The question is did the violence of the group lead to their aims to come closer to being achieved.
The credit-assignment problem is hard in reinforcement learning and harder in reality, which is why OP used the much more empirically verifiable “Groups that did X were less likely to succeed at Y” claim. My argument is that his claim is a lot sketchier than it looks at first glance, because groups that succeeded at Y and did X tend to conceal that they did X.
Nevertheless, the closest proxy for “Were these peoples’ actions effective?” is “Did the people who ended up in power after these people took action move to reward them?”. A university sinecure is a very scarce, very desired asset, and there are a lot of people competing for them. To receive one as a reward is a statement by those with the power to hand them out that your actions were veryappreciated.
The credit-assignment problem is hard in reinforcement learning and harder in reality, which is why OP used the much more empirically verifiable “Groups that did X were less likely to succeed at Y” claim. My argument is that his claim is a lot sketchier than it looks at first glance, because groups that succeeded at Y and did X tend to conceal that they did X.
Nevertheless, the closest proxy for “Were these peoples’ actions effective?” is “Did the people who ended up in power after these people took action move to reward them?”. A university sinecure is a very scarce, very desired asset, and there are a lot of people competing for them. To receive one as a reward is a statement by those with the power to hand them out that your actions were very appreciated.