Are we failing the ideological Turing test in the case of ISIS? (a crazy ideas thread)

We should take the outside view and look at other governments that had "crazy" ideologies and ask if the leaders of these governments really believed these ideologies. The Nazi leaders were mostly sincere in their beliefs, as were many but not all of the communist leaders (Lenin and Trotsky certainly were true believers in what they professed, while Mao and Stalin were probably cynical opportunists.) My guess is that most of the Christian European monarchs who claimed a divine right to rule really did believe that they were God's instruments.

let us assume, that the top leadership of ISIS is composed of completely rational and very intelligent individuals

Of the sort that casebash assures us cannot exist? The imaginary competence of fictional rational heroes? Top human genius level?

No. These all amount to assuming a falsehood.

1. The premise of this article is wrong. The ISIS are really just a bunch of idiots, and their apparent successes are only caused by the powers in the region being much more incompetent than ISIS

Another straw falsehood to set beside the first one. All of this rules out from the start any consideration of ISIS as they actually are. They are real people with a mission, no more and no less intelligent than anyone else who succeeds in doing what they have done so far.

There is no mystery about what ISIS wants. They tell the world in their glossy magazine), available in many languages, including English (see the link at the foot of that page). They tell the world in every announcement and proclamation.

"Rationalist", however, seem incapable of believing that anyone ever means what they say. Nothing is what it is, but a signal of something else.

I have not seen any reason to suppose that they do not intend exactly what they say, just as Hitler did in "Mein Kampf". They are fighting to establish a new Caliphate which will spread Islam by the sword to the whole world, Allahu akbar. All else is strategy and tactics. If their current funding model is unsustainable, they will change it as circumstances require. If their recruitment methods falter, they will search for other ways.

More useful questions would be: given their supreme goal (to establish a new Caliphate which will spread Islam by the sword to the whole world), what should they do to accomplish that? And how should we (by which I mean, everyone who wants Islamic universalism to fail) act to prevent them?

I recommend a reading of Max Frisch's play "The Fire Raisers").

You don't win ideological Turing tests by speculated about possible theories which you can came up with in the ivory tower. You instead need to read about the actual reasoning of the other side.

With ISIS the best article is likely Graeme Wood's What ISIS Really Wants. If you generally want to understand radical Islam Sayyid Qutb's Milestones is an insightful book as it lays out the general doctrine of modern Salafi jihadism.

ISIS does have intelligent leaders but those leaders also happen to be very religious. If you don't understand that religious framework I don't think you will succeed at winning any ideological turing test.

Memes are subject to evolution. I would expect that fanatics are selected, to a certain extent, for fanaticism that happens to work in a way conducive to spreading the fanaticism. So it's not really inconsistent to point out that they have standard goals such as religious fanaticism and lust for power, yet to note that they do "rational things". After all, any group of fanatics who want power, but act in ways that are sufficiently irrational as to be ineffective, never would have become known except as a historical footnote.

(Note that this doesn't mean that every single thing they do is "rational", just a couple of the top ones. It is consistent that ISIS makes people skeptical of Islam and prevents Islam from spreading to Europe, because other groups are also ineffective at spreading Islam to Europe and not being very good at it either doesn't put ISIS at much of a competitive disadvantage.)

"left-leaning political elite in Europe encouraging the acceptance of and submission to Islamic culture in Europe "

I can't recall any politicians encouraging my submission to Islam.

It is easy to think of the ISIS as just a bunch of lunatics who kill people because they believe God told them to do it,

That is an odd use of the word 'lunatics'. The great majority of the people who ever lived did things, and often killed people, because they believed God(s) told them (through intermediaries) to do it. The particular acts of ISIS are not very unusual in the broader span of history. Different but comparable acts of mostly- or partially-religiously-motivated mass genocide and other evils have happened multiple times in the 20th century alone. Slavery, sex slavery, torture and execution of infidels, etc. were accepted in very many times and places; were all who committed them "lunatics"?

