Reflections on Palantir
nabeelqu.co
nabeelqu.co
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sinclair's law still applies: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Which I thought was interesting to see at the end of: https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/i-was-wrong-about-the-ethics-cr...
(Sinclair's law likely applies to ACM and to other technical societies that accept money from big tech.)
> Gotta do what boss tells me to do
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii...
I think your definition of right wing is confused with authoritarian.
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.
"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.
"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
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.
This is absolutely delusional
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
It doesn’t require a megalomaniac at the helm. It just often happens that way.
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.
But it sounds like they are a consulting company and a sort of ConnectAll (for those who use Jira, Rhapsody, DOORS, etc).
I promise you Palantir does not use UML or Rhapsody, and would not recognize DOORS if they slammed in its face.
GOFSI: "There are decades when nothing happens"
Palantir: "There are weeks when decades happen"
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.
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.
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
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.
https://www.palantir.com/careers/
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.
Yes, Karp is clearly... hmmm eccentric.
Yes, Shyam is the golden anchor of the engineering culture. He's a tremendously inspiring influence, often overlooked by outside commentators.
“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.”
The dark triad personality traits are defined by an explicit lack of empathy and ability to connect with other people
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)
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.