[Link] A rational response to the Paris attacks and ISIS

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 point, myriad Muslim youths are angry at the Western intervention into Syria. For a number of them — say, 100 — the report will be the thing that tips them over from anger to outrage, and they will decide to join ISIS.

During WWII, the United States slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese and German civilians in various bombings. How much "rage" did this cause? Did it make it more difficult to de-Nazify Germany? I'm not sure but my gut feeling is that on balance, it was not counter-productive. My instinct is that creating fear and despair is more productive than avoiding anger. And that if it is perceived that Western powers are afraid of creating anger, it will only embolden the radicals and encourage them to use human shields.

Anyway, these are empirical questions and the rational thing to do is to see what worked and did not work in the past in similar situations.

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 Western intervention into Syria. For a number of them — say, 100 — the report will be the thing that tips them over from anger to outrage, and they will decide to join ISIS.

Let's say 5 percent get trained in ISIS camps as suicide bombers. That means five new suicide bombers per report of an airstrike killing civilians, ready to wreak havoc on the United States or other Western countries.

Why did you choose those numbers? Do you have any inside knowledge as to why people join ISIS? And why would 100 new ISIS members lead to any increase in the number of suicide bombings? I doubt that the decision of ISIS to cause a suicide bombing is constrained by the number of members, or willing members. And are you sure that the only effect that more aggressive interventions can have is to increase the number of willing suicide bombers? Even granting that aggressive measures do push people over the edge into joining ISIS, what if they also scare some people out of joining ISIS? What if they kill more ISIS members than the create?

We can make up numbers but that isn't particularly productive, because the math isn't the hard part - it isn't where most of the uncertainty is.

(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 justified through argument or evidence. Sure, it makes sense that Da'esh would enjoy more radicalized Muslims, but it doesn't seem like it would enjoy the "intensive assault and attack" part.

I'd like to see an article dealing with the actual reasons people decide to join Da'esh. And I'd also like to see a realistic analysis of the actual - not percieved - threat that Da'esh poses to the World. And I'd also like to see an analysis of the reasons why Da'esh succeeded in its latest attacks. Did it expertly fool law enforcement/security agencies? Or did they have adequate warning but chose to not act on their intelligence? So far the evidence seems to point to the latter possibility.

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 terrorists’ hands.”

How is everyone so savvy when it comes to knowing what terrorists want?

...

This also helps explain why the presumed motives of terrorists seem to shift so rapidly and contradictorily. Consider that until the Paris attacks this past week, the conventional wisdom held that the group wields violence to achieve a Caliphate unadulterated by Western interference. Since the attacks, however, we’ve been told that actually the Islamic State wants to provoke the West into more military interference in order to showcase the West’s brutal behavior. Before the attacks, we were told that France is a juicy target for the Islamic State because of its failure to integrate its Muslim population. After the attacks, we are being told that the Islamic State actually wants France and the rest of the world to become even more xenophobic against Muslims on the theory that alienated moderates may be more receptive to extremism.

It’s no wonder the media are constantly talking up terrorists as “masterminds” who commit “sophisticated” attacks. Regardless of their outcome, whatever happens will invariably be seen as exactly what the terrorists want.

It's like Texas sharpshooter fallacy by proxy.

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 nothing in response to terror attacks, but 10% of the time we topple a regime. The randomization prevents ISIS and other actors from manipulating us (I'm not saying this is a good idea, just that it builds on rationalist (game theory) concepts and is nonobvious).

Another policy response would be to fight attentional bias by imposing certain restrictions on media reporting of terror attacks. For example, we could place a 6-month moratorium on detailed or graphic reporting of attacks, allowing only simple, factual information to be published in the immediate aftermath of an attack ("On November 13, more than 100 and less than 200 people were killed in Paris by unidentified assailants. Police responded quickly, and the attackers have now all been arrested or killed. Authorities recommend a general increase in vigilance, but no other interruptions are necessary. Details of the attack will be published in March 2016"). Again, I'm not saying this is a good idea, just that it is nonobvious and builds on rationalist concepts.

On a related note: the Libertarian International Brigades are an informal foreign fighter grouping involved in the Syrian conflict in particular. They are allied with the People's Protection Units, and the Lions of Rojava (PPU's foreign legion) in particular who espouse democratic confederalism. They may also be associated with the Kurdistan Workers Party, but it is unclear:

Having PKK on a „terrorist organisations list13” is a real treat for the adversaries of Rojava. Due to shared ideology, close ties and common enemies, it is extremely easy label Rojava as a „marxist-stalinist terrorists”, make it look like just another militant group, only pretending to be peaceful.

They also seem to be rivals of the Kurdistan Regional Government, which has top level ICANN domain so they're fairly legitimate in the international domain:

„Kurds fight for their state” This is probably the thickest smokescreen to hide Rojava from the world. It is based on double disinformation: that Rojava is a purely Kurdish project and that the goal of Rojava is (or at least should be) to build a Kurdish state in the same sense as the KRG14 does. It has many dangerous implications. First, it strips Rojava off all revolutionary character. Second, makes it look like separatists among separatists (as the „legitimate separatists15” are KRG). In the public narrative, especially in the West, the „golden standard of Kurdishness” is KRG. Every Kurdish movement that deviates from this, seems to be suspicious. This is of course fueled heavily by KRG propaganda, but they are just one of many stakeholders. KRG is a „domesticated form of Kurds” – which tries to join the „international community” on the terms given to them. If Rojava can be pictured as a splinter Kurdish group, just fighting sectarian war against KRG, nobody will care when Peshmerga takes over (using NATO-sourced equipment, of course).

But, just like the Lions of Rojava, aren't a 'Kurdish movement', apparently:

The Kurdish cause. Keeping the image of Rojava as „Kurdish” is a dangerous opening for many types of attacks. As much as the electoral success of HDP in Turkey was built upon transgressing a stereotype of „Kurdish party”, the official image of Rojava can be changed into openly muliti-ethnic, inclusive and free from national denominations. It is complex, as there is hardly a terminology available to describe it. It is also a matter of decision, how far would Rojava separate from the nationalist Kurdish movements, which still supposedly provide certain support. I am not in a position to analyze it, but from the external image perspective, being presented as „Kurdish” creates more and more vulnerabilities for Rojava (see previous sections on Turkish and KRG propaganda).

I believe that there is a way to develop a narrative about a new society, free from the bounds of nationalism and theocracy, creatively including all ethnic, religious and social traditions. To show it in categories the Western world – at least declaratively – admires. And keep saying „Rojava”, „Rojavans”, Rojavan” and „Rojavanness” at every occasion. Make people understand that „Rojava” is, in a sense, „Kurdistan Plus”

Now to my point:

Recently, as far as I can tell, all their online communications have dissapeared. For instance here and here or even here.

IS/ISIL/ISIS/Daesh's hackers?

Turkey?

Self censorship?

As the Kurdish saying goes: 'Kurds have no friends but mountains'

I would ask their allies themselves, but contacting the lions of rojava or Rojava plan is probably frowned upon by Western authorities, even for academic curiosity/concern.