1. As per usual, the things that make palantir well known not even close to being the most dubious things.
2. I agree that the rank and file of palantir is no different from typical sv talent.
3. The services -> product transition was cool, I didn't weigh it as much as should've, but I did purchase fomo insurance after they ipo'd
4. The shadow hierarchy was so bad, it's impossible to figure out who you actually needed to talk to.
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 products to monitor protest movements.
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 government's removal of the French Catholic Acadian population, the Amhara security forces treatment of Tigrayans in Ethiopia, and of course the one that its perpetrators euphemistically called the Final Solution.
How, exactly, is ICE doing anything remotely like this? If it were true, surely it would be in the headlines and surely people would protest it harder than what is happening elsewhere in the world today?
And don't forget the UK National Health Service
Will evil techno-cons replace neocons?
> Palantir is hot now. The company recently joined the S&P 500. The stock is on a tear, and the company is nearing a $100bn market cap. VCs chase ex-Palantir founders asking to invest.
[...] During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. There were regular protests outside the office.
I don't really see the contradiction here? The most morally repugnant companies are often the most profitable, and the stock market sometimes (not always) follows suit. And if the protests outside their offices have decreased, that's probably just a sign that there are other things to protest against now...
your 401k is probably funding cocacola extract water from impoverished communities and then selling it back to them with sugar.
The first question is, what about the third and fourth categories? Would they be dissenters in general, or specific kinds (judged to be riskier for the autocratization process) and which?
The second question is, how would they go about identifying them? Are there products and services at Palantir that may have been designed for this goal?
> I did purchase fomo insurance after they ipo'd
please tell us something
At the end of the day though, I get the feeling the author is too concerned with status and the rat race of business in America. His view of what it’s possible for someone in tech to work on is very narrow, at some point he says you can either work at google on google search or work at palantir or a few other things.
I’m thankful to the comments here for pointing out more of the bad thing Palantir has been apart of, and so while i feel this article is interesting, Palantir still sounds pretty bad.
To me, the purpose of a 'flat hierarchy' and this internal 'status game' are obvious - clandestine operation.
* Lots of projects, most of them 'clean'
* Nobody truly knows what everyone is working on. The competitive nature of internal politics makes sure there is plenty of rumor and gossip going around. What do you expect from a highschool popularity real-life mmorpg?
* It moves the benefit of compromising your morals right to your doorstep as an individual engineer. Work at Meta or Google and you can make your fuss about privacy and whatever else you feel they did wrong that week and feel like you're doing the right thing but still take home the big bucks. Work at Palantir and you're soon desperate to elevate your status. Oh and it so happens there's plenty of shady data analysis requests to go around and oh wouldn't you know it all the data you could ever want.
* All this talk about:
> 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.
Why is 'social context' so unusually important? Your customers can't actually explicitly tell you what they want. Why not? I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that Palantir IPO'd and is a magnet for investors doesn't contradict this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and surveillance.
I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.
Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to political stuff.
When people post memes about "You are about to find out why US doesn't have free healthcare." with some overwhelming American firepower equipment in the image, it's not hard to see why a lot of people find it a grey area.
(Also, there are plenty of reasons why the American defense industry is both quanitatively and qualitatively different from those of other nations, e.g. France, Sweden – i.e. its disproportionate involvement with arms sales, its involvement with defense boondoggles and the opportunity cost, etc. Regardless of the grays, when the system is black, entire countries are painted black.)
What you're writing should naturally lead to the conclusion that working for Google, Meta, Verizon, AT&T etc are all in the category of companies one shouldn't strive to use their hard earned talents for. For some reason I cannot fathom, you seem to land on the idea that Palantir is okay, because all these others somehow have snuck under the radar of many people?
So... Y'know. You could just let people assume that you're a lineman or something.
To be fair, most countries don't routinely bomb some random folk halfway across the world. So if you work on defense tech there, there is a less immediate connection between what you do and people dying.
I don't think so. I see tons of people with moral objections to Meta specifically.
“Where do you work?”
“Oh at $COMPANY.”
“I hear they work in missile defense technology, you should be ashamed. Gaza Israel blah blah blah”
“Oh, well sorry you feel that way.”
“So how many innocent children you bombed this week?”
