Tal Lancewicki

Monday, March 10th at 2 pm CT: Talks at TTIC presents @TalLancewicki of @TelAvivUni with a talk titled "Near-optimal Regret in Online MDPs with Aggregate Bandit Feedback." Please join us in Room 530, 5th floor.

Imagine a 9/11 with 10x times more murdered; with many more children and elderly massacred; with the terrorists conquering US towns and having the choice to spare each of the fatalities separately, but again and again choosing to butcher them all, sometimes also raping them; with the terrorists also desecrating the bodies of the murdered, and parading them, sometimes naked. Think about how you would feel. Think about how you would feel if on that day people asked you to consider both sides. Think about how you would feel if people said their thoughts are "with both sides on this complicated day." Think about how you would feel if people that day called AlQaeda "freedom fighters." What you would feel in this hypothetical situation is what Israelis feel right now. What I described is only part of the atrocities that Hamas Palestinian terrorists committed in their attack on Israel yesterday. (Israel's population is about ~33 times smaller than the US, hence the approximate number 10x so far.) And I haven't even started to talk about the kidnapped men, women, elderly, and children, whose fate I cannot bear to imagine. (And, I'm sparing you from some things that you would never be able to unsee/unimagine.) As you read and hear various "thinkers" and journalists in the upcoming days and weeks, I urge you to remember this post. Sometimes in life the truth is not in the middle. Sometimes in life, there is nothing more immoral than claiming that the truth is somewhere in the middle.