It feels like the moral section ignores the elephant in the room which is Peter Thiel's hostility to democracy and the more general far right swing in America. There's a difference between working on morally gray tech during normal times versus during times when there is every reason to believe that it WILL be significantly misused.
I wish the morality section were more direct - either admitting that the author has no issue with "grey areas" (a euphemism if I've ever seen one) or that money outweighs their moral concerns. That would feel more intellectually honest.
When it comes to the morality of work, I think it's okay to be selfish with your ideals - whether that means prioritizing money over ethics or refusing to engage with something that conflicts with your values, regardless of your actual personal impact. I have no problem accepting that it's not my responsibility to make ICE more ethical.
A lot of technical people seem to have no trouble with casually glossing over the ethics and morality of what they work on. Even here on HN, I regularly get downvotes for suggesting maybe developers should have some kind of ethical baseline below which they will refuse projects. Nope. Technical complexity, challenge, opportunity to learn a new technology, opportunity to do cutting edge research, and of course a fat stack of stock... all of these things routinely help us to justify working on the Torment Nexus. "Oh, I'm just moving protobufs around, I'm not the one doing evil with them" they will say. Or, instead, you'll see the justification: "Hey, I have five kids to feed. I can't just quit my job! Gotta do what boss tells me to do." This is how we slowly ended up where we are today with surveillance everywhere and coercion and behavior modification built into every tech product.
Personally, my favorite one is when someone with salary and clear ability to get a new job whenever they want claims it is "privileged" to reject a job on moral reasons. Their kids would go hungry if they had ... very high salary, just a little bit lower.
I have seen real world people refuse positions on moral grounds. It does exist and morally dubious positions pay what they do because they have to.
Can’t expect most individuals to decline a paycheck. However you can organize workers at these kinds of workplaces for real leverage (collective rather than individual, just like ownership and management does)
I have seen real world people refuse morally dubious positions in tech. We are not talking about "going hungry" vs "salary". We are talking about "having very very high salary" vs "having very high salary" here.
It is absolutely ok to blame people who do immoral stuff for more money. Pick pocketers do immoral stuff for more money too, it is really the same thing.
Right here in this post you have no trouble ignoring any real concern using a meme instead while declaring that it's everyone else's fault for "glossing over" things.
I think you would find they're not glossing over anything, you are just uninterested in any details since your value system already has a conclusion you're not going to change your mind about.
It just reads irresponsible to me - not my department group think.
"Palantir’s answer to this is something like “we will work with most category 3 organizations, unless they’re clearly bad, and we’ll trust the democratic process to get them trending in a good direction over time”" - I wonder what the line to "clearly bad" is/was
Later in the piece he notoriously declares that “welfare beneficiaries” (a well-known racist dog whistle about Black people) and letting women vote are both impediments to his libertarian dreams of dismantling democratic government.
> For years, Yarvin was something of an odd internet curiosity, with his ideas far from most political conservatives’ radar. He gained one prominent reader — Thiel, who had written about his own disillusionment with democracy, became a Yarvin friend, and funded his startup. “He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin later wrote of Thiel in an email, “just plays it very carefully.” (https://archive.is/iAtnM)
"Hostility to democracy" is underselling it. These people's stated goal is to replace democracy with a CEO-style monarchy. They even have a playbook, and they're getting dangerously close to implementing it.
That elephant in the room, is what they have found in our data, that shifted them into that direction . Maybe if you have humanity under the sql microscope and ask it ugly questions ,without the usual self-serenading , maybe what you find is really ugly, unable to sustain democracy or free market capitalism . And maybe tech can not save us. Maybe tech only raises the stakes, for that final nuclear exchange between decayed warrior cults.
It is relevant again, because one would like to know whether DOGE will install this in the US government.
As for the article, I find it hard to understand what Palantir is actually doing. The article uses Airbus as an example, which ordered some kind of a software system for coordinating manufacturing. The article claims:
"This ended up helping to drive the A350 manufacturing surge and successfully 4x’ing the pace of manufacturing while keeping Airbus’s high standards of quality."
I find this extremely hard to believe. The A350 isn't the first aircraft that Airbus has built.
I'm also skeptical on European reliance on deep state related companies. It is enough that Airbus already uses Google for mail handling (industrial espionage?). Given that the US is now officially a potential EU enemy with territorial aspirations in Greenland, these things have to stop for our national security.
Airbus ex CEO and COO who was supposed to become CEO left (or got kicked out depending on who tells that story). One ended up joining Palintir EU and the other ended up joining the EU attempt at Palantir - Helsing.
Maybe I feel this way because I am not a smart human, but why is being intelligent so important, at the cost of being kind, ethical etc? What is so special about Peter Theil’s philosophy if that man is part of the billionaire club who are using their money to make most people’s life miserable?