“Actually zero, I spent the week writing Ansible and bash scripts. Then I went to a presentation about a team trying to stop $COUNTRY from hacking into the electric grid and shutting down power to hospitals. Then I read a report about improving 911 tech backends and other emergency services. Then I had lunch with my friend, who works in forensics catching sex traffickers, and he told me some crazy stories.”
“Wow I didn’t know you guys did all that stuff at $COMPANY…”
“Sounds about right…”
I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this summary is good enough.
> The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S., but internationally as well.
About "sin" industries:
> "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, miltech) can be seen as morally contentious by some workers. As a result, individuals may seek higher wages to compensate for any discomfort or societal stigma attached to their work in those sectors.
A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies have data that lives in separate databases and they can't easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against all their data, and make connections and correlations that they wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously siloed.
One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard to do because the database of prescription purchases was disconnected from the database of drug convictions.
Super boring, but super important stuff, which I've seen neglected at far too many places I've worked.
Sounds like data engineering with a dash of ML.
One is described well in the article, originally aimed at commercial clients. The article isn't short but we're on HN, not Reddit, so we should read the articles. Parts 2 and 3 describe it. The linked note at the end of 3 is very relevant.
The other one is the gov one, which is also mentioned as "Palantir has prevented terrorist attacks".
The article actually links to lots of product docs. It isn't secretive, plenty of videos on Youtube demoing the software. The docs are public, which is more open than can be said for 90% of software in their price range.
Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more benefit and locked-in they are.
Here is the link for anyone interested: https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ and a YouTube explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGRCTTjLfQ
Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically integrated data providers" space.
That's what companies should all be built and optimized to do. That's what it's about.
Warp Speed: Aims to integrate ERP, MES, PLM, and factory floor systems into a single AI-driven platform. As opposed to legacy ERP systems, it focuses on production optimization rather than just financial tracking. Warp Speed has the potential to relegate legacy systems to backend data storage, shifting the entire intelligence layer (and value) to Palantir's system. Warp Speed targets both innovative new manufacturers (they note Tesla and Space X alums starting new companies) and traditional large-scale operations.
Mission Manager: enables other defense contractors to build on Palantir's platform and benefit from their security infrastructure and position of trust within government. You can think of it as an AWS for defense companies; plug and play with the foundations handled for you. While the product just launched in Q4 2023, they just received a new $33 million CDAO Open DAGIR contract. While this is possibly just an advanced POC, it represents significant potential for future growth and wider adoption in the defense sector. Now is the perfect time. From 2021 to 2023, VC firms invested nearly $100 billion in defense tech startup companies, a 40% increase from the previous seven years combined. Time is the most important thing for these startups and Mission Manager shows the potential to save lots of it.
The perfect time is yesterday. All defense companies already went way up.
Palantir... Not so much
AFAICT, it is government & government-adjacent contracting using techniques borrowed from big tech and WITCH, since big tech won't directly court government sw contracts, and WITCH may fail at getting clearances for foreign-based personnel.
It’s quite expensive now.
I would encourage you to do your own research.
For some reason, HN has very little depth in stock market understanding. HN passed on META at $100.
I know there are some very knowledgeable people here. Wish there was a way to create a “subreddit “ here without all the Reddit noise.
There is a long tradition of show HN were the comments poo poo startups and ideas which end up being huge and the opposite is also true with praise and admiration of failures.
The introduction of "grey areas" as a distinct category seems to pre-emptively soften the possibility of negative judgments.
Struck me as not that different from many other consulting type engagements: It’s not something a company couldn’t just do on their own if they wanted but companies just choose to pay someone else to do a bunch of grunt work under the guise of some hand-wavy special expertise and IP.
1: For Coca Cola paying salaries for computer people is a cost that gets in the way of their real business of selling beverages; for someone like Palantir having good computer people produces profit, that is the real business. This is always going to trickle down to the work conditions, pay, etc.
After squinting at the linked Tyler Cowen essay, I think it's a convoluted way of saying "context is valuable and a lot of times when things suck it's because there's not enough of it". I was hoping he was going to give an operational definition of context. Does anyone have a more developed take?
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/co...
Given the mileiu we find ourselves in on the web, this is probably hard to avoid. We're deluged with information nonstop, typically in fairly shallow small bites, often from sources with very limited and biased points of view. Doing a true deep dive to understand background and context before forming any sort of conclusion of your own is difficult, time-consuming, and contrary to human instinct, because we want to participate, and if we don't have an opinion, we feel like we can't, or at bare minimum, saying that surely won't put you at the top of an upvote-based sorting scheme.
