Narcissa Bagnold is a first year student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, she says that her lifelong dream of being sorted into Slytherin was shattered when to her surprise she was assigned to Gryffindor during the Sorting, an event where incoming students are sorted into their Houses. Her parents are also angry, insisting that the new sorting algorithm adopted by the school has made a mistake. According to the Bagnolds, the previous selection mechanism or the Sorting Hat has always placed their lineage in Slytherin. They are requesting a moratorium on the adoption of the algorithmic tool, called MagicFix, and an official rescinding of all decisions made by the new sorting tool until the developers can explain the algorithms behind it.
Corbenius Bagnold: “It’s a complete black box! I don’t know why we’re abandoning a reliable, really true and tested way of doing things simply because there’s a new shiny toy in town. Not a single member of the Bagnold family has ever been assigned outside of Slytherin, let alone Gryffindor! It’s an outrage and we will fight and challenge this decision all the way up to the Ministry of Magic!”
The Bagnold family is not alone in voicing their disappointment with the new tool. Many veterans of the wizarding community say that the adoption of a computer based sorting algorithm is a slippery slope towards reliance on muggle technology, which they feel lacks the nuance needed to make decisions.
The Keeper of Keys and Grounds and the Professor for the Care of Magical Creatures at Hogwarts, Professor Rubeus Hagrid has seen many students come and go. While he admits that the Sorting Hat has made one or two odd decisions in the past, he considers the margin of error to be significantly less than what is currently being sold as a replacement.
Hagrid: “Listen, we all know that Peter Pettigrew should not have been in Gryffindor, we can all agree on that. But the fact is no amount of “Big Data” can replace our magic. If Dumbledore was alive today he would not have allowed it. I can assure you of that.”
The Sorting Hat echoes similar points.
The Sorting Hat:
“Trusting a machine to sort a kid,
The founders of Hogwarts would have forbid.
I can always explain what I have done,
Secret decisions or a black box, I will have none.
Muggles muddled with biases,
Only predict what they have seen,
Students become what they have been.”
But MagicFix, sold by software behemoth Unreal Leaps Inc. is not without supporters. Proponents of this new tool, including the new Hogwarts Headmistress Dolores Humphries, are adamant that the Sorting Hat is in fact riddled with biases.
Dolores Humphries: “It’s about time that we seriously revisited the systems we created thousands of years ago. We owe a great deal of gratitude to our founders for creating these mechanisms and to be fair they’ve gotten us here. But us wizards have to reinvent ourselves too, and also look towards muggles when they are doing something well. Is it possible that our Sorting Hat, the creation of four white wizards or a very limited demographic, could have some biases? I certainly don’t mean to be impertinent but we have to reconsider their very human, wizardly biases.”
The developers of MagicFix insist that the deep learning AI they have built is unmistakably better. For them, the original Sorting Hat simply doesn’t have enough data on the lifelong outcomes of the students. Because they have access to this data, they are able to combine it with decades long research on personality traits to offer a one of a kind matching algorithm. While Unreal Leaps Inc. has worked with institutions like Harvard, Brown and Oxford, this is their first venture into the world of witchcraft and wizardry. Arthur Weasley, a massive human technologies enthusiast and former head of the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office at the Ministry of Magic now sits on the board of the company. He says that the technology behind the machine learning algorithm is as good as any magic he’s witnessed in the wizarding world.
Arthur Weasley: “For those that argue that the tool lacks intuition, or I think the preferred term is ‘magic’ I only have one response. The models are some of the most developed in the market, and because we have been able to work with an extensive list of schools, they have only gotten better. To use one of Arthur C. Clarke’s laws, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ and that’s exactly the case here.”
Other say that the sorting process itself should be abandoned altogether and perhaps be replaced by random house assignments. They point at Dumbledore’s own words, noting that he hinted at some regret about the culture of partisanship at Hogwarts before his passing.
Sonorha Patel: “You know, perhaps sometimes I think we sort too soon” These were his words to Severus Snape! Imagine being labeled or defined at such a young age, your fate , friendships and opportunities strictly tied to the whims of a Sorting Hat. It is absurd! We’ve long held the position that this procedure itself should be evaluated. I’m certain that if it was, we would find some inherent flaws in this system. This is why we are against all sorts of sorting processes, regardless of them being magic or machine based.
The use of personality traits have a long history in both wizard and muggle worlds, and there are founded criticisms of the application of standardized tests like the Big Five, even among field experts who say that the results are compromised when applied in different contexts.
We were unable to reach the Ministry of Magic directly, but after the Bagnolds logged an official complaint with their Wizarding Complaints office, the Ministry issued a press release announcing the launch of an investigation into the use of machine learning algorithms for student sorting, especially as other wizarding schools seem eager to test out similar tools. In the meantime, instead of a moratorium, the Ministry advises parents and students to work with their respective schools to decide which sorting method best suits them.