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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I've edited the birthdate of the person Amelia refers to, to be 1927 - too many people were interpreting that as "She thinks he's Tom Riddle" despite the House incongruence, an interpretation I'd honestly never thought of due to Illusion of Transparency.
I recommend checking out what your hints mean in canon, because that's what we have to go off of. The first thing I did when I saw 1926 was head over to the Harry Potter wiki and figure out who was born in 1926. It's Riddle and three of his Death Eater pals, all from Slytherin, of which the obvious option is Riddle. Riddle fits the biographical details you give, with minor modification consistent with the upgrades people get from canon (a MOR Riddle might decide to not murder his family while still in school, for example). The canon rules for Houses appear to be "only Black is Noble and Most Ancient," and so we really don't have any idea which houses are the seven mentioned by Bones, and what the eighth missing house could be. Gaunt is a way better option than, say, Lestrange (where we know Lesath is alive).
In a fanfic, you should expect people to suspect that new characters are canon characters rather than completely new characters, which the person Bones is describing now appears to be (no canon births in 1927).
Thank you - I assumed it was a canon character, and came to this thread to find out who it was.
I think you're underestimating how quick people are to latch onto a detected pattern at the tiniest bit of evidence, and highly overestimating how quick they're to let go of the pattern they (brilliantly) detected when evidence to the contrary appears.
Any date at around that era will keep making people think she identified him as Tom Riddle, no matter any other evidence to the contrary, unless you explicitly have her mention a different name for him by chapter's end.
If you don't want people to have that confusion by chapter's end, just edit the chapter to have her name him with whatever non-Tom-Riddle name she thinks him to be.
I think the idea was to hint at Riddle(the Albania reference in particular seems intended for that purpose) and then swerve, and 1927 does that effectively - it's in the right ballpark to make people think of him, but when they go look it up, it's not.
Said by Quirrell, but appropriate to the question of EY publishing the name of the hero: "it is clear he does not wish the fact announced, and has reasons enough for silence. "
Whether true or false, it isn't clear to me. Eliezer has edited chapters in the past for the purposes of clarity/removal of red herrings.
Facepalm
Of course, if Riddle wanted to create a hero persona for himself, he wouldn't use his real name, especially not when his villain persona's name was an anagram of his real name.
So to create his hero persona, he looked for a dead scion of a Most Ancient House who he could impersonate. In his Voldemort persona, he orders the kidnapping of the Minster of Magic's daughter, then rescues her in his hero persona, &c.
Also solves the problem of why doesn't Bones know Riddle became Voldemort.
I don't think that's an issue. It's a really long anagram - 'I am Lord Voldemort' to 'Tom Marvolo Riddle'. You need his middle name, you need to use 'Tom' rather than 'Thomas', and how many would think of prepending 'I am Lord' to 'Voldemort', especially when 'Lord' is mostly (exclusively?) used by Death Eaters. (Did anyone in the entire world besides Rowling get that anagram before it was published in Book 2? No one in canon but Harry seems to know.)
Remember that folks like Hook would publish hash - I mean, anagram - precommitments to their great scientific discoveries. Against humans without computers, anagrams are pretty effective trapdoor functions. (And that's when you know there's an anagram in the first place.)
EDIT: For 'Tom Marvolo Riddle', the AWAD anagram server says 74,669 possible anagrams. Some are quite ominous, eg. 'Dread Mil Volt Room'.
In fairness, I think the first anyone heard of "Marvolo" as Riddle's middle niddle -- er, I mean name -- was when he anagrammed it for Harry in the Chamber of Secrets. So it's not a big surprise that no one else guessed the anagram.
Yeah, it was a total cheat. That's why I put my anagram in the Dramatis Personae.
Incidentally, what's happened with that play since I left my comment?
Most of the stuff I was hoping for hasn't panned out thus far. The ebook gets a few downloads each week, mostly as referrals from the HPMoR fan art page.
That's too bad. Maybe you should just re-release it for free so you at least get some readers?
The American version definitely says in the flashback, "she lived just long enough to name me -- Tom after my father, Marvolo after my grandfather." (And the book introduced him as T.M. Riddle.) I have no reason to think the British version lacked this info.
Am I misremembering? Isn't that after the point where he anagrammatizes it for Harry in the CoS?
Definitely not. First Riddle uses the diary as a Pensieve-style flashback machine and gives Harry this info, then Ginny steals the diary back, then we get to the CoS climax.
Oh yes, you're right. So, yeah, a sufficiently ingenious reader might have noticed the (apparent) throwaway comment about the names, noticed that the letters of "Voldemort" are contained in "Tom Marvolo Riddle", and worked out the rest before the big reveal fifty pages later. I remain of the opinion that it's no big surprise if no one did.
That, and an anagram that long can become almost anything. Exapmles: Armored doll vomit, odd immoral revolt, and my favorite, devil marmot drool. So even with the "marvolo", and even with the knowledge that it anagrams to something you're not going to spontaneously make that association unless you have prior reason to suspect voldemortiness.
Of course - it's so obvious in retrospect! And it even encodes a hint about Quirrel's future activities too:
(If you squint, his resemblance to a devil marmot is clear.)
What house incongruence? Mystery Man was a Slytherin, as was Riddle.
He means that Tom Riddle isn't connected to any noble house but Scion of X was. So it is incongruent that people would just to think that Scion of X was Tome Riddle.
Born or married house, not sorted house.
Ah, I see. He's messed with character backgrounds so much that I figured Gaunt had just been made noble or something, but fair enough.
Ah. And checking the Harry Potter wiki, I see I had forgotten just how far the "pureblood" house of Gaunt had fallen in canon.