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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#451

Post by bbqfog »

lmz wrote: post #216
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…

[flagged]

I'm pro open borders. I see no downsides to letting whoever wants to live here, come here. I also think the US culture (think TGI Fridays and Macys) is pretty much the worst and can only improve as we import people with rich cultural histories.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#452

Post by talldayo »

notadoomer236 wrote: post #322
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s the progressives who took over the vanguard of the Dem party that espouse the position of open borders There are no federally elected democrats who espouse the position of open borders. None. Zero. Every single member of the democratic party in office today in federal office supports some degree of border control, and frankly the degree that they want is not worlds apart from what most republicans want. The GO…

Yet they haven’t they fixed it. It ballooned during the last four years, including federally funded flights bringing in people from South American countries

Imagine how little Americans must care if they voted Trump out after a single term.

Edit: and you don't believe in global warming? Too rich!

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#453

Post by [deleted] »

hylaride wrote: post #448
andsoitis wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#454

Post by acdha »

deltarholamda wrote: post #427
acdha wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think ethics is “bureaucracy” and “useless classes”, you’re pretty loudly shouting that you needed that instruction. The problem with leaving it to parents is that parents are not uniformly qualified or interested in doing so, and it’s in society’s best interests not to leave important things to chance.

You have just re-invented the priestly caste.

Do you think a civics class is a taught by a “priestly caste”? Or the ethics course in a medical or engineering program?

Words have meanings and neither of the terms you used are appropriate for this context. It’s possible that there could be an issue with the way standards are formulated but that’d be specific to a particular situation rather than inherent to the concept.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#455

Post by deltarholamda »

soulofmischief wrote: post #439
deltarholamda wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have just re-invented the priestly caste.

Surely you have the capability of making a distinction between doctrine established for hierarchical control and a teaching a basic system of deriving ethics or morality, with the exact intention of preventing such hierarchical control within an industry that has the power to make any extreme institutional system a reality. You've seen the effects of a generation of social media technologies and how it compared to th…

The post I was replying to explicitly said we couldn't leave the teaching of things like ethics and morality up to parents. That's a priestly caste.

It's all well and good to say that your chosen priest caste won't exert hierarchical control, pinky swear, but history and human nature disagrees with you.

It's also odd to suggest that we can teach a system of deriving ethics or morality. Philosophers have been hard at work on this for a long time and haven't gotten terribly far, and they disagree with each other quite strenuously.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#458

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

lmz wrote: post #216
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…

[flagged]

> Is it all that repressed guilt from invading Indian lands or something?

I don't think you have to look that far back to find fairly convincing arguments that the US is the architect of much of its own immigration "problems." Most illegal immigrants come to the US from Latin American countries that the US spent a lot of time interfering with in very recent history.

Consider Guatemala. Democratically elected president overthrown with CIA support in 1954 so that US fruit companies could keep up their profits by exploiting people. The 1950s weren't that long ago.

Consider El Salvador. During their recent (ended: 1992) civil war the US funded the right-wing government that according to the UN committed 85% of atrocities during the war. The US government then refused to grant asylum and legal protections to refugees, which contributed heavily to MS13 forming in LA. The US then deported many of these gang members back to El Salvador, which did a huge amount of damage to their development after the war.

Wrt Mexico's gangs, most of the demand for their products come from US customers.

Wrt Venezuela, whether the sanctions are right or wrong there's no doubt that they're hurting people there economically.

Given what the US has done to these countries (and others) in living memory, I don't think we have much of a moral right to turn these people away. I've also never had a single negative experience (and many positive ones) with immigrants from these countries (I live in an area with many of them), nor am I convinced that they're even an economic drag on the country.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#459

Post by AnarchismIsCool »

mandmandam wrote: post #449
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 m…

I think you've hit the rationalist nail on the head. They look thoughtful and intellectually honest but in reality they're just kit bashing philosophy to paper over absolutely insane biases and political positions. You don't see any of them espousing leftist/egalitarian views, they're always sitting around thinking "this ethnic cleansing makes me feel good, how can I justify my participation?"

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#460

Post by deltarholamda »

acdha wrote: post #454
deltarholamda wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have just re-invented the priestly caste.

Do you think a civics class is a taught by a “priestly caste”? Or the ethics course in a medical or engineering program? Words have meanings and neither of the terms you used are appropriate for this context. It’s possible that there could be an issue with the way standards are formulated but that’d be specific to a particular situation rather than inherent to the concept.

It's naive to think that a civics class or an ethics class is free of foundational prejudices. You suggest empowering a group of people to choose what to teach, and what not to teach, and thereby decide what constitutes "civics" or "ethics". And you advocate that this is outside of a parent's scope.

That's a priestly caste. Of if, as you say, there may be a problem in the formulated standards, then the body that formulates the standards would be the priestly caste. I don't have a problem with the concept, actually, but it's best to call it what it is. Pretending that this would be perfectly neutral is daft.

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