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see comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 12 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Hypothesis 1: Voldemort both stupidly destroyed a school (instead of coming back later in disguise to learn the martial art) and stupidly allowed the tale to spread (letting people know he neither knew the martial art nor was able to control his temper).
Hypothesis 2: Voldemort was smart enough to learn the martial art from the school, combined vengeance for the humiliation he experienced with sound strategy in destroying it afterwards, and then spread misinformation to his enemies that would cause them to underestimate both his abilities and his self-control.
You can construct intermediate hypotheses, but #2 sounds a lot more like MoR!Voldemort to me than #1.
I think you're right that Hypothesis 2 is more likely than H1. However, both assume that some tale (true or false) about Voldemort visiting the school has been circulated in wizard Britain. But as far as we know, that tale is told for the first time in Quirrell's class. As always, Quirrell is our only source:
Of course, if this is the first time the story is told, people may wonder how Quirrell knows. But this is the same chapter in which Quirrell rather blatantly lies and claims to have been a Slytherin, when he (Quirrell, not Voldemort) in fact wasn't.
Yes, that's one of the intermediate hypotheses. Call it 1.5 --
Hypothesis 1.5: Voldemort stupidly destroyed a school (instead of coming back later in disguise to learn the martial art), but was smart enough to not spread the tale. Then as Quirrel, he spread misinformation to his enemies that would cause them to underestimate both Voldemort's abilities (now that he's learned the martial art from Quirrel) and his self-control (Quirrelmort having more than the old Voldemort).
It works with what we "know", but still seems to me to be too Canon!Voldemort and not enough MoR!Voldemort for my taste.
Sorry, how do we know this?
This came up in one of the previous threads:
But during the interrogation we get this:
I think JoshuaZ meant we don't know for sure that Scrimgeour wasn't lying to trip Quirrell up, the way he did with the Fuyuki thing. (The fact that canonically Quirrell was in Ravenclaw argues against this, but it doesn't seem a sure thing.)
I'll go with Quirrellmort forgot he was supposed to be Quirrell for a second, and instead was just being honest.
My first thought when reading that was that they were simply falsified records.