Take this very thread. I'd heard of Palantir in the sense of hearing the name, knowing where that names comes from, and knowing it is associated with Peter Thiel. That's about all I knew of it before right now. After reading this blog and all the comments, what do I know now? A little bit more. My prior on them being part of an explicit and intentional conspiracy to abet genocide and prepare the population for an eventual authoritarian takeover in which regular people are getting jailed left and right for buying Plan B and what not is low, so I guess I tend to dismiss speculation like that. They seem to make a product for synthesizing data from sources that don't have compatible schemas and seemingly no APIs for common-format export. That was largely just manual work at first, maybe still is, but they've tried to make a product of it. Some commenters are saying it is snake oil. Some are saying it's amazing and useful. My takeaway from that is they are trying to solve a very hard problem and sometimes what they do works and sometimes it doesn't. They seemingly take on customers that are political hot potatoes and not popular with the stereotype demographic of a silicon valley workforce, more typical of the customers you'd usually see taken on by a Raytheon or Lockheed.
I guess I'm supposed to have an opinion beyond that. I don't know. My brother-in-law works for Anduril and has spent most of his time the past three years deployed to theaters of combat teaching soldiers to use drones. My wife works for Raytheon on a spy satellite orchestration that is literally named Cyberdyne and would almost certainly be considered dystopian by any average person on Hacker News that heard about it and didn't have the context of working on it for two decades. I don't believe they're evil. I was an Army officer commanding tank units in Iraq and Afghanistan and I don't believe I'm evil.
I'm not sure how people think we're supposed to approach subjects like this. We're going to have international conflicts and laws. They're both a part of civilization. Given that, it seems somewhat inevitable and reasonable that countries will also have military and law enforcement agencies. Balancing action with inaction, false positives with false negatives, is impossible to get right all of the time, but what is the takeaway? Should all humans everywhere refuse to work for any military or law enforcement agency? Should all businesses refuse to sell to them? Wouldn't that mean we effectively have no defense and no laws? Where is the line between acknowledging that sometimes even your own country is guilty of atrocities and overreach and simply throwing up your hands and saying we should build no weapons and have no sort of intelligence gathering activities of any kind?
I don't buy that the US or Israel is uniquely evil here and seemingly neither is Palantir simply for doing business with ICE and the IDF. I'm obviously motivated to believe that, but again, surely there is some spectrum, isn't there? If we look at say, the 20th century histories of France and Germany, there are no saints. France was an imperial power that did a lot of bad shit in Africa. They gassed protesters and have had some obvious law enforcement brutalities. But they didn't commit a holocaust and try to conquer all of Europe. I guess that's a low bar to clear, but still, should no one ever sell anything to the French military? The German military? Doesn't that again mean they wouldn't have militaries? If neither European powers nor the US had militaries, then seemingly all of Europe would currently be Soviet republics. That is surely not better than where we actually find ourselves, even if where we find ourselves isn't the best we can do.
Also, great learnings for everyone building AI driven services companies.
I always wondered why you needed BD / "business folk", but its rare to find the ability to schmooze with customers and hustle along with deep technical talent in the same individual.
So really surprising (and cool) to see how Palantir was able to do this with their FDEs!
Dismissing it as politics beating substance is not useful, since there is so little substance present. Figuring out which of the bidders is incompetent is non-trivial when what they do is far from your expertise, and if it's close to your expertise, you wouldn't be hiring outsiders to do it. I have heard similar things coming from DOTs where, when the infrastructure is something that hasn't been done this generation, they get bent over a barrel by the contractors.
TL; DR: when people who can't write software hire other people to write software for them, what non-political signal do they have to separate the sheep from the goats?
The day finally came and the execs were all in the office for the big presentation. I wasn't there, but from what I heard, it was basically a handful of unfinished, incomplete Power BI type reports outlining information that we already had/knew. They were literally laughed out of the room and the meeting was cut short. It was a huge waste of time. I wish I could have been there, from what I heard it was hilarious.
In the sense that Palantir found out information that you guys already knew... but how much time did it take? How much man power and how much money? What is that compared to the resources your company spent to build that internal knowledge?
Also what company was it if you feel comfortable revealing?
