid is this? Some other schemes like Myers-Briggs are considered bogus but I see there are mappings online between that and Hogwarts houses.(personalityunleashed.com/16-personality-types-as-hogwarts-houses/) On the other hand, the five factor model is for some reason taken more seriously. Is there any reason to think Rowling was actually onto something with the sorting hat? E.g. does it reflect any known research before or after? For that matter is the whole industry of personality classification bogus? Four temperaments has some other schemes listed that I haven't looked into yet. It's hard to navigate web search results about Harry Potter because of all the merchandising that it finds. Thanks. 2601:644:8581:75B0:0:0:0:8C8A (talk) 18:54, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

ALL politicians are Slytherin. Blueboar (talk) 19:22, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that occurred to me too. I've thought sometimes there are a few rare exceptions, but that is probably naive. 2601:644:8581:75B0:0:0:0:8C8A (talk) 22:38, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Certainly not all when they start their careers; many are driven by ideals rather than ambition. But those that do not nourish the Slytherin aspect of their (presumably pluripotent) personalities will usually not survive for long in the political ecosystem, so there is an effective sieve.  --Lambiam 23:39, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

The categories are not mutually exclusive; I know more than a few people who are both hardworking and intellectually curious. And some folks fit in none of these categories yet are good people. We probably all know people that fit well in one of these prototypes, but I can think of many other prototypical categories: shy; indecisive; entitled and quarrelsome; nurturing; self-effacing. Rowling's categories are merely four spots in a vast sea of possibilities, deftly chosen because they serve the narrative well.  --Lambiam 00:03, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

People are famously complicated and categorizing them to ease the mental burden of understanding them is a perennial impulse. Unfortunately, these simplifications are always wrong and often harmful. "There are x kinds of people" isn't a something you hear from Plotinus and Wittgenstein, rather t-shirts. Rowling's now cemented legacy shows her dumber than a t-shirt: she made her eponymous a cop and she made herself a common hatemonger.

Temerarius (talk) 02:02, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

The hat doesn't say each person belongs in exactly one category. Rather, each house requires certain attributes, and students with the attributes for than one house can discuss that with the hat and make their own choice, but of course they retain the attributes. Harry Potter in the JKR books was seen as both courageous and capable of greatness, so the hat offered him Slytherin and Gryffindor. Yeah JKR is looking feeble these days, but even when the HP books were first published, they weren't very good. I read the first few of them and gave up. I find that lots of HP fanfiction is simply better than the Rowling books. Re politicians I'd say e.g. Trump is Slytherin but also has some Gryffindor attributes. I mean the guy is brazen. 2601:644:8581:75B0:0:0:0:8C8A (talk) 03:06, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

So according to you, anyone who stands up for the rights of women (in sports, prisons etc) is a "common hatemonger"? That's certainly a point of view. And whatever Rowling's literary merits or demerits, she got millions of tween and teen boys reading, when otherwise they would have been playing videogames. Meanwhile, someone who has read the first third of the first Harry Potter book should know that Rowling was not setting up four mutually-exclusive categories -- as the anonynmous IP mentioned, the Sorting Hat said Harry could go into either Gryffindor or Slytherin, and seemed to be leaning a little toward Slytherin (but Harry strongly preferred Gryffindor)... AnonMoos (talk) 18:47, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

iirc the hat also made ludicrously bad mistakes, despite portraying itself as infallible. The whole "your fate is sealed, but the guy deciding fate is a bit insane" thing is a pretty common British childrens lit trope, as is especially the horrific-orphan-origins-with-abusive-adopted family thing. SamuelRiv (talk) 02:03, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

There do exist personality tests in psychology, with actual "sorting" of sorts. A bit of an overview of the tests that I found for free on NIH from Silverman. For example, you can see all the things MMPI has been adjusted and re-adjusted to have as its personality axes. There's also the Rorschach Test, which is not supposed to measure anything about how you think, but just to place you into population buckets (and that's pretty much what all clinical personality tests are doing, and arguably what all population-calibrated tests do in general). Then those population buckets are correlated to quite a bit of medically relevant information, like pharmacological response or prognosis, which can hopefully guide treatment.

It's not destiny, and it says little to nothing about your actual personality -- it's just that your honest score on a psychology test groups you with population A, and population A is correlated to study subpopulation outcomes X, and importantly the test is shown to be predictive and stable. Contrast those statistically important criteria that validate the tests above to, say, what has been determined about Myers–Briggs Type Indicator testing, and hopefully you'll start to get a feel for what "real" vs "fake" "personality testing" is supposed to do (afaiu). SamuelRiv (talk) 03:30, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Provinces of French Algeria

During the later years of French Algeria, was the region divided into provinces, or was it merely regions and departments like in the rest of France? The French Algeria article doesn't use the word "province" except for an event in 1847, and its "Government and administration" section doesn't really address geographic subdivisions. Departments_of_France#Former_departments mentions several in Algeria, but I'm unsure whether provinces existed too.

Context: 1954 Chlef earthquake begins by saying that the earthquake happened in a specific province of French Algeria. I'm uncomfortable with this introduction, because it's anachronistic unless provinces existed in Algeria in 1954. Nyttend (talk) 22:51, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

The Provinces of Algeria article says "1957–1974: Immediately after independence, Algeria retained its 15 former French départements, which were renamed wilayas (provinces) in 1968, for the most part, with some name changes" Abductive (reasoning) 23:34, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

In 1954 there were still only three départements in Algeria (Alger, Oran and Constantine), approximately covering the northern third of the country; the vast and sparsely populated southern regions were simply unorganized territory (the linked article about former French départements had a map). It would be anachronistic to refer to a post-1957 département or province in an article about an event in 1954. Xuxl (talk) 13:19, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

If you scroll down to the middle of this page, there's a photograph including a map which shows only northern Algeria as belonging to Nato... AnonMoos (talk) 19:48, 13 September 2024 (UTC)