Well, I expect you're failing, yes. It is going to be futile to try to understand the Islamic State without understanding the philosophy of Al-Ghazali, the most influential Muslim scholar since Mohamed, the man accorded the honorific Hujjat al-Islam (Proof of Islam), and his doctrine of occasionalism.

This is going to be particularly hard on this site because the local "rationality" is rooted in the Aristotle-Averroes-Aquinas tradition, where we believe in things like natural laws that can be deduced by observation. And Averroes (Ibn Rushd) was a critic of Al-Ghazali who was exiled to live among Jews for heresy.

Al-Ghazali, in his The Incoherence of the Philosophers, says that there is no such thing a a material efficient cause; the efficient cause of all things is the will of God. When you apply an open flame to cotton, the cotton is burned by God, not by the fire. If God decided in a particular instance to instead have to cotton metamorphose into a VW minibus on the application of flame, that would be no more and no less a miracle than the occasions on which God had the cotton burn. "Allah's hand is not chained"; God might usually work in ways humans can understand, but He is transcendent, and is not required to obey reason.

Internalize this principle of causation, and it becomes clear that one must align one's will with God as best you can and try to please God. All other tactics are futile, because God decides the results of all things. So first and foremost, you align your actions with those of Muhammad and his closest followers, as recorded in the Koran and Hadiths. Since God is usually logical, you then try to be logical in how you do things after aligning yourself with God's will, but never let logic override faith and fidelity to the example of Mohamed.

Or you could, you know, look at the evidence each side presents.

I am 100% in favour of looking at the evidence. But that isn't a thing Val could have done to avoid arguments breaking out in the comments, because how carefully Val has looked at the evidence has essentially no bearing on whether others choose to argue about the issue. And it certainly isn't a thing Val could have done to avoid arguments while also expressing an unwillingness to get involved in those arguments because the only way Val's expertise thus acquired could influence the arguments would be through Val getting involved.

I'm going to underline that what you're trying to do isn't an ideological Turing Test. An ideological Turing Test is expressing your opponents point of view in such a way that they agree you've done a good job of expressing it.

This isn't a matter of speculating on motives, or even getting the motives right. It's a matter of becoming able to set aside your own point of view to express another point of view, accurately and non-ironically, .It's at least plausible that being able to pass the Turing Test will help with being able to communicate with and understand people you don't agree with.

The Great Leap Forward increased Mao's power in the sense that it gave him much more control over of the lives of Chinese citizens, although it did cause him to lose favor among the Chinese elites.

Why couldn't they be both rational and honest religious extremists?

I never said they couldn't be.

However, I still struggle to understand you. Do you feel this article shouldn't have been written? Or do you disagree with what you believe to be my ideological views? I was never meant to state, defend or attack any ideology at all. Just to listen to interesting ideas and theories which maybe didn't occur to me before.

No, it wasn't.

It seems however, that the main point of this article was misunderstood. Maybe I didn't express it cleanly enough, and some of the remarks in it contributed to it being misunderstood?

With the list and my comments about the list my intention was not to state that "this is what they really want" or that "this cannot be what they really want". All I wanted was to start a discussion thread about possibly weird or unconventional ideas about what the true long-term goals of their leadership could be, assuming them to be very intelligent and rational. My examples (including my doubts about them) were just meant to be a starting point. Do you think they distract from the main purpose? If so, I'm happy to remove or revise them.

My point is that instead of just declaring what I believe their goals and objectives are, I also presented my own doubts about them. Maybe I only should have listed those 4 possibilities without commenting, or maybe even left them completely out? I'm not arguing for or against nr. 2 being their true goal, I just presented them as possible choices.

Please elaborate. Where did I write about anyone that they "secretly agree with me"?

Also stop equating "doesn't agree with your worldview" with "being just crazy".

Why do you feel I did this? Actually I wrote the opposite: that a lot of people dismiss the isis, for example, as just being crazy. This whole article is about them not being crazy.

