And how does it correlate with their own stated goals or unstated desires?
Unstated desires: Hitler was right on the money. Sure, his plans didn't quite work out. Take over the world? It's kind of a long shot. But given the payoff and the probabilities of success (remarkably high it would seem, given how close he got) the expected utility is rather high.
And consider what was motivating him. That nearly ubiquitous drive to dominate the world. Sure, the 'world' was historically a bit smaller than, you know, the actual world but the unstated desire still seems to be in place. The problem with taking over the world (or the several tribes between the inhospitable desert and the uncrossable river) is it doesn't tend to last all that long. Someone else wants a turn. And has a big stick. So you'd better make the most of raping the conquered and servicing the concubines while you're still in power. From what I understand Hitler didn't really take advantage of his situation from the perspective of genetic fitness. His unstated sexual goals didn't line up too well with the 'short lived yet prolifically sexual dominance' reproductive strategy but I don't really hold that against his rationality.
When all is said and done I consider even Hitler's short lived rise to power a far more successful fulfillment of goals than Ben Franklin managed and Hitler himself an example of rationality far above the mean rather than a counterexample of successful irrationality. He declined towards the end. His paranoia went from being an incredibly well calibrated asset to a liability as burn out took over. His judgement became impaired as he tried to push himself beyond human limits with stimulants, overwork and stress. A more rational person would have deduced that he was similar to all the other humans he could see not being able to achieve superhuman feats of achievement indefinitely and made allowances for that. History may have turned out differently if he had cut down on his workload and relaxed a bit.
"And consider what was motivating him. That nearly ubiquitous drive to dominate the world."
Most people don't actually want to conquer the world, or do much of anything, really. What most people actually want can be nicely summed up here.
As Eliezer and many others on Less Wrong have said, the way the human species rose to dominate the Earth was through our intelligence- and not through our muscle power, biochemical weapons, or superior resistance to environmental hazards. Given our overwhelming power over other species, and the fact that many former top predators are now extinct or endangered, we should readily accept that general intelligence is a game-changing power on the species level.
Similarly, one of the key ingredients in the birth of the modern era was the discovery of science, and its counterpart, the discovery of the art of Traditional Rationality. Armed with these, the nations of Western Europe managed to dominate the entire rest of the world, even though, when they began their explorations in the 15th century, the Chinese were more advanced in many respects. Given how Western Europe, and the cultures derived from it, has so completely surpassed the rest of the world in terms of wealth and military might, we should readily accept that science and rationality is a game-changing power on the civilization level.
However, neither of these imply that intelligence, science, and rationality, as a practical matter, are the best way to get things done by individual people operating in the year 2009. We can easily see that many things which work on the species level, or the civilization level, do not work for individuals and small groups. For instance, until the discovery of nuclear weapons, armed conflict was often a primary means of settling disputes between nation-states. However, if you tried to settle your dispute with your neighbor, or your company's dispute with its competitor, using armed force, it would achieve nothing except getting you thrown in prison.
People are crazy and the world is mad, but it does not necessarily follow that we should try to solve our own problems primarily by becoming more sane. Plenty of people achieve many of their goals despite being completely nuts. Adolf Hitler, for example, achieved a large fraction of his (extremely ambitious!) goals, despite having numerous beliefs that most of us would recognize as making no sense whatsoever.
We know, as a matter of historical fact, that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, despite being generally incompetent, unintelligent, irrational, superstitious and just plain insane, managed to take over a country of tens of millions of people from nothing, in the span of fifteen years. So far as I am aware, no group of people has managed to achieve anything even remotely similar using, not only rationality, but any skill involving deliberative thought, as opposed to skills such as yelling at huge crowds of people. However, it is a corollary to the statement that no one knows what science doesn't know that no one knows what history doesn't know, so it is entirely possible, perhaps likely, that there is something I am overlooking. To anyone who would assert that intelligence, science or rationality is the Ultimate Power, not just on the level of a species or civilization, but on the level of an individual or small group, let them show that their belief is based in reality.