Now they have a platform that's hard to replace because the businesses that rely on them are extremely slow to adapt themselves that's the very reason Plantir was able to get into the space.
Most companies like the mentioned Airbus though do nowadays get convinced to do more impactful things, and they do reap the rewards.
It doesn't help that the product has evolved ridiculously over the years. Just in these comments there's people who e.g. worked there in 2016. Productwise they might have well have been at an entirely different company, unless they were on the gov side of things.
Going for operation use cases was a huge win. Once novel data existed in the system (rather than just transforms of existing data), it became a lot harder to rip out. That could be as simple as having someone merge records so you know that two companies are actually the same.
Foundry was a really interesting case because it was basically an enterprise ETL platform before those became very popular + a team of people who helped you get data into it. One of the genius things about the business model was that it operated like a consultancy, but built contracts like a product company. That allowed them to charge based on the value provided rather than hours worked, then pull the best lessons from the deployment back into the main product.
In hindsight, the fact that Palatir went to Airbus meant that the fix was in and it was already decided that Boeing was going down. Or for the less cynical, it was Palantir's magic that made Airbus successful and if Boeing were competent they would have hired Palantir.
1. Palantir does more than government work. They have 3 core products:
- Gotham fka PG, used by government agencies for Intel and Mission Planning. Used to extract information from unstructured data, geographical analysis and much more. Just look up Meta Constellation
- Foundry, their commercial big data product, kind of comparable to Databricks or MS Fabric, but much more capable. You can build no code applications on top of your semantic layer (ontology) and even write back to the source systems (ERP).
- Apollo, their deployment product. Haven't used it and I don't know if they are really selling it or just advertising. They are using it internally very heavily though.
2. Palantirs commercial products are not a secret. There are tons of videos out there, the docs are public, you can even sign up for Foundry and use it immediately.
3. Palantirs commercial side of business is bigger than its governmental today.
4. Foundry is NOT "basically Grafana". As I said before, just watch some videos
As a response to violations of civil liberties? More like a major mechanism for.
If tech leaders actually believed that they were adding value and receiving fair proceeds, they wouldn't spend so much energy trying to control the media. They wouldn't be increasingly distrusted. Society wouldn't be so divided. They wouldn't need a monetary system based on unlimited money creation.
It's interesting that morality is often mentioned when discussing such companies. It must be a significant challenge for them to find people who are both intelligent enough and immoral (or amoral) enough to do the kind of work which still yields profits in a system such as ours. They now have to signal their moral status far and wide to every corner of the globe attract the 'right' candidates.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/
Alex Karp has something figured out. The investor class loves him.
Palantir has $0.09 earnings per share. 2023 was the first year they were profitable. So P/E isn't the right metric to look at here.
Also no investor ever trades on _trailing_ metrics. It's all about forward earnings, but 99.999999% of valuation multiples you see online are trailing metrics (or use questionable forward estimates pulled from some aggregate which is also just noise instead of actually diligencing estimates)
Also P/E doesn't matter for companies that have not been profitable for long. Any PE number above 100x is very likely just noise. I wouldn't look at anything too far above 30x, maybe 40x to account for the craze behind NVDA today
I mean, it is those things. I think just because it's listed on a market doesn't change those things. People are just like, "I value the money it makes me more than the ethical qualms I have about what Palantir is".
Thank God for reader mode.
Sounds like a fucking awful place to work.
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.
I think the actual awful part of people like that are when they get in a position of power and preach their weirdness as The One True Way(tm). Which, unfortunately, a lot of them do. I think this stems from them having success in life without realizing it's selection bias. The result is that their own decisions are biased towards their quirks and they become pretty insufferable about it.
But, to your point and to completely contradict mine, I would bet those "One True Way" people probably are the norm at Palantir, judging by the onboarding book choices.
Is that really any different in 2024?
In other words, if you read the article I would add one more bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify palantir's work - genocide assistance.
from https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-f...
""" Not only did it provide information to the US military during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but over the past 10 months in particular, Palantir has provided AI-powered military and surveillance technology support to the Israelis in its war on Gaza.
It has, in the words of Palantir's co-founder Alex Karp, been involved in "crucial operations in Israel".
Palantir says it offers defence technologies that are “mission-tested capabilities, forged in the field” to deliver “a tactical edge - by land, air, sea and space”.
