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.

Given what you've written in this article, I can see why you'd have a lot of trouble modeling ISIS. Hint: if you want to model someone else don't start with "of course, they secretly agree with me but they say otherwise for some reason I must figure out". Also stop equating "doesn't agree with your worldview" with "being just crazy".

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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"?

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.)

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.

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.

"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.

I find this the least likely as the main goal. Also, if this was the case, they are counterproductive.

That's not obvious, and it's certainly not obvious to them. After all, past attacks on Europe resulted in the Europeans rolling over and accepting their demands.

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.

And so being good empiricists the Islamists have concluded that this trend will continue.

However, the recent terrorist attacks, and the many atrocities committed by the recently arrived asylum seekers, (...), will probably lead to Europe being more skeptical regarding Islam, which might reduce the chances of Islam peacefully and silently spreading.

It was never that peaceful, crime (including rape) rates by Muslims were notably higher than that for the native population. Even with the current dramatic events the German government is still refusing to take any action and doing its best to downplay the incident.

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The problem with this is that their current economic model is unsustainable in the long term.

So? What's your point? When the Bolsheviks were first taking power in Russia, they used a similar economic model. Heck, the central pillar of their ideology was an ineffective economic model. Didn't stop them from ruling Russia for three quarters of a century.

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