What terrorists want is irrelevant. "Don't play into enemy hands" is irrelevant. The entire discussion is irrelevant.

The correct response to enemy action is the response that furthers your own ends. It doesn't matter what effect this has on your enemy, good, neutral, or positive; your long-term ends matter.

"The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this." A particularly relevant quote from Musashi, used by Eliezer on at least one occasion in the sequences.

Avoiding doing what the enemy wants is mere parrying. Stop mere parrying, and cut.

It's an interesting article, but I feel the analysis is very one sided. For example, "here are the costs of putting boots on the ground against ISIS: look there are costs, we shouldn't do it!"

But what about the benefits?

In rational analysis one has to be very careful to not construct these kinds of one-sided analyses because they are a fully general counterargument. Everything has costs. By just pointing at the costs and not even mentioning the benefits you can make anything look bad.

The point about being overly emotional in the immediate wake of a major disaster is a good one though. What do you think we could have done differently and better after 9/11 by being more rational and less emotional?

One of the things that annoys me about lesswrong is the spectacle of rationalization in the clothing of rationality.

Because any of these changes in government policy would radicalize more Muslims.

Where is the evidence for this claim? It's entirely possible that the opposite is true; that if the radicals are perceived to be accomplishing something without pushback, it will attract more support for their cause and more recruits.

For instance, consider what happens when Muslim media report an airstrike by Western forces that kills civilians. At any po

Nearly the same could have been written after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor if you replace Muslims with Asians. My view is that political correctness stops westerners from considering certain weaknesses, and the big danger is that ISIS realizes and seeks to exploit this willful blindness.

The comments on that article don't seem to responding to anything in the article itself. Many are just ad hominem followed by a strongly stated opinion. From what I can tell the Plain Dealer is a relatively liberal newspaper, but the comments don't seem to reflect that.

Anyways, probabilistic thinking has become a reverse dogwhistle for me and I think part of your argument illustrates why:

For instance, consider what happens when Muslim media report an airstrike by Western forces that kills civilians. At any point, myriad Muslim youths are angry at the We

(Disclaimer: politics is the mind-killer.)

I think it should be a requirement that anyone who wants to write about Da'esh should at the very least have travelled to present-day Syria or Iraq at least once, and communicated with people involved in the war. I'm not necessarily saying that your argument is wrong, just that the actual situation seems far more nuanced.

For instance, can you provide an argument that increased committment of troops is "exactly what ISIS wants."? It seems like something oft-mentioned on "pundit" blogs but rarely ... (read more)

Why People Keep Saying, “That’s What the Terrorists Want”

When President George W. Bush later responded by occupying Iraq in 2003, millions of Americans insisted that doing so was exactly what al Qaeda wanted. When, in 2004, Spain had the opposite reaction after the Madrid train bombings, and pulled back from that conflict, Americans told me that withdrawing from Iraq was actually what al-Qaeda wanted.

Today, a similar thing is happening with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, as politicians and pundits accuse one another of “playing into the terrorist

This is part of my broader project, Intentional Insights, of conveying rational thinking, including about politics, to a broad audience to raise the sanity waterline.

Given that your idea of "rational thinking" appears to consist of the kind of Straw-Vulcanism that gives "rational thinking" a bad name, I'd appreciate it if you would stop trying to "help" the movement.

As I mentioned below, the "What would ISIS not want us to do?" is not a good heuristic, because by asking it you implicitly accept their world view. I'm reminded of a (probably apocryphal quote from a WWII general), something like "Every Japanese soldier you encounter believes it is his duty to die for his country, your duty is to assist him in the performance of his duty in whatever way is most practical."

I'm glad to see rationalists getting published in mainstream media outlets. And I appreciated your reference to attentional bias.

However, the article seemed too simplistic overall. For example, the idea that attacking Islam is playing into terrorists' hands is almost a cliche. And the policy conclusions seem extremely bland and also not particularly rationalist.

For an idea of what an explicitly rationalist and non-obvious policy conclusion might look like, imagine a counterterrorism foreign policy that is actually randomized: in 90% of situations we do n... (read more)