Terrorist leaders are not about Terror

Do we know how to reason about that other information?

There is some highly specious reasoning in that piece. First, the notion that the Afghan war bankrupted the USSR and led to their demise was a symptom of Bin Laden's delusions, not a fact about the world. The war wasn't unimportant, but the collapse of the USSR was much more complicated than that, and reflected the over-all trend of trying to outspend the US DOD with significantly less GDP.

The Federal Reserve, worried about a fear-induced recession, slashed interest rates after the attack on the World Trade Center, and then kept them low to combat skyrocketing oil prices, a byproduct of the war in Iraq. That decade of loose monetary policy may well have contributed to the credit bubble that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008.

This is even more dubious. Certainly there is some relationship between reserve rates and mortgage markets but most of the excess money supply was "created" by the various financial arrangements that buried default risks, artificially lowering the price and returns on the secondary markets.

This piece reads more to me like a not-very-subtle dig at the author's domestic political grievances.

It's an interesting statement, but back in 2008 I read a compilation of Laden statements 1994-2004, and one of the interesting things (besides how bin Laden waffled on 9/11 and how he admitted it worked out much better than expected) was how his economic reasoning does not show up until the end - suggesting that he had no such thing in mind. And you see on occasion some pretty weird economic thinking, like this '97 bit:

Ladin: Correct! This is the right method to throw America out of the Gulf. The United States is beefing up its forces in the Gulf in a bid to control the oil resources. Since 1973, prices of all other items have increased but oil prices did not rise much. Since 1973, the price of petrol has increased only 8 dollars per barrel while the prices of other items have gone up three times. The oil prices should also have gone up three times but this did not happen. Price of American wheat has increased three-fold but the price of Arab oil has not risen three-fold. The increase was not more than a few dollars over a period of 24 years because the United States is dictating to the Arabs at gunpoint. We are suffering a loss of 115 dollars per barrel every day. Only Saudi Arabia produces 10 million barrels oil per day and thus the loss is one billion dollar per day. Total loss is more than 2 billion dollars. In the past 13 years, the United States has caused US a loss of more 1100 billion dollars. We must get this money back from the United States. The total population of Muslims all over the world is more than 1 billion. If every Muslim family is given 11,000 dollars then the 1100 billion dollars will be repaid. Muslims are starving to death and the United States is stealing their oil. It buys oil from US at a low prices and then makes US buy its tanks and fighter airplanes by projecting Israel as a threat. In this manner the United States takes all its money back.

This is hardly new, didn't he say something similar himself in his videos? The point was to trick the US into radicalizing the populace via increasingly barbaric acts of warfare and secret policing. He wouldn't be the first terrorist to make such a claim and, tempting as the "don't you see you are playing into their hands!" argument is, it always smells like post-hoc justification for a failed military campaign.

Edit: Sorry should have read the article didn't realise it mentioned the mans own arguments.

It's true that the discussed statistics do not rule out an interpretation like the new leaders add to longevity by steering the organization into tamer less effective strategies, as opposed to my own favored implied interpretation, that 'old leaders stay too long and drag down organizational performance & survival'.

But you could probably cross-check her list of organizations with assassinated heads, and compare against Max Abrahms' list of the 7% successful terrorist organizations and see whether survival correlates with success. (I'd bet it does.)

I vote liquid nitrogen. I was pretty disturbed that people actually cheered his death.

Considering he was killed by a gunshot to the head, I doubt it matters much either way.

Parenthetically, I wonder if the SIAI cognoscenti would prefer that bin Laden was buried in liquid nitrogen rather than at sea.

I don't think I'm an SIAI cognoscentus (I don't know if that's the correct singular), but in general while I'm in favor of general preservation of individuals, I think a utilitarian calculus strongly suggests that preserving this individual would be very likely be a net negative.

Also about winning elections.

How confident are you about this? The morale boost seems to be a significant strategic benefit, from what little I see.

Why can't it be about both?

But revenge, in turn, is about counterfactually preventing the deed you want to get revenge for. Although revenge does not "undo" that (past) deed, agents that act as if it did are victims of less wrongdoing (under plausible models of human incentive structures).

Disclaimer: Not trying to voice an opinion about this particular person, his killing, or the impact thereof, just making a general point about the decision-theoretics of revenge.