These capabilities include supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with the data to fire missiles at specific targets in Gaza - be it inside homes or in moving vehicles. """
Palantir can not provide information. They can give you insights into your data. They're like splunk..and equally expensive.
That there's a genocide in Gaza is objectively debatable. In the sense that people debate it.
You can be pro-Israel without pretending to hold humanist values and so on.
This mythical idea that certain successful tech founders are successful because they are highly contemplative intellectuals is so exhausting to me. The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane. I can no longer take seriously the "I make software and then sit and think about ancient political philosophy" trope.
It's the same thing as self-aggrandizement by interacting with (texts of) ancient philosophers.
Somehow the lessons learned always come out as, 'more power and money for me'. Ancient philosophers, and many since, certainly had much to say about that.
I like reading old books and philosophy so I found a copy. It was basically completely unfollow-able, and at best tangentially related to anything they were doing.
I think having some biblical text to appeal to, in order to justify what is otherwise completely self-dealing, self-serving behavior is some foundational principle of the VP lizard school in Silicon Valley.
It’s a sleight of hand. People will come up with brilliant illusions to distract you from the convenient hand that’s wrist deep into your coin purse.
Not to say there aren’t interesting or valuable intellectual ideas in these books — in Girard, or what have you. But ultimately you have to judge people objectively on the sort of behaviors they exhibit, not on the “illusions” of the intellectual or philosophical explanations they give for those behaviors.
I wonder if it's more of an adaptation or coping mechanism than a foundational principle. I think these people cannot bear to actually digest the cynical view of what they are doing in the world so they grasp for something more esoteric and hold that up as guiding principles.
If they were actually doing something good, they wouldn't have to find a book that explains why what they're doing is good in some indirect way. If you look at Jimmy Wales' guiding philosophy, for example, it is clearly and directly correlated to the work being done at Wikipedia. There's no jumping through hoops, because most people agree that Wikipedia is a good thing.
Any idea what the book was?
Ah, now believing to pseudoscience is a sign of great intelligence?
Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both).
The amount of manual labor doesn’t justify its market price, but because governments rarely change their vendors, there is significant lock in that probably supports some amount of their market cap.
Hey now, they're forward-deployed engineers. Nothing like Oracle or SAP consultants.
“Forward deployed” sounds like they’re in a FOB out in the sticks somewhere.
Getting clean data seems like a universal need, but the job is still difficult, under-appreciated and underpaid. How come?
I have a pet theory about private equity: they're in the business of laundering boring jobs for college graduates. Few kids dream of graduating college to work at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. But working for Accenture in New York or Atlanta, now that's sexy. Even if you spend your entire work week *checks notes* working at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. (Investment banking is similar, though the transaction orientation makes the division of labour a little more sensible.)
Palantir pays less for its consultants (sorry, FDEs) than Bain et al. Few in their generation dreamed of graduating college to work at a soulless corporate consultancy. But a tech company, now that's sexy.
More pointedly: It's remarkable how an ostensibly 80% GM business only barely became profitable last year. Palantir's Q2 '24 cash flows from operations at 40% of revenues looks closer to the mark [1]. (Palantir's cost of revenue "primarily includes salaries, stock-based compensation expense, and benefits for personnel involved in performing [operations & maintenance] and professional services, as well as field service representatives, third-party cloud hosting services, travel costs, allocated overhead, and other direct costs" [2].)
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...
https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/
(And a very different kind of science fiction for a non-cop.)
"A boring dystopia as a service."
Or maybe I'm just not cognitively ready to read this yet this morning. I guess I'll set my A/C to 60 and chew on some ice to see if that helps. :|
From what I understand, their software is also responsible for deep-strike drone path planning, avoiding air defenses through Russian terrain.
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 world. There's more to life than intellectual satisfaction.
They pay well, and that’s where the interest ends. There’s a lot of challenges in gluing CRUD together at a large enough scale, but it’s not exactly valuable to the greater world.
That seems like a very uncharitable take. For instance, don't you think the section on morality[1] addresses this head on?
Teach your values to your own kids, man
And I have no worries that the billionaires will make sure their views and values are aired and widely known, so students will be very much able to make up their own mind.
The minimal standard we should teach our students is to be part of the solution, not the problem, and that sitting on the fence counts as being on the side of the problem. Working for a "neutral" employer is just not good enough. There are plenty of worthwhile alternatives out there. We all should try to make the world a better place in some small way.
1. https://archive.ph/LwvMA 2. https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/
However, this differs from universities teaching students which business areas are more moral to work in than others. Who would have the authority to decide which businesses are more ethical? Some argue that working in the defense industry is the least ethical career choice, while others claim it would be immoral not to support a country's right to purchase weapons for self-defense. These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases.
When I taught design I ended one of my courses with a lecture and discussion on ethics, and I'd like to think I was pretty even-handed. One common issue that most young designers encounter is being asked to implement dark patterns that improve the company's profits at the expense of the end-user's well-being. The goal of that lecture was not to tell students what is right and what is wrong but to get them to think critically about the effects of their decisions on end-users, customers, society, and the planet. But those answers are different for everyone, for example in my case I was more ethically comfortable working on US military projects than projects involving advertising, social media, gambling, or other forms of psychological manipulation.
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.
I think this is important, especially in tech. Our contributions often change the world, even in little ways, but this compounds.
Grey areas. By this I mean I mean ‘involve morally thorny, difficult decisions’: examples include health insurance, immigration enforcement, oil companies, the military, spy agencies, police/crime, and so on.
Every engineer faces a choice: you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things and basically fall into category 1. You can also go work on category 2 things like GiveDirectly or OpenPhilanthropy or whatever.
The critical case against Palantir seemed to be something like “you shouldn’t work on category 3 things, because sometimes this involves making morally bad decisions”. An example was immigration enforcement during 2016-2020, aspects of which many people were uncomfortable with.
But it seems to me that ignoring category 3 entirely, and just disengaging with it, is also an abdication of responsibility. Institutions in category 3 need to exist. The USA is defended by people with guns. The police have to enforce crime, and - in my experience - even people who are morally uncomfortable with some aspects of policing are quick to call the police if their own home has been robbed. Oil companies have to provide energy. Health insurers have to make difficult decisions all the time. Yes, there are unsavory aspects to all of these things. But do we just disengage from all of these institutions entirely, and let them sort themselves out?
I don’t believe there is a clear answer to whether you should work with category 3 customers; it’s a case by case thing. 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”. Thus:
On the ICE question, they disengaged from ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) during the Trump era, while continuing to work with HSI (Homeland Security Investigations).
They did work with most other category 3 organizations, on the argument that they’re mostly doing good in the world, even though it’s easy to point to bad things they did as well.
I can’t speak to specific details here, but Palantir software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance.
This is an uncomfortable stance for many, precisely because you’re not guaranteed to be doing 100% good at all times. You’re at the mercy of history, in some ways, and you’re betting that (a) more good is being done than bad (b) being in the room is better than not. This was good enough for me. Others preferred to go elsewhere.
The danger of this stance, of course, is that it becomes a fully general argument for doing whatever the power structure wants. You are just amplifying existing processes. This is where the ‘case by case’ comes in: there’s no general answer, you have to be specific. For my own part, I spent most of my time there working on healthcare and bio stuff, and I feel good about my contributions. I’m betting the people who stopped the terror attacks feel good about theirs, too. Or the people who distributed medicines during the pandemic.
Even though the tide has shifted and working on these ‘thorny’ areas is now trendy, these remain relevant questions for technologists. AI is a good example – many people are uncomfortable with some of the consequences of deploying AI. Maybe AI gets used for hacking; maybe deepfakes make the world worse in all these ways; maybe it causes job losses. But there are also major benefits to AI (Dario Amodei articulates some of these well in a recent essay).
As with Palantir, working on AI probably isn’t 100% morally good, nor is it 100% evil. Not engaging with it – or calling for a pause/stop, which is a fantasy – is unlikely to be the best stance. Even if you don’t work at OpenAI or Anthropic, if you’re someone who could plausibly work in AI-related issues, you probably want to do so in some way. There are easy cases: build evals, work on alignment, work on societal resilience. But my claim here is that the grey area is worth engaging in too: work on government AI policy. Deploy AI into areas like healthcare. Sure, it’ll be difficult. Plunge in.8
When I think about the most influential people in AI today, they are almost all people in the room - whether at an AI lab, in government, or at an influential think tank. I’d rather be one of those than one of the pontificators. Sure, it’ll involve difficult decisions. But it’s better to be in the room when things happen, even if you later have to leave and sound the alarm.
