If you were completely unrestrained by ethics, armed with the ancient secrets of Salazar Slytherin, had dozens of powerful followers including Lucius Malfoy, and it took you more than ten years to fail to overthrow the government of magical Britain, it meant you were stupid.
I tend to agree with Harry that a smart wizard could do devastating damage to magical Britain far beyond what Voldemort accomplished. Maybe with Time Turners, all bets are off.
But taking that as given, I see two assumptions above that may be false.
Voldemort was failing to overthrow the government - assumes that he was trying to overthrow the government. Voldemort is completely unrestrained by ethics.
Both of those assumptions have problems.
Voldemort seems like a fine bogey man to be destroyed by some hero, who is then crowned king. If you're looking to be king, you can't do without a Voldemort. Likely he wasn't trying to overthrow the government, he was trying to have the people hand the government to him. Or maybe he wasn't trying to rule at all. Maybe this was his grown up version of Hogwart's armies, so that he was just teaching them how to fight.
As for ethics, Quirrell doesn't seem unrestrained by ethics. He's not big on minimizing suffering, but he does seem to have a sense of justice. And Voldemort backing down in the face of Dumbledore's reported immolation of Narcissa seemed unnecessary and more like an excuse to stop the violence.
"Voldemort seems like a fine bogey man to be destroyed by some hero, who is then crowned king"
Yes, and when Quirrell hears that Harry is being kept in Hogwarts due to the threat of Voldemort, Quirell specifically - and immediately - comes up with a plan to allow Harry to leave, by creating a "fake Voldemort" that Harry can defeat, ideally in a way that "leaves the [legend] open for future re-use".
So there may be an as-yet-unnamed Dark Wizard who has the personas of Voldemort and David Monroe. This Voldemort may either be him...
Edit: New thread posted here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 86. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: