tadrinth comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 10 - Less Wrong
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Hat-and-Cloak is Voldemort but not Quirrell. When in Quirrell, Voldemort has a whole (probably quite powerful!) brain to run his computation on. Outside of Quirrell, he relies only on what computation he can do purely as a 'ghost', or as magic, or whatever. Hat-and-Cloak is thusly disguised because Voldemort lacks a body. Or maybe Voldemort possesses someone else, who isn't as smart as Quirrell, and is proportionally dumber and more prone to mistakes. Quirrell is zombie while Voldemort's away because Voldemort set it up that way. Don't want your robot walking away without you.
Part of the groundhog-day attack involved setting up a trigger in Hermione, that when she can attack Malfoy, she should try to kill him. This explains her behaviour in the battle, and her apparent behaviour in the duel.
Hat-and-Cloak is a player in this story. Players in this story are clever and powerful. A sensible way of resolving this apparent contradiction is to postulate some form of disability or restriction applying to Hat-and-Cloak. Then all you need is Conservation of Characters.
What evidence is there that H&C isn't just Quirrell wrapped in an illusion?
There's no need for Hermione to have cast the lethal hex. She wins the duel, then the real perpetrator stuns both of them, hexes Draco, and then memory charms Hermione into thinking she did it. However, if that's the case, unless the perpetrator then used Hermione's wand to cast the hex, checking what spells her wand had cast would reveal something fishy.
Why are we proposing the H&C is not clever and powerful?
Slips and mistakes H&C has made point to incompetence.
I'm confused about H&C. On one hand, yes, he looks incompetent. On the other hand, in Ch.35 he knew that Quirrell would be questioning Zabini about Dumbledore's plot, and instructed Zabini accordingly. How could he know that, given that Quirrell decided to question Zabini on the spur of the moment, when he heard Harry mention Dumbledore favorably? The most likely explanation seems to be that H&C is Quirrell and instructed Zabini just in case.
ETA: if I ignore logic and judge only by manners, then H&C seems to be Snape. But why?