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

wired.com

471–480 of 756 posts

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

#471

> ...about working for a company named after J. R. R. Tolkien’s corrupting all-seeing orb. Wasn't the the problem that Sauron had one so he could corrupt the other users through the orb, but the orb itself was not corrupting?

Nope. Sauron could just radicalize by making the palantir show what he wanted them to see, but it was always true.

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

#472

> ...about working for a company named after J. R. R. Tolkien’s corrupting all-seeing orb. Wasn't the the problem that Sauron had one so he could corrupt the other users through the orb, but the orb itself was not corrupting?

> he could corrupt the other users through the orb, but the orb itself was not corrupting? Interestingly enough, the stones could not lie. They only showed real things. Sauron's corruption was achieved through a lack of context. Just like Palantir (the company) can do with data. A dataset can be completely truthful, but lead to a false or manipulative conclusion. But to the original point, yeah, the name Palantir is…

[deleted]

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

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one likes war, everyone loves defense. Something something expanded surveillance under the guise of counter-terrorism post-9/11 It was renamed after WWII. In part because smart minds realised that war between industrialised civilisations had ceased to be an accretive endeavour since sometime between Napoleon and the Kaiser.

Have you heard about the Cold War that immediately ensued after WW2 between the world's two leading industrial nations?

Everyone involved was smart enough to realize it shouldn’t go hot.

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

#474
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It read like a C- college sophomore dudebro who read some Ayn Rand and Raspail and Yockey and said "I fucking am John Galt", hit a bong, and got to scribbling their 'manifesto'.

All three of these suggestions are likely true. I’ve never done Ketamine but I’ve heard it can seriously degrade the user’s “quality control” of their ideas, meaning that ideas that they have, or ideas they get from others, that are intellectually subpar appear to be quite brilliant. The dissociation is also helpful for overcoming moral qualms if they were ever present. Combine that with speed and a insular SV cultur…

I feel sorry for them because some of them will never wake up to experience life

And that's deeply sad to me

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

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US did not retreat. We fought multiple wars to maintain our power and influence. We toppled multiple regimes to maintain puppet governments. Very much the same as the USSR and China have done. As much as I am critical of the US, until now the US did behave very differently from other superpowers. Consider the end of WWII. The US did not inflict reparations on the vanquished nations but rather, invested huge sum…

The US treated both Germany and Japan well. It did not and has not treated any other nation whose government it's meddled with well. That's my point. Edit Actually we probably could throw in South Korea into the nations the US has treated well after meddling.

Spain, France, the entire iron curtain following 1992 dissolution of USSR, Taiwan, Phillipines, Costa Rica, Panama ... and speaking of central America, Venezuela isn't doing so bad either. Perhaps more expansive lists could be produced once the definitions of "meddled with" and "treated well" are more refined.

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

#476
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that people will be able to justify anything that is "normal". I went vegan after learning too much of how the literal sausage is made and the amount of people who have unprompted (people are weird about it so I try to avoid talking about being vegan except for mentioning it quickly while declining food) said something along the lines of "factory farming is awful but I just love bacon" and laugh is l…

man look at everyone getting weird as hell about it under here. Good gravy!

This comment section is actually pretty good and it's generally well intentioned so I'm not mad but it's the same stuff every time. It's like how a tall person I know hears the same "how's the weather up there" joke over and over and got tired of it.

The only thing people will say that annoys me is the "but animals eat other animals" argument from otherwise intelligent people (no worries if children say it). I've yet to meet someone who sincerely thinks that what happens in nature is ethically okay (as a simple point, many animals will eat their own family when stressed and sexually assault each other constantly, which are very natural but obviously unethical for humans to do. I've seen animals torture and eat each other alive) so the whole argument is a waste of time. It's weird that the "it's natural" argument is probably the most common when many people will walk it back even before I point out the flaws.

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

#477
post #404

Earlier 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…

> We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate, As a third party watching I just assumed it was a “dead cat”[1] to get people to stop talking about the Epstein files. Obviously the Iranian government are not good guys either but the timing of this war… it just looks very odd. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy

Also trump seems to have this weird thing about Obama. He is obsessed with him. He tore up the Obama Iran deal, and is now seeking a better solution.

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

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that people will be able to justify anything that is "normal". I went vegan after learning too much of how the literal sausage is made and the amount of people who have unprompted (people are weird about it so I try to avoid talking about being vegan except for mentioning it quickly while declining food) said something along the lines of "factory farming is awful but I just love bacon" and laugh is l…

to be fair, you can get "good" meat - factory farming is awful, but not all meat is factory farmed. You can eat happy animals, for example pigs that spent their lives outside being pigs, hanging out with their pig friends, and near the end of their pig lives had to go be eaten. If you believe plants are conscious too, that's probably more ethical than eating Nutella made with palm oil from forests that were completel…

> "fully ethical" meat

Clams. Clams and oysters and such. Sessile bivalves are the plants of the animal kingdom, the "genetically engineered brainless cow" of nature. They're also environmentally friendly even when farmed, and more healthy than any animal meat while addressing the same nutritional needs and more. They're almost comically ethical and healthy (and seafood dishes are great imo), they just don't produce bacon and burgers specifically.

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

#479
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…

My experience is that people will be able to justify anything that is "normal". I went vegan after learning too much of how the literal sausage is made and the amount of people who have unprompted (people are weird about it so I try to avoid talking about being vegan except for mentioning it quickly while declining food) said something along the lines of "factory farming is awful but I just love bacon" and laugh is l…

I always think that this sort of culture and interaction was exactly was it was like to live during a time when slavery was legal and permitted. I hope in 100 year meat eating will be seen as similar.

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

#480

Yea, the same innovations that enable freedom can also be used for control. What else is new?

Palantir enables freedom in the same way salt water quenches your thirst. It doesn’t.

Salt water totally quenches thirst if under 0.5%. Sea water doesn't.
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