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Velorien comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115 - Less Wrong
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So why is Harry going to such great pains to erase evidence of his involvement?
Hmm, if it was known that Dumbledore had died and that Quirrell had been Voldemort all year, bad things could happen to Hogwarts. This route makes it most like that it will be McGonagall as headmistress.
Dumbledore is not dead, just stuck in time. Maybe.
Can't Harry get the time turner messaging squad to give Dumbledore advance notice of everything that will occur, so that he can set the mirror trap to be not so much of a trap?
Dumbledore did seem to be very insistent on how Quirrell had fooled him and he had no idea whatsoever that Quirrell was Voldemort.
They're going to have to reveal Dumbledore's death anyway, and Quirrell =/= Voldemort would be the default assumption for any uninitiated observer anyway, seeing as their dead bodies were within metres of each other.
To me, the scene looked as though Quirrell had tried to fight Voldemort and the Death Eaters. Perhaps the story is that Quirrell killed the Death Eaters, Voldy killed quirrell, tried to sacrifice Hermione in a dark ritual, but Hermione's purity killed him.
Or cut that last step, and make it that Harry snapped his fingers.
Imagine the the myths that will come up around this. "Man, if you try to use magic to kill a kid magic will fuck you up, I don't care who you are."
Because it's hard to be seen as on the light side when you decapitate 38 adult wizards in an instant? Fame is harmful, not helpful, to Harry's goals. Better to make it look like Voldemort managed to cause a magical backfire that killed all his minions in a failed ritual involving Hermione. To go back to the Azkaban chapters, the perfect crime is the one that is declared a tragic accident and closed.
Is that true? Harry wishes to reform or replace the government of Magical Britain, and being the hero who defeated Voldemort twice would make that a lot easier (as Voldemort himself acknowledged). Turning Hermione into the Girl-Who-Lived dilutes that effect, and also brings all his fame-related problems down upon her.
Harry at this point trusts Hermione's judgement far more than his own. Putting Hermione in the position of power as the girl-who-lives-again pushes her into the forefront, letting her be the head that Magical Brittain needs, leaving him to go about his business determined to not destroy the world, as his unbreakable vow requires.
With all due respect to Miss Granger, she would make a terrible politician. Her strengths are an amazing memory, academic talent, and an unbreakable moral compass. However, she has no skill at manipulation, poor social skills in general, and no special ambition or vision. The Malfoys of this world would run rings around her.
By contrast, Harry is an unstoppable force for change in whatever direction he seeks, and his only real weakness is being too immature to properly weigh up the potential consequences of his actions. Which, admittedly, is a humongous flaw, but with recent events he finally knows that.
But she is also smart enough to ask for help, and a very quick study.
As with her army, it may be expected that she will organize an effective and powerful cabinet, whose combined abilities shall be filtered through her morality to let be made manifest only the good within them.
The other problem I see is that shortly before her death she was still bound up in "I'm just a twelve-year old girl". I don't see her making the shift out of that perspective fast enough to fully capitalise on Voldemort's defeat the way Harry would. (and let's not forget the various flavours of psychoogical trauma she may now be suffering from)
Data point - were I to interact with harry, I would likely see him as dangerously incompetent or a powerful enough optimizer to be a threat. Politicians probably don't want to be lumped into these mental buckets
Is it really that much better than being the hero who defeated Voldemort once, though? Putting on Hermione does seem pretty mean, but I think it's a very in-character sort of mistake, especially after the kind of day he's had.