And how can people who read philosophy in their evenings (mentioned in the article) justify the work they do during the day?
I honestly do not understand why companies like Palantir and people like Theil are admired, respected etc
The thrill of working with and being surrounded by brilliant people who are breaking new ground and building things that people really find useful is a hell of a drug.
It doesn’t require a megalomaniac at the helm. It just often happens that way.
I don’t disagree. I was explaining why one might want to. The “electricity” in the air when you are working and surrounded by brilliant people who really are passionate about what they’re doing is addictive and extremely fulfilling.
That is often how you get brilliant people to work on things that are otherwise potentially bad for humanity. You appeal not to their humanity, but to their excitement and passion for building.
Sorry I didn’t mean to imply that they use standard systems engineering practices or tools. I was equating their data integration efforts like that ConnectAll tool you can buy.
> I got Severance vibes from this blog about Palantir.
If our most immediate means of understanding the world are by relating it to fiction rather than history then it's likely we have a poor understanding of the world and reality.
No? What do you think the point of fiction often is? Finding similarities between Severance and the real world (and vice versa) is the whole point of that work of fiction.
> What do you think the point of fiction often is?
Fiction is not obligated to reveal anything about reality. Mainly it's escapist. But I'm not trying to have some big debate. Clearly you're passionate in your belief. Ultimately, how to understand the world is something one figures out with life experience and time at which point history becomes your best source of instruction.
When you're young it may seem to make sense to get your morality from Harry Potter and Star Wars. But that's usually just availability bias and the fact that fiction is easy to consume.
But then you discover that the map is not the territory, sometimes that discovery is painful or brutal or destructive and the consequences of having misunderstood the world are permanent for you and those around you.
Anyway, not an argument. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, merely pointing a fact about competence in understanding the world.
I watched a video recently that briefly mentions Palantir, though only in passing. I only recall this because the video had some incredibly alarming tidbits about billionaires stating their goals of "corporation states" unironically
They are a consulting company that tries to do some element of product development in house. This is not a new strategy - all the big consultancies, agencies, etc have been on various forms of the path for the last 15-20 years.
The reality is there is sometimes a space for custom product dev, and sometimes better to rely on actual software/product providers that already have scale, market understanding, etc.
what i get is Palantir is mostly the USA's home-grown answer to SAP with an aerospace/defense slant, and since a lot of aerospace is ITAR export controlled, they get cloistered in the robe of government secrecy.
whole bunch of "strategists" and management types getting hired, and of course the usual truckloads of "backend" and "full-stack" engineers to make the wheels on the bus go round.
Typical comm FDE, right down to the stint at Airbus. He’s fully internalized Shyam’s why do we even need devs attitude, not realizing it’s only one side of a dialectic. Hint: there’s a reason he isn’t CEO.
It's not about well-rehearsed acting to bluff clients (like conventional management consultants).
Impro is about improvisation: having a deep reservoir of experiences and reference points, but no pre-planned templates; empathizing with the client's situation; thinking fast; being open-minded and creative; challenging received wisdom; pulling disparate ideas together; assembling a synthesis; embodying a story; imagining a solution; presenting difficult concepts smoothly; having conviction in your ideas; high risk tolerance; be convincing; be committed to doing what you say and implement what you imagine; create a technical solution, an operational scenario, a bottom-up deployment plan, and a path to win strategic acceptance based on results.
(I strongly suggested to every employee to take some into improv classes for the same reason. I didn’t want them to be better actors. I wanted them to be better listeners, which is what improv is really about)
Is it wrong to say that they are developing sociopaths in this fashion? Anyone ever read the book to say how it is applicable? If you were a client how would you feel about knowing that your interactions with your consultant were all an act?
“Being a successful FDE required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games.”
It's interesting how Palantir kept ownership over FDE work. When I hire a consultant I own his work. He cannot bring it elsewhere to modify and generalize.
I've worked as an FDE in a company that followed a similar approach – any work we did for a customer was still our IP and licensed as part of the software package, so we could then generalise it through our product org
It's not quite like hiring a consultant anyway, for example I've used Foundry before and while custom development is a part of it, the platform has a ton of stuff built in (partly thanks to the culture of adding features to the mainline product from customer engagements) so everyone benefits from it
As a stylistic note, it’s funny that philosophy graduates often can’t help but mention that they are one at every opportunity they have, as if that carried a particular a certain intellectual prestige. They do that while perhaps missing the point: a critical mind does not need to announce its status and does not rely on declarations of prestige to be one.
It’s also funny how a marvelously rational philosophy graduate can then support the most banal moral positions. The life of the mind is quite something.
I don't think the author harps on it just to say "I am very smart", they want to point out that the degree to which Palantir employees then were acquainted with the Western philosophical canon and thought was unusual.
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