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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

#621

Post by computably »

Detrytus wrote: post #557
tdb7893 wrote: post #101

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…

I grew up watching my grandmother butchering a chicken for a Sunday dinner. Or my uncle butchering and skinning the calf. Knowing how the sausage is made does nothing for me. I can understand someone being vegan because they believe eating plants is healthier. I can understand being vegan because you don’t like the taste of meat. But bringing any moral/religious reasons for it always seemed silly to me. There’s nothi…

> Knowing how the sausage is made does nothing for me.

Considering that this is nowadays a substantially less common background, and probably trending that direction indefinitely, this reads more as you being desensitized. It's not like vegans are unaware that people could have a background like yours.

> But bringing any moral/religious reasons for it always seemed silly to me. There’s nothing more natural than one animal eating another. Humans evolved from mostly vegetarian monkeys to predators

Morals and religion aren't about what's natural, they're about what humans desire. Illness, violence, and deception are all perfectly "natural."

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

#622

Post by daemin »

jltsiren wrote: post #277
sfink wrote: post #39

Earlier 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…

The palantiri were created by Fëanor. The kinslayer whose pride, rage, and desire for vengeance drove most of his people to their doom. The potential to corrupt was always present in them. In the LotR, Aragorn bends a palantir to his will and uses it for good with great difficulty. He manages to do that, because he is (in addition to everything else) the trueborn king and the palantiri are his birthright. Denethor, o…

I think that's also one of those problems in stories like this, that there's a powerful tool with the power to corrupt but only those chosen few by right can wield it without becoming corrupted.

It implies that there will always be people ordained through some manner which are incorruptible and therefore can use these things to "fight evil". The usual suspects in our world are people in Government, and by extension in military and law enforcement.

One example of someone actually destroying such a device after they finished using it rather than letting themselves be corrupted by it was Batman after he finished using it to locate the Joker. But of course this was in a fictional movie, and in no way represents the real world.

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

#623

Post by computably »

smackeyacky wrote: post #617
computably wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if they were conscious? Well, they're not. > If they aren’t but still a lifeform, that makes it perfectly okay? According to Jains: No. Violence against plants, insects, and possibly even certain microorganisms is considered unethical. IMO as an irreligious person: Yes. Life is just a particular form of self-sustaining and self-propagating system. Those properties are of little to no moral value.

Are you sure? What about a stand of trees whose consciousness might just run extremely slowly compared to ours?

About as sure as one can be. It's neither logically nor physically impossible, but the claim that trees are conscious is practically unfalsifiable and is not supported by any substantive evidence. It has nothing to do with "fast" or "slow," no matter how you poke or prod or slice or dice a tree, there's nothing that suggests a capacity for consciousness. I would be less surprised if my friend's dog started speaking perfect Chinese with an American accent.

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

#624

Post by sofixa »

arthurjj wrote: post #504
theturret wrote: post #283

As I said in another comment, I think it’s important to debate what these companies are doing, how they’re doing it, and whether the United States’ actions are morally and legally justified. But I also think we need to get more smart people interested and working in national security. That’s the way you get the best balance between effective security and the minimum negative side effects to civil liberties or collate…

> As I said in another comment, I think it’s important to debate what these companies are doing, how they’re doing it, and whether the United States’ actions are morally and legally justified. I think it's sometimes hard to debate these issues in tech circles. In my experience something like 5-10% of techies are vocally critical of these companies or anything National Security related. This article headline is a grea…

> This article headline is a great example, a serious debate is difficult when you compare people who disagree with you to Nazis

You know that the Nazi comparison isn't because of the disagreement, but because of what that disagreement is based on?

It's really not hard to compare ICE to the Gestapo or SA, core Nazi institutions. They're kidnapping people off the streets in brutal manners, targeting them based on immutable visual characteristics, sending them to camps from where many are never heard of again. Including people who are citizens and thus not even "guilty" of the crime which is supposedly being targeted.

Palantir as a company enables that. In the same way we legitimately call out Dehomag (IBM's German subsidiary) for them enabling all Nazi atrocities, we can call out Palantir for enabling the current atrocities.

It's not "disagreement", it's "if it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it's a fucking Nazi duck".

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

#625

Post by 0x3f »

tdeck wrote: post #598
0x3f wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relative to other government contractors, Palantir is pretty good. More so because the bar is typically so low, though. But that's priced in. Them featuring in conspiracy theories is just because there's a cultural treadmill for all these things, isn't there? You can't harp on about Raytheon forever. Those are the villans of the past. Back when Bush was the great evil, or something. To get engagement, you need to fra…

Americans who don't like Palantir think (correctly) that the surveillance might affect them. Far fewer seem to care about war crimes committed against people in other countries.

Right but was Booz Allen not dealing in mass surveillance too? There's something that's narratively appealing about Palantir in this context. The name, Thiel as a key figure, the mission statement, the branding. It may even be that they have an image of effectiveness that others don't.

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

#626

Post by JumpCrisscross »

carlosjobim wrote: post #494
Aeolun wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except for in Korea, Vietnam, etc etc

> Except for in Korea, Vietnam, etc etc

I originally discussed "war between industrialised civilisations." "Korea, Vietnam, etc" were not that.

The World Wars drove home the argument that direct confrontation between industrialised socieities is a lose-lose proposition. Since WWII, what I think we've been experimenting with is whether industrialised civilisations can wage war by proxy and still come out ahead. ("Ahead" here measured in relative and absolute power and wealth.) The answer appears to be no–unless you can bog down another who was stupid enough to engage without a proxy. But I don't think it was obviously no until somewhere between the Iraq War and now.

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

#627

Post by aziaziazi »

alterom wrote: post #612
satvikpendem wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't vegetables cheaper than meat? I'd assume poor people also like the taste of meat, as was evolutionarily advantaged, not that it's the cheapest.

>Aren't vegetables cheaper than meat? Do you even do any grocery shopping where you live? Not long ago, I could get chicken for $0.99/pound, same as the cheapest tomatoes, whereas quality tomatoes sold for $2.99/pound. Now the prices for meat are up, but chicken still costs $1.99/pound[1], while decent tomatoes are $3.99/pound[2]. Even if you are thrifty and find cheaper tomatoes, they are incomparable to chicken in…

The comparaison of chicken and tomatoes is a strawman.

First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy - which are what the 0.99/p chicken eat [edit: and it's closer in term of nutrients].

Second: the shelf price you mention includes gouvernement subsidies and economy of scale. The grains price should be the one paid by the fermer, adjusted for smaller packaging. Your comparaison may stands where you live because of political choices and societal evolution. It doesn’t in a more liberal and non regulated juridictions, does it?

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

#628

Post by rcbdev »

tdb7893 wrote: post #101
Ritewut wrote: 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…

Eating factory farmed meat is seen as very low-class and irresponsible in my immediate vicinity. I have a hard time imagining any of my work colleagues admitting to eating factory farmed meat, even if they do due to cost reasons.

But farmers also enjoy high societal standing here, maybe that helps.

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

#629

Post by chrisco255 »

Aeolun wrote: post #473
chrisco255 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It went hot in proxy wars. It only didn't go to total war because of threat of nuclear war and even then nuclear incidents nearly happened on multiple occasions.
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