This is an unexpectedly excellent article and incredibly well written.
Reflections on Palantir
351–360 of 658 posts
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#352"Very intense people" -> Borderline evil sociopaths.
"Things in category 3 needs to exist" mmmmh no, and reading from a "philosophy grad, rationalist heavy" that those are "morally thorny" questions tells me that he should have studied something else...
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#353In Section 6, the author attempts to assess Palantir's moral standing, but the chosen categories—"neutral/good/gray"—reflect a biased framework. A more objective classification, like "neutral/good/bad," would have been more appropriate. This subtle shift raises questions about the methodology used to evaluate the company's ethical impact. The introduction of "grey areas" as a distinct category seems to pre-emptively…
They are "difficult/thorny" questions only if you want them to be like that.
"Health insurance companies make difficult decisions all the time" a.k.a. do we screw up our clients manually or through AI?
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would also be interesting to hear thoughts on the company of somebody like Cory Doctorow. Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-... "Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s…
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I think Darryl Cooper's take is interesting. It's actually original sin from the Holocaust put on all conservatives, not just Germans
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Urban conflict in general produces civilian casualties with women, men, and children dying in proportions matching the demographics. You are begging the question still. Citation needed. > In the Russia-vs-Ukraine war there are relatively few dead children because the demographics of both counties skews towards adults — not because of the military doctrine of either side. Children make up less than 20% of the popula…
Let me simplify this for you: Do you believe that 50kg shells or 500kg bombs dropped on apartment blocks selectively kill women and children, or that they kill the people in the apartment block indiscriminately? Because the arguments being made here are the former: that somehow the Israeli military is going out of its way to target not just civilians, but specifically an excess of women and children... or something t…
Well, I think it is barbaric to drop bombs on areas where you hit such a high proportion of civilians that in the end your overall distribution of victims matches the distribution of the overall population.
So unless the distribution in age etc. of your combatants matches 100% of the distribution in the overall population, then the distribution of the victims should also not match the overall population. If it does, that is a very, very bad sign since it means that you basically mostly just kill the population so much that the killing of the combatants does not meaningfully influence the statistics. And this is a bad thing regardless which country does it.
Or let me simplify this: targeting your indiscriminate bombs indiscriminately is very bad.
Caveat: I did not check any numbers here and my comment is only based on the comments in exactly this thread. I just found your take on this very weird.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#356246 PE, with a $94B market cap. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/ Alex Karp has something figured out. The investor class loves him.
Curious why this is downvoted. Crazy high PE / general valuation for a company that as far as I can tell mostly does IT consulting/contracting - sure they are in a growth sector - but still - plenty of other companies can do what they do.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me simplify this for you: Do you believe that 50kg shells or 500kg bombs dropped on apartment blocks selectively kill women and children, or that they kill the people in the apartment block indiscriminately? Because the arguments being made here are the former: that somehow the Israeli military is going out of its way to target not just civilians, but specifically an excess of women and children... or something t…
> arguments being made here Being made where though? I google '65% of women children gaza' and among the front page of results, all but one reporting that figure do not indicate that women and children were selected for. Civilian infrastructure yes (e.g., "Israeli military has relentlessly targeted infrastructure indispensable to civilian survival." which is true, considering 14 hospitals were hit directly). The exce…
> Killing that indiscriminately and ineffectively is, indeed, alarming
Oh, I agree! The problem Israel faces is that HAMAS fighters don't wear uniforms, are often under 18 years old, and uses civilian buildings for protection.
The dilemma I see as an outsider is that I honestly don't know what else could have happened after October 7th. A bunch of dominos were set up, someone knocked over one, and things unfolded along a nigh-inevitable path from there.[1]
IMHO the fault is with allowing things to "get this bad" in the first place, which is mostly Israel's fault. It's like kicking a dog repeatedly. Eventually, it will bite you, but once a dog has its teeth sunk into your calf, you're not going to treat it nicely.
Let me ask you a simple question. Pretend you're Netanyahu on October 8th. What would you have done? What alternative choices do you think would have been available to you, that the people would accept? What decisions could you have made that would "stick", that wouldn't result in you being kicked out of your position of power on the 9th and replaced by someone else willing to do something horrible that is certain to result in civilian deaths? Keep in mind that to this day there are many abducted civilian Israelis being held in Gaza as hostages.
I've been thinking about this for months and I honestly can't come up with anything.
[1] Look at what the US did after 9/11! Same setup, same story, same depressing outcome.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#358The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt. We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider wo…
I sure don’t have any more glamorous reasons to work for the company I do.
They pay well, and that’s where the interest ends. There’s a lot of challenges in gluing CRUD together at a large enough scale, but it’s not exactly valuable to the greater world.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#359The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt. We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider wo…
Maybe OP was aware of Palantir's impact on the world and was ethically OK with it. Ethics are nuanced, an by all means not universal.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would also be interesting to hear thoughts on the company of somebody like Cory Doctorow. Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-... "Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s…
> Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..." And don't forget the UK National Health Service
Are you trying to say that working for the NHS is bad? I’d choose the NHS over a great many other things if given the option.