Palantir: The Most Evil Company | Hacker News Reader

Palantir: The Most Evil Company

politicaleconomist.substack.com

119 pointsmgh2110 comments

I posted this a few days ago on a separate Palantir-related thread, but it probably is more relevant here. The world could use fewer Alex Karps. -- This quote from the CEO of Palantir (Alex Karp) haunts me. --- > “I actually am a progressive,” he said. “I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers — I’m trying to be nice here — out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”

George Orwell famously argued that the decline of the English language contributes to muddled thinking and political dishonesty. He probably can't imagine how far this can actually go

Is he wrong?

This has historically been very true. The nuclear deterrent has significantly decreased the probability of civilian or armed forces dying as a result of conflict globally.

The nuclear deterrent works because of MAD. If only one nation had the capacity for nuclear weapons, there's a strong case to be made that we'd be living in a totalitarian world state or at the very least vassals to the dominant state.

The US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons for nearly four years.

Cool, now imagine if Nazi Germany had that monopoly.

Or what would happen if something like it would happen today.

Russia is pretty much nazi now (superior Russian genes and soul + genocide of Ukrainians) and they are not exactly swinging them but definitely sabre rattlin.

Israel is not using theirs on Gaza either.

Russia does not use nukes because the US and EU exists as deterrents.

Also there's a reasonable chance that some of them won't work correctly which will then weaken Russia's show of strength

To be clear I'm referring to a new superweapon or defence scheme being invented that somehow makes nukes obsolete.

Imagine what Trump would do. He is already trying (and mostly failing) to strong-arm all his allies today.

And the DoD pushed - several times - for their use in China to limit it's economic growth. Look it up.

I'm sure they planned to use them everywhere. Hell, we planned to blow up nuclear weapons US in order to make canals.

Yet, it never happened. Actions matter.

It's not my impression that an extremely aggressive attitude helps safety, no. There is a reason for "they will attack us everywhere" and quite some part of that is the "wrath of America" coming down on them some time in the recent past (either directly or via proxy, like Israel).

Obviously having a military is a necessity and there is some truth to what he is saying, but it's also superficial and short-sighted. It's a strategy that works great right up the moment your back is turned or you're not paying attention for a minute. There's always going to be nutjobs out there doing nutjob things, but at times the US has almost gone out of their way to create enemies.

I think this is a reference that if you want peach, one must prepare for war.

That includes offensive and defensive options, and being able to show you can stand up to others when it comes to other nations that have other views and moral beliefs.

You can do that without creating a single unaccountable entity housing everyone's data. In fact, it is a weakness to have a single point of failure.

Strength is a deterrent, no doubt. But there's a difference between having strength, and wanting your so-called enemies to go to bed scared and wake up scared.

Never been punched in the face I see?

I haven’t given anyone a reason to want to punch me in the face :)

The attacks happen unprovoked and usually at the weak

Your argument is that stronger nations bully weaker nations, and somehow this supports the idea that there should be only one strong nation.

Seems exactly like someone who knows the equivalent of being punched in the face. Thats not a deterrent, it's an action that provokes retaliatory action from a place of fear of needing to defend ones self. If a group is dangerous enough for one to think they could do harm, leaving them without options/scaring them is an awful strategy

You want to deter wild animals, not scare or corner them. Rattlesnakes want to deter you from stepping on them, not scare you into doing so.

If I'm stuck living with someone and they regularly punch me in the face for "preventative" reasons, I'll put rat poison in their coffee.

Domestic abuser logic seems ill-advised as foreign policy. Everyone already knows the US MIC can kill them personally with impunity if wished.

Yet Russians are laughing in America’s face every way imaginable.

That's because we elected a clown, not because our military is weak.

Obama and Biden were clowns?

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” - H.L. Mencken

"I can get the drug prices down… 1000% 600% 500% 1500%. Numbers that are not even thought to be achievable." - Donald J. Trump, POTUS

Your military will get weak when the clown replaces competent people with clowns loyal to the top clown.

Is it worth it? Like 70 million people died in WWII but an estimated 5 billion will die in a full nuclear exchange. That's like 70 world wars worth of people.

Was the nuclear deterrent a tool that could be used outside of war to spy on basically anyone on earth?

It's not wrong. Putin felt free to attack Ukraine because he wasn't scared of the consequences. You need psychopaths to make a coldly rational decision not to mess with you, in international relations, and you do that by being prepared and willing to respond.

You're making the case for why it is so dangerous for the world that one nation/company has this much power over others.

Absolutely not. He's making exactly the opposite case. America behaved too weakly towards Russia and that's how they got away with starting a bloody war.

All nations are only beholden to their own citizens and only cooperate with other nations out of self interest.

The only periods of relative peace that the world has ever seen have been during the reign of a supreme hegemonic power.

Again, you're not making the argument you think you are.

"Russia attacked a weaker country because it is stronger. This is why we need one country to be stronger than any other country."

Mutually Assured Destruction works because of the Mutually part.

You're not reading what I'm saying then. Never did I mention anything about MAD. I talked about hegemony. The opposite thing. If you insist on understanding the opposite from what I write again then I must interpret it as willful.

> Putin felt free to attack Ukraine because he wasn't scared of the consequences.

That doesn’t change by letting palantir build the surveillance state.

Putin wasn’t scared of the consequences because he knew it would be politically suicidal the west to risk escalation to a large mainland European war that’s been mostly considered a relic.