However, I cannot more strongly disagree with your implicit assumption of innocence for "category 1." Facebook alone is unquestionably more harmful than Palatir, and any purely for profit entity is by necessity intentionally unanchored to any ethical foundation at all. Facebook is known for explicitly supporting genocidal regimes abroad, and for intentionally ignoring white supremacy, child abuse and domestic terrorism here in the US, all while being very explicit about not cooperating with the government agencies responsible for combatting these issues.
To that end, I would extend your thesis to the effect that people who eschew category 3 for category 1 aren't simply abdicating social responsibility, but are hypocritically engaged in substantially more socially harmful behaviors.
Sure, Palatir leads to people dying, and sometimes those people are innocent bystanders, but those actions are the result of any engagement with the public sector. Facebook is a direct progenitor of genocide abroad and fascism stateside, and is wholly untethered from either conscience or consequence. Category 1 is worse.
lol, where has the author been in the past decade? both of those are bad, especially the feed algorithms are scientifically proven to have a strong influence on the decline of trust into democratic institutions
" Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water or rainwater? And only pure grain alcohol?"
The Nazi regime used this headline and other similar international actions to claim that the global Jewish community was an enemy of Germany. This supposed declaration of war served as a convenient pretext for the Nazis to intensify their anti-Semitic policies, which eventually led to the Holocaust. The narrative fit into the broader Nazi ideology that portrayed Jews as an existential threat to the German nation and the Aryan race, and it was used to justify the systematic genocide that was to follow. This is akin to Thiel stating "well, if the jews had the power, they too would have committed a holocaust against the Germans", this is sheer insanity, he uses a similar argument to justify the Palestinian genocide. Stating "they didn't dresden Gaza", huh? What Israel did to Gaza is, by any measurable metric, much worse than what happened to Dresden. His defense of Israel's Genocide of Palestinians is not just factually wrong but filled with statements that are evidence of his denial of reality.
At 1:03:05 Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity. Legally and pragmatically, that statement is absurd. One can not judge people based on their "intentions", which can't be separated from personal bias and interpretation, but only on their concrete actions and not their perceived "thought crimes".
So Thiel dishonestly removes all context of a century of brutal colonialism and ethnic-cleansing to paint the crudest zionist propaganda of "they just want to kill all jews" instead of a colonized people whose children, in the same year - months before that event, were brutally murdered by the israeli occupation as they have done for decades: At least 507 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023, including at least 81 children, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians since the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began recording casualties in 2005. [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/shocking-spik...]
Weaponizing antisemitism to disguise colonialism is extremely heinous and cheapens real antisemitism - would it make any difference if the occupiers were Scientologists? If you lose your land and property why would you care about the identity of your oppressor?
Even Ahmed Yassin the founder of hamas has a famous video shared across social media where he states: “We don’t hate Jews and fight them because they are Jews. Jews are people of a religion, and we are people of a religion. We love all people of religion. My brother even if he is my brother and he is a Muslim, If he steals my house and kicks me out, I will resist him.”
Although the zionist propagandists know very well that it is their oppressive occupation for which they are hated, they still prefer peddling a false narrative that their targets of colonization just "hate the jews", because it's a very potent narrative that plays into islamophobic and orientalist tropes which the western world finds appealing.
That's the infamous Ender's Game school of warfare, there's a reason that book used to be handed out at US military academies. Extremely relevant essay:
https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating...
Stryka’s concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the humanity of the “other,” is presented instead as an example of scapegoating the “other”—but in this case the other is redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about understanding the “other” are redirected from worrying about the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer, but the misunderstood victim of others’ fear and prejudice.
"18 Sept 2023 - At least 38 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far in 2023, making it the deadliest year since records began, said Save the Children."
> “Asana, but for building planes”.
Would you use Asana for even building a project plan?
I should probably look into this Palantir operation.
But, I'm really stuck on the point about Trump being a capable meme generator. I mean, this feels like someone saying that a monkey produces lots of BS. It is close to technically accurate, monkeys do produce feces, and the cosine distance between that and true bullshit is small. But, it misses the larger vibe-stench.
The selection of the list of people and the reason they were being mentioned, in the section you’re referring to, was another point where the piece threw me.
I wouldn’t say it changed my mind about the company, but it, uh, gave some new shading to my existing impression.
If you bought that garbage I have some ice to sell you.
Peter Thiel, supporter of Donald Trump....supporter of civil liberties, I'm sure...