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Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

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Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#91

Post by vlowther »

therobots927 wrote: post #55
mdni007 wrote: post #42

[flagged]

I know exactly what you’re trying to say and you need to understand that it’s highly counterproductive. The United States was built on genocide of the natives, slavery of captives from Africa, and multiple unecessary wars that have killed millions of innocent people. This is not a new thing.

It also isn't a unique thing. See (for example) the entire history of, well, pretty much any country. There is a reason Utopia literally means "no place".

* Genocide of the natives? Literally all countries in the Americas, for starters. * Slavery of captives from Africa? Pretty much everyone with colonies in and around the Caribbean was guilty of that too. * Multiple unnecessary wars that have killed millions of people? That encompasses more or less all of European history.

By all means, criticize Palantir. But don't pretend US history has anything in particular that would set up the prerequisites for it to exist.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#92

Post by renticulous »

QuercusMax wrote: post #6

For a company supposedly full of smart people they sure do work hard to turn their brains off

Very well said. I will provide an analogy.

Imagine I came to know that ghosts exist with supernatural powers. My first reaction shouldn't be of fear. It should be of curiosity. What laws are prevailing in ghost realm which provides them with great powers over material world. Does one becoming a ghost suddenly know the truth of Rieman Hypothesis or P=NP?

The same could be asked of people who are supposed to know better by virtue of them close to knowledge and technology. Should they spend their improving lives of others or enslaving them for material gains?

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#93

Post by alex1138 »

ien24sdq wrote: post #84
Ritewut wrote: post #69

Everyone in this industry should be required to read Careless People by Sara Wynn-Williams about her tenure at Facebook. Not because the book is about how evil Meta/Facebook is as a company but because you get to see the lengths people go to mentally convince themselves they are the good guy. Repeatedly in the book she tries to assure herself she's making the world better and that there's actually an ethical, positiv…

This is a really important thing that people on the left in particular seem to consistently overlook: local incentives, emergent corporate behaviors, and the unconscious need to believe you’re “right” have way more explanatory power than “X is actually evil”.

Yeah but keep in mind what Zuck specifically has done. He copied Snapchat multiple times, Facebook overwrote people's public-facing emails, "dumb fucks" in IMs

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#94

Post by orochimaaru »

Ritewut wrote: post #69

Everyone in this industry should be required to read Careless People by Sara Wynn-Williams about her tenure at Facebook. Not because the book is about how evil Meta/Facebook is as a company but because you get to see the lengths people go to mentally convince themselves they are the good guy. Repeatedly in the book she tries to assure herself she's making the world better and that there's actually an ethical, positiv…

There is no “ethical” company. They will tend towards making money by means that can be interpreted as being legal. Sometimes they will do things not legal - but those are calculated decisions based on how much the profit from said actions is compared to how much they will pay out as fines.

Ethics and laws are for chumps like us. Because we don’t have the financial and legal muscle to challenge the state.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#97

Post by Ritewut »

alex1138 wrote: post #93
ien24sdq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really important thing that people on the left in particular seem to consistently overlook: local incentives, emergent corporate behaviors, and the unconscious need to believe you’re “right” have way more explanatory power than “X is actually evil”.

Yeah but keep in mind what Zuck specifically has done. He copied Snapchat multiple times, Facebook overwrote people's public-facing emails, "dumb fucks" in IMs

Zuckerberg is awful person but he alone is not "Meta." It is a company made up of thousands of employees and each of those people play their role in enshittifying the internet. Some of do it gleefully and others do it because they think the battle is better fought in the company than out of it. The large salary also doesn't hurt.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#98

Post by mbesto »

Jtsummers wrote: post #16
QuercusMax wrote: post #6

For a company supposedly full of smart people they sure do work hard to turn their brains off

I've been working in the aerospace (now space) arena my entire career, and there's a lot of overlap there with the defense industry. What I've seen is that it's very easy for people to look at their work as a narrow area and to forget about the consequences of it (how it's used, what it actually does when used). I think many (I won't say the majority but it wouldn't surprise me) in the defense and intelligence sector…

> I think many (I won't say the majority but it wouldn't surprise me) in the defense and intelligence sector don't think, either willfully or because of lack of introspection in general, about these things.

I think it has more to do with the fact that many of the products built for defense are never actually used against adversaries in their useful life. Just look at our nuclear weapon stockpile.

Palantir on the other hand is an invisible weapon. They could be reading my comment right now and identifying me with sentiment "adversarial" for all I know. What implications that has on my daily life is innumerable...and I'm a US citizen!

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#99

Post by jimbo808 »

leonidasrup wrote: post #8

Palantir employees should understand that they are not regular employees at a regular company. They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. Also Palantir customers should understand that by buying Palantir services/products they are doing business with U.S. defense company. I don't say that this is positive or negative, it just clarifies the relationships and it should set the expectations.

It's a U.S. domestic surveillance operation, disguised as a defense contractor.

Or really, it's not disguised at all. The company is named after Tolkein's palantíri, so they weren't being shy about it.

It's a company that exists solely to exploit a loophole that shouldn't have been upheld, effectively eliminating the fourth amendment.

Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys

#100

Post by sfink »

uoaei wrote: post #82
sfink wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was, which is why it makes such a perfect analogy. Surveillance has lots of good and bad uses, and is morally neutral itself. Powerful but neutral. The problem comes when the users use it for bad purposes, and in fact it is so tempting that they can't help using it for more and more bad purposes. If every palantir (either one) user was a "good guy" who refused to use it for bad purposes, it would be a potent force…

There are morally neutral technologies, but the unique quality of surveillance data containing PII (and tools to correlate across time and space) means that it's only morally neutral until it is used in any capacity. Which is to say, it is not morally neutral.

You've already made a pretty big leap from surveillance to storing surveillance data persistently, and another to the tools. I'm not going to argue that mass surveillance is morally neutral.[1]

Tolkien's Palantirs let you see and communicate and influence across vast distances. That's no more immoral than a videophone. Of course, that's also not surveillance; that'd be a telescope. But surely telescopes aren't immoral?

[1] I mean, I would, but (1) you can't create a mass surveillance system from a morally neutral or positive place, and (2) it seems nearly impossible to implement a mass surveillance system without creating more harm than benefit. So it becomes a boring semantics argument as to whether mass surveillance is fundamentally immoral or not.

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