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Comment by harimau777 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

> people seem to have no trouble with casually glossing over the ethics and morality of what they work on

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

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

> 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.

Democracy or the blob?

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

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.

What? Karp is on record claiming Palantir prevents terror attacks which would otherwise force a right wing movement in Europe.

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii...

I think your definition of right wing is confused with authoritarian.

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.

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