In bemoaning how things are getting worse everyday, we often tend to forget that the state of the world is becoming monotonically more observable. 1/
It may not be so much that there is monotonically increasing suffering in this world, but that it is monotonically more observable--we can be aware of it, if we choose to. 2/
Wars become forever stalemates because both parties have much better observability into the state of the adversary. As my son says, Normandy-like surprise attacks are much harder in this era of satellite/cell signal observability (Ukraine being a textbook case in point..) 3/
On the whole, this observability is a force for good, IMHO--in as much as it actually gives us a choice of using our knowledge to improve the state of affairs: realize the impossibility of surprise wars or make it harder to look away from the suffering in the far corners. 4/
So on this #Festivus day, let's celebrate the human ingenuity that has been the main driver of the increased observability of our world!
May all our POMDPs become MDPs! 5/
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