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Oscar_Cunningham comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8 - Less Wrong
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Apart from, y'know, still being humans, right?
If any of those previous Dark Wizards were dangerous even as ordinary humans, they wouldn't've lost in the first place.
Unless they had some kind of really cunning plan.
If they had such a plan which really truly required them to be non-magical* and somehow was superior to all magical plans, they could just burn their power themselves...
* This makes me very wary as it sounds perilously close to conjunction fallacy. The set of 'non-magical \/ magical plans' ought to be larger than either subset...
Example: Have your enemy burn your magic. Your enemy thinks you are safe and lets their guard down. Your minion sacrifices themselves and you absorb their magic. You win.
Admittedly this plan will involve more than three things going right in a row.
I was going to say that this step seems like an assumption, except Eliezer just made Dumbledore say that was the secret to Grindelwald's success, so...
He never said that his Muggle allies were killing themselves; the blood sacrifice mentioned could easily be from those who were killed in the Nazi extermination camps.
Is there a difference, from the magical point of view, between Muggle allies slaughtering each other to fuel Grindelwald, and slaughtering non-allied Muggles to fuel Grindelwald?
Arguably, his Muggle allies (assuming, as usual, that these are the Nazis) were indeed sacrificing themselves: they started a war which they lost, leading to their deaths (in many cases) by war, hanging, or suicide (the last including the Muggle Fuehrer himself).
However, I interpreted this as Sheaman did; sacrificing others may be less powerful, but it was a lot of others.
In a number of magic systems, the willingness of a sacrifice can have a huge impact on its effectiveness, ranging anywhere from a willing sacrifice granting significantly more power than the unwilling to requiring the sacrifice to be willing for it to work at all.
I'm uncertain where Potterverse stands on this, let alone MOR!Potterverse.
Assuming Voldemort's ritual in GoF was more than empty words, willingness is important, or at least notable, given:
Italics added to emphasize parts concerning consent.
Also, many parents in the holocaust were forced to either leave there children or die. Many were forced to sacrifce themselves for their significant other or watch them both die. Consent (as wormtail shows) can be based on a wide variety of factors that might not involve you being truly aligned with how you feel about the ritual itself. A muggle might walk into the gas chamber willingly to save his/her spouses life but the harry potter verse never deals with "how much consent is consent".
Sure. So in one ritual we know of, consent and lack of consent matters. But that doesn't argue much one way or the other about the proposed scheme for how burning your magic might be a winning strategy.