Reflections on Palantir • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#441

Post by immibis » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 1:50 PM UTC

austinjp wrote: post #330

The 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…

Each individual has to balance between working for the corrupt system in order to extract benefits from it (otherwise the system simply kills you through starvation), and working in ways that benefit society even though the system punishes them for it. The best individual outcome results from working with the system at all times, so the problem will never be solved.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#442

Post by tucnak » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

lioeters wrote: post #409

tucnak wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it have to do with Faust? Israel is not a superhuman thing of any kind, and it doesn't possess superhuman knowledge.

Peter Thiel is enriching himself, fully aware that he's participating in ethnic cleansing, violence, and mass murder. If you see the video in the sibling comment, it's clear that he knows the evil he's working for, he is trading in the suffering of humanity for his own profit. And he knows we know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_with_the_Devil

You, too, don't appear to understand what the Faustian is about specifically. Guys, you should read up on something other than Wikipedia, & not embarrass yourself with dimwit attempts at allegory.

Allow me to suggest Faust by Goethe!

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#443

Post by crabbone » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

cambaceres wrote: post #432

austinjp wrote: post #330

The 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…

Certain situations that are likely to occur in professional settings would be suitable topics for university education. For example, doctors will encounter many challenging decisions where it's crucial to understand what past generations of medical professionals have learned from similar situations. However, this differs from universities teaching students which business areas are more moral to work in than others. W…

Ethics study is rarely about what decision to make, but mostly about how to make a decision. So, there's no problem with teaching ethics in the presence of defense industry.

Similarly, doctors learn medical ethics, and, of course, not every question has the "right" answer. Partially, medical (and research) ethics are about knowing what constitutes malpractice under current law, but it's also about some more general ideas (on which the law might be based) that are hard to quantify. Here's one example: during a drug research, if the interim results show that the newly suggested treatment is unambiguously better than the one given to the control group, the researcher is compelled to stop the research and just move everyone to the new drug. But, the reality is rarely so clear-cut. The researcher might not be confident in the accuracy of the intermediate results. While the average success from a particular treatment might improve, it might also worsen the situation for some outliers in the target group etc. All this would lead the researcher to the situation where they need to select between continuing and stopping the research with no clear best choice.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#444

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

austinjp wrote: post #330

The 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…

[deleted]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#445

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

austinjp wrote: post #330

The 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…

[deleted]

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#446

Post by crabbone » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 1:59 PM UTC

derkster wrote: post #403

moolcool wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's preachy at all to say "Hey, the work you do has impacts on the wider world"

who are we to hold others accountable for their actions when money is at stake?

Potentially the ones affected by the actions of those receiving the money?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#447

Post by killjoywashere » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:02 PM UTC

kome wrote: post #342

dan-robertson wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t the article say the OP wanted to work on meaningful problems in healthcare and bio? I don’t think what you describe sounds like that.

he wanted, but he didn't - his first deployment was for airbus. then it follows a weak ethical discussion on why working for imperialist powers "is good, actually".

> weak ethical discussion

followed by a one clause stone-throw. Irony?

So, the major democracies are imperialist powers? Do you live in a small dictatorship? If not, to be consistent with the rock you just threw, you don't pay your taxes? Do you just not take responsibility for anything? Because that's what he's arguing Palantir does.

Here's another take: since WW2 there's been a messy but semi-stable competition between the great powers expressed most visibly through a series of proxy wars near the perimeter of Russia and China. However, the competition is also expressed in the global economy, on the networks, in space, in the oceans. Turns out good people are often forced into ethically tenuous situations and in a world with 8 billion people, every one of whom has lots of opinions, there's a lot of possibility for entirely reasonable people to find themselves in life-and-death struggles.

Wolf packs defend their resources, mainly by marking their territorial boundaries but occasionally they fight. Are they unethical in doing so? Are we any different?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#448

Post by hylaride » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:02 PM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #424

avmich wrote: post #203

Earlier 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..." ICE does ethnic cleansing? That sounds like an outrageous claim. Examples of ethnic cleansing includes the Turkish massacre of Armenians during WWI, the forced displacement and mass killings in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90s, the Novia Scotia colonial gove…

Cory Doctorow doesn't understand that there's shades of grey the world, which is a shame as he could otherwise be one of the greatest socio-tech thought leaders in the world.

ICE does things in a horrible way, but like most western government institutions, it's a symptom of a/the problem.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#449

Post by mandmandam » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:04 PM UTC

danw1979 wrote: post #406

> These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun. This, it turned out, was an inheritance from the Paypal mafia. Sounds like a fucking awful place to work.

100 mile bike rides are awesome. So is reading philosophy. Competition can be fun and motivating. Experimenting with weird diets can be fantastic exploration.

Fuck Palantir. Not because sometimes they act like human beings, but because sometimes they don't.

The worst attitude fta by far was the "Well at least we're at the table" justification. Weak rationalization presented as rationality; a thin veneer over "might makes right". "Gray areas" - yeah okay buddy.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#450

Post by beedeebeedee » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:12 PM UTC

I'm amazed there's no discussion in the article about Palantir's role in Gaza and their development of Lavender and "Where's Daddy". That goes beyond the gray areas that the author mentions.