If you have a good model about them, please describe it.

Every strategy has drawbacks. If you prioritize avoiding arguments then indeed you have to accept having less influence than people willing to have those arguments.

So it could be that, given Val's actual preferences, avoiding arguments wasn't a good priority to have. But given Val's stated goals (avoiding distraction from the main point of the discussion), leaving the topic alone would have met then better than bringing up an inflammatory and distracting topic and then declining to discuss it.

It seems to me as if "don't bring up the distractingly inflammatory topic, but if someone else does and gets things very wrong then be ready with convincing evidence and arguments" is a strictly better strategy than "bring up the distractingly inflammatory topic, but then declare yourself unsettling to talk about it" both for avoiding conceding control to the crazy and for avoiding distractions.

Or is his failure to foresee the outcome merely evidence he was a bad planner? Did his ideology say anything he tried would succeed as long as his goals were correct? After he achieved a bad outcome, did he therefore modify his ideology to account for it?

Surely Mao didn't intend that outcome, and would have tried to avoid it if he had foreseen it.

Perhaps there are a blend of motivations. There are some true diehard believers. Some relatively lukewarm Pascal's Wager types. Some purely opportunistic charlatans.

Care to cite the relevant verse?

I don't think that passing around verses of the Koran is the way to have a conversation like this. I hold my opinion based on the analysis of the Atlantic article.

In this case we are talking about the scenario where an ISIS leader would say: "In the past we thought the Koran prospribed free healthcare about know we don't think so anymore."

It seems to me that a pre-requisite of talking about ISIS' motivations would be actually visiting the region and being involved with them first-hand, or else basing your opinion on information gathered from direct, reputable sources.

Right now most of the discussion on the internet - especially including this post - fail to meet this criterion. They are simply opinions based on opinions repeated by other uninformed persons which also repeat opinions from other uninformed persons. If I am wrong, then provide links to your sources.

In fact you could argue that the major factor in the West's seeming inability to deal with ISIS is the failure of intelligence gathering. The CIA and other agencies have admitted they have a hard time gathering intelligence about them (this may be misdirection on part of the CIA, however).

1. Trying to make their ideology more dominant (aka spreading Islam in general)

I find this the least likely as the main goal. Also, if this was the case, they are counterproductive. So far Islam was very successful in the last few decades to gain a bigger and bigger foothold in the Western world, helped both by demographics and by the predominantly left-leaning political elite in Europe encouraging the acceptance of and submission to Islamic culture in Europe instead of encouraging the immigrants to abandon their culture for the culture of the host nations. However, the recent terrorist attacks, and the many atrocities committed by the recently arrived asylum seekers, while hurting European economy, will probably lead to Europe being more skeptical regarding Islam, which might reduce the chances of Islam peacefully and silently spreading. So these events, if indeed orchestrated by ISIS, might have been successful in harming the economy of their enemies, but I don't know what an effect they had on the spreading of Islam. I'm tending on believing in a negative effect, but I just don't know enough factors to know it for sure. I believe the violent attacks in the Western world are done mostly to show their own followers at home how powerful they are and how weak their enemies are.

In fact, these results make it hard on the Islamic people who wouldn't join ISIS. This makes ISIS more attractive to these people. If a government oppresses a group than every anti-government group seems less oppressive to that group, both because oppression is relative and because of in-group vs. out-group dynamics.

Dude, you don't own this forum. So you don't get to decide what is or isn't abuse of moderating power. And threatening the moderators is certainly not going to help your case.

Even with the current dramatic events the German government is still refusing to take any action and doing its best to downplay the incident.

It is darkly amusing that the govt that stood idly by while the sexual assault mobs were running wild, and then did their best to cover up the attacks, got busy cracking down today, turning the water canons on the people opposing their immigration policy.

ISIS are Fremen (in terms of appeal to men).

ISIS is led by a cabal of wizards. The destruction they caused feeds into a spell designed by smart, rational magicians to create the Philosopher's Stone.