My statements were informed by evidence, and making a statement that it "risks" radicalizing more Muslims would be factually incorrect, since evidence that we do have shows that it does radicalize

That's not true at all, and it's easy to demonstrate with a thought experiment. Suppose I read a post on an internet by someone who says he spoke to a terrorist and the terrorist told him he was radicalized by reading Tsipursky's posts on less wrong. To be sure, this is weak evidence that Tsipursky's post are radicalizing people, but by your standards, it would be legitimate to say "Further posts by Tsipursky WILL radicalize more people." Which is ridiculous, of course, but by your standard it would be correct.

We might talk about how many would be radicalized, but it would be false to state that aggressive western activities do not radicalize Muslims.

There is another possibility, which is that it is not known whether Western activities radicalize anyone. In other words, that the evidence is inconclusive. Surely you are aware of this possibility?

I see from the latter part of your comment now that you have come to a firm conclusion about my views

Pretty firm yeah -- based on your complete failure to provide satisfactory evidence for your position; your dodging and weaving; and your failure to look for legitimate evidence.

and were arguing from that perspective all along.

If you had come up with evidence which stood up to scrutiny, then of course I would have revised my views. For example if anti-American terrorists were disproportionately from towns in Iraq as opposed to Syria, it would actually bolster your argument.

So it looks to me like you are again rationalizing -- the fact is that your evidence has completely failed to stand up to scrutiny; you failed to take well-known biases into account; and rather than just admit it, you need a face-saving out.

Anecdotal reports by terrorists is the best data we have available. Weak evidence is still evidence.

If you had said that Western activities "risk" radicalizing more Muslims, you might have a point. Instead you came to a firm conclusion based on spectacularly weak evidence.

As aspiring rationalists, we need to orient toward the truth, and avoid confirmation bias.

Unfortunately, it seems you have fallen into exactly that trap. It looks like you gave a few self-serving anecdotal reports far far more weight than they deserved because it fit your pre-determined Leftist conclusion.

Not only that, but it seems that, having been informed about social desirability bias, you are not updating your confidence in your conclusion. You still believe that generally speaking we can trust terrorists to accurately report their motivations.

If you were serious about investigating your hypothesis, you would compare measures of radicalization in Iraq to other countries like Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc. If the Sipursky Rage hypothesis has any validity, one would expect lots of radicalization in Iraq and far less in Syria. But I doubt it ever occurred to you to do that, since you seem mainly interested in finding evidence to support your pre-determined Leftist beliefs than in actually investigating them.

I think you and brazil84 may have different notions of summarizing in mind. If summarizing a book means describing what's in it then most books can be summarized in a few paragraphs. If it means conveying a large fraction of the useful or interesting content then many books can't. (A dictionary or encyclopaedia might be an even better example than a physics textbook.)

Yes, I think so. Here is how I would summarize an unabridged dictionary:

This is a book which contains entries for most of the words in the English language; each entry sets forth the typical pronunciation as well as definitions for the word. Here are a few examples:

Example 1:

Example 2:

Example 3.

Yes, I dispute the statement that peoples' accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable.

Then I suggest you educate yourself about social desirability bias. It's well known -- and obvious just from general observation -- that people have a strong tendency to self-report information which puts them in a more flattering light. If you have not taken this into account in your assessments, then it's fair to say that any conclusions you have drawn are suspect.

It's the sentence ending in footnote 22.

Ok, so apparently a typical example of the best evidence of your claim is a polemic in which someone cites the Dresden bombing as a rationale to criticize Western attempts to purge Nazis from post-WW2 Germany. There is no evidence as to how much such events actually motivated anyone; it's just an argument someone is making.

Your evidence for Sipursky Rage is quite weak as to Nazi Germany and extremely weak as to the situation in Syria:

A few anecdotal reports of terrorists who make the self-serving and unverifiable claims that they were motivated by Western misdeeds is so weak as to be ridiculous.

There are many pieces of evidence, it's not helpful to speak of the strongest one.

Then please summarize the best evidence for your claim.

Also, please answer my question: Do you dispute that peoples' accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable?

. Here's one typical example, a link from a prominent book that shows that there were a number of newspaper articles expressing outrage over the bombings that made de-nazification more difficult.

Can you please quote the relevant part of your source? I did not see what you were talking about.

So you're saying you're incompetent at your job, got it.

Well it depends on how one define's his "job." As a tenure-track professor, one could argue that his primary job is to make a good impression on his tenure committee. From that perspective, publishing an op-ed which implies that rationalism just happens to support left-wing foreign policy is probably a pretty good idea. So one could say that he's doing his job rather well.

My looking at history is that this isn't quite correct. It is the most restrained aggressor/tyrant who winds up getting targeted.

That may very well be the case, and if so, it's positive evidence that Tsipursky Rage is not a relatively important factor in motivating peoples' behavior. Which is consistent with my instincts.

The implosion of Iraq, which paved the way for the emergence of ISIS.

The most obvious weakness with this evidence is that there exist numerous plausible reasons -- other than Tsipusrky Rage -- for the "implosion of Iraq" as you put it.

For example, the obvious explanation for the "implosion of Iraq" is that the American invasion destabilized the area and left something of a power vacuum. Your evidence provides no way of distinguishing between this factor and Tsipursky Rage. The same is true of the situation in Libya.

In short, your evidence does not stand up to scrutiny.

That's a peculiar choice of wording.

Your evidence is pretty vague and flimsy.

The aftermath of 9/11 is by itself overwhelmingly sufficient evidence for the hypothesis that enraging your enemies is a terrible idea.

Actually that's not the issue under discussion. Sipursky's claim seems to be that airstrikes would "radicalize" people who were not necessarily enemies beforehand.

In any event, do you care to cite any specific post 9/11 events which characterize this "aftermath" you refer to?