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Velorien comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Just came across this in re-reading chapter 3:
Why a burnt hulk when the Killing Curse does no physical damage whatsoever?
It strikes me that the body doesn't match Voldemort's presumed cause of death, there are no witnesses of said death (since Harry's memory cuts out early), and burning a corpse is a classic way to render it unidentifiable.
Moving from considering evidence to speculation, it strikes me that the prophecy would make it incredibly easy for Voldemort to fake his own death - if he went to the Potters' house, killed the parents, placed a mysterious mark on Harry, and then disappeared, leaving a body behind, there is no way his enemies wouldn't take that as his death and the prophecy's fulfillment.
Why would he fake his own death, though? He was winning.
To make Harry Potter a worshiped celebrity.
Probably not. While Voldemort's terrorist group was doing increasingly well, Dumbledore's presence alone would be sufficient to prevent a complete victory, and the entire civil war was a distraction from Voldemort's likely main concern, the muggles.
Because Voldemort isn't real, and Tom was tired of the game anyway when he learned he should probably focus on Harry. (If he died, and was inconvenienced the way Dumbledore thinks, how did someone consistently sabotage the Defense Professor? Though that's weak evidence for a couple reasons.)
Dumbledore doesn't realize that Voldemort is a mask, otherwise he'd be spamming this news everywhere. Even without understanding it, he gave Harry a big hint by faking the scene with the burnt chicken. He hoped Harry would think it through and arrive at the same conclusion. But Albus doesn't want to say it explicitly because it would sound silly, and he already looks like a lunatic.
...I've never so much as heard the implication that Voldemort was actively sabotaging the Defense position so much as he cursed it once, and it is the curse that is continuing to do its work. Such speculation doesn't appear to make sense to me now that I have heard it.
Linking the burnt chicken to the burnt husk of Voldemort's supposed body, however...is not something that I've considered, and it actually makes some sense, though I do not say that with a high degree of certainty. Though, why wouldn't he have spoken up by now?
If it's plausible for him to be burnt by a rebounding killing curse, then the evidence for a faked death is weak. If it's implausible, he'd have found a better method to fake his death.
It does not happen, there are no antecedents, nobody knows what happens.
So it's the second one. It's implausible for a killing curse to rebound, so nobody would believe he died that way. Or at least, their less likely to believe it than believe a more plausible death.
This point is repeated in subsequent chapters - e.g. "burnt to a crisp", which given its inconsistency with Avada Kedavra's established effects, really makes it sound like foreshadowing. I do agree that we don't have strong evidence for a motive, though.