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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations.

Potato potato. Palantir explicitly provides tools for data analysis and operations for government and enforcement agencies. Postgres is a database used for virtually anything that needs a database. The two aren't the same.

For the record - Palantir isn't 100% culpable of a government resource abusing its capabilities, but it sure unlocked a whole bunch of capabilities that were either too expensive or too difficult to do previously (for example, storing records in an RDMS).

> Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution.

ACLs require humans to configure them. Uber also has a robust ACL. It doesn't stop someone in the org from using and abusing its God-mode.

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What I don’t like about this kind of “moral” analysis is you are basically reacting to negative branding. do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use? I don’t think you do, it’s just they may not have the same “bad guy” labels.

> do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use?

Actually there are us who would consider what impacts our employers have. E.g. I avoid working for adtech, and sure as hell would not want to work for a company providing government surveillance software.

You’re telling me bad guy labels (bad image for you), not impact. You're personifying on organization.

For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy. Your job at the children’s charity could be scamming old ladies.

> For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy.

This only happens because companies need to adhere to regulations, not because they're doing it out of respect for people.

And by simply not working in adtech, I don't need to go through some mental gymnastics to justify what I spend 40 hours a week building. The beauty of being a programmer is there's a bunch of work out there that doesn't involve crappifying the internet.

> This only happens because companies need to adhere to regulations, not because they're doing it out of respect for people.

Nobody involved in that decision is motivated by respect? You're sounding pretty pessimistic for such a big emphasis on morals.

Go ahead and share what industry you work in then. I guarantee it is not unambiguously good.

I work in an industry with a small handful of software companies, so not going to out myself. But the 13 year old edgelord I was wouldn't be able to criticize what I'm working on now, so I can rest easy here.

Motivated by respect?! While working in Adtech?

Did you get confused by two opposing morally charged labels in the same sentence?

“And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?”

Everything being "not unambiguously good" doesn't mean it's all equivalent. Even if we can't quantify things perfectly, we can still make reasonable comparisons. I don't know precisely how much an adult tiger or raccoon weighs, I'm still pretty sure about which one is heavier.

That’s what I’m saying. The moral labeling game causes black and white thinking.

You are not a moral person for working at an elementary school instead of a car manufacturer. The question is actually what you do, what talents you have, and how that affects other people.

I don't disagree with you that working for a certain industry isn't sufficient to make someone moral, but I do think that working for certain industries is sufficient to make someone _immoral_. I can't conclude you're moral or immoral just from the fact that you work at an elementary school, but if you making your living from scamming innocent people or something, I don't think I need to know what specific skills you have to decide that you're immoral. At some point far enough along in the spectrum, things stop being ambiguous, and everyone will draw the line differently. The parent commenter considers adtech to be on the wrong side of that line, and although I think reasonable people might disagree, I don't think their perspective is unreasonable either.

On the other hand, if everybody all collectively agreed not to work on adtech, there would be no adtech (or adtech companies). Our decisions don't exist in a vacuum with everyone else's choices being static.

I don’t understand. Would the world be more moral if the ads were only published in newspapers? Or are you expending this to say if I was truly moral I would not participate in the buying and selling of goods?

Computer ads aren’t evil, surveillance, spam, and scams are evil.

Computer ads may not inherently be evil in a vacuum, but pretty much all adtech in practice is at best willfully ignorant about participating in some combination of surveillance, spam, and/or scamming. There certainly can be scams and spam in newspaper ads, but they're definitely not nearly as invasive, and I'm not even sure what it would mean to talk about surveillance with respect to newspaper ads.

I honestly don't have a clue how what I said could be interpreted as arguing that all buying and selling is immoral, so I wouldn't even know how to begin addressing that line of thinking.

> do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use?

Yes, absolutely. I think it's very common for people to make ethical decisions in how they make their money and how they spend their money.

That’s not what I said. Do you actually know the impact? Or do you just know what labels they have?

We don't know how many victims there were of the Nazi atrocities, but I feel pretty confident going by what you could call their qualitative, "labels." In fact, I don't think the true casualty numbers are known for most wars and genocides. Utilitarian calculations are limited to situations with controlled conditions and scientific openness, like when charities try to keep track of their cost effectiveness.

This is definitely a well thought out comment that's worth replying to.

If you're asking if every citizen living in Germany from 1933-1945 did only evil things, the answer is obviously no. If you're asking if every person who was ever in the nazi party was a uniquely evil human being, also no.

I just think moral questions are clearest in the extreme.

Of course not, we all operate in uncertainty. We can try to make ethical decisions even while quantified ethics are an unsolved problem.

> basically reacting to negative branding.

I am not. Palantir not only brands themselves as providing data analysis for governments but they also actually sell those tools too.

What is the impact of that relative to the other products and commerce you participate in? What would happen if Palantir didn’t exist?

Do you call your gas company to make sure they didn’t buy from OPEC?

"Oh, you're taking a stand on one thing? Explain why you don't take a stand on everything!"

If you were interested in reducing harm you would ask this kind of question. If you are just interested in avoiding things that have a bad image, then you wont.

The logical conclusion of this viewpoint is that you must fully withdraw from society and live off the land as a hermit, lest you accidentally do something that has a negative externality.

> What is the impact of that relative to the other products and commerce you participate in?

The impact is exactly what is pointed out in the article - someone in the local police department could use it against me.

> Do you call your gas company to make sure they didn’t buy from OPEC?

No, because that doesn't affect me.

See, you keep clinging to some morality claim, and I am explicitly not. I am saying that there is potentially a direct impact on abuse against me personally.

This is such a dodge, whataboutism at its finest. “You have a moral critique of a thing? Well that’s weird because you clearly don’t have a detailed moral analysis of literally everything else you do in life, therefore this critique is just because of negative branding”.

“Moral” in quotes is a tell, too. You’re arguing that morality is illegitimate unless someone has done a full “utilitarian” breakdown of everything they do in their lives. And of course you will only accept that breakdown if you deem it sufficient.

No. I’m arguing that morality is determined by what you do (help or harm), not what industry your employer is in and how the media perceives that market segment.

This shallow label analysis (oil bad, palantir bad, non profit good) is not “morality”, it’s politics.

Most people espouse a utilitarian ethics, but rely on media and social cues rather than harm to determine their choices.

If your job is to pour barrels of oil into the ocean, I think that’s worth evaluating. If your job is to do accounting for the oil company, I’m not sure you’re causing harm relative to other accounting employment.

It’s also valid to decide image is important to you, but don’t tell me it’s because you are a Good Samaritan.

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