A real "Are we the baddies?" moment for them
Sounds really late, honestly. It's been apparent from people outside the company for years, and employees realize it just now?
Now it's in the news where their normie friends and family see it
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
#132Little Eichmanns unable to feel good about themselves now that there's so much bad press? They should've known, in fact, most of them DID know about who they work for and what they do. They just can't handle the pressure. Name, shame and move on, fellas. No words worth listening to from Palantir employees.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#133> “I’m curious why this had to be posted. Especially on the company account. On the practical level every time stuff like that gets posted it gets harder for us to sell the software outside of the US (for sure in the current political climate), and I doubt we need this in the US?” wrote one frustrated employee. The message received more than 50 “+1” emojis.
> “Wether [sic] we acknowledge it or not, this impacts us all personally,” another worker wrote on Monday. “I’ve already had multiple friends reach out and ask what the hell did we post.” This message received nearly two dozen “+1” emoji reactions.
> “Yeah it turns out that short-form summaries of the book’s long-form ideas are easy to misrepresent. It’s like we taped a ‘kick me’ sign on our own backs,” a third worker wrote. “I hope no one who decided to put this out is surprised that we are, in fact, getting kicked.”
entirely possible they're phrasing their concerns on the corporate slack to be 'pro-company' so they don't worry about getting fired for their views but it doesn't actually sound like they're wondering anything, they're just bothered that it's being brought to light.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#134Everyone 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…
They would read it and just say to themselves "Wow, how could anyone fall into that trap? Certainly I never would!"
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#135Yes, the answer is yes they are.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#136Everyone 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…
I'll never forget this spot on NPR where they interviewed a machine learning engineer working on AI videos. The engineer was purely focused on how cool the technology is, how real it looks, etc.
The interviewer asked, "aren't you worried about this getting into the hands of the wrong people, and creating deepfakes for extortion and things like that?"
The engineer paused for a few seconds, and then said, "gosh I never even considered that." She created this monster and all she could think about was how neat it was technologically.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#137Earlier 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…
I thoroughly disagree. Surveillance is an invasive tool of control, and as such intrinsically immoral. Just like a slew of other immoral actions, it may be a net positive when applied for a greater good, but if not used for anything, it's evil. This is trivially true to most common moral understandings. If my neighbor installs a camera pointing through my window and into my shower, applying some fancy technique to se…
So should the US simply not pursue any tax evasion cases? Because catching tax evasion necessarily requires surveillance.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. We should stop using the word "defense". They're war contractors at a war company. The Department of Defense is the Department of War. They changed the name and then immediately started taking military action against other countries. We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate, but it certainly has nothing to do with "defending" t…
> for reasons that nobody can quite articulate They were articulated many times, maybe you didn't want to hear. The action itself was poorly planned and executed, it's a different question.
Many reason were articulated, including the threat on an immediate attack on the US. That reason ran counter to defense assessments. Also, the reasons and goals stated by Trump (“President of Peace” and inaugural awardee of the FIFA peace prize), Rubio, and Hegseth have not been consistent.
Was the reason to open the Strait that was already open, prevent an attack, to prevent Iran from making a nuclear weapon, or to change a regime?
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of what the Trump administration will tell you, that's not it's name. The executive branch is not empowered to unilaterally change the name of a department.
It’s not empowered to unilaterally declare war without approval from congress, either. But here we are.
The president isn't empowered to declare war, but as Commander in Chief he is empowered to send the military anywhere he wants and start whatever "conflict" he wants, for whatever reason he wants, including no reason whatsoever. After which Congress can retroactively declare it a war if they so choose. But the US hasn't fought a declared war since WW2, because declarations of war don't really mean anything when the missiles have already been fired and the bombs have already been dropped.
I hate Trump as much as anyone with a moral core should, but the President's capacity for creating arbitrary military violence and expenditure has always been unchecked.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#140To quote the Declaration of Independence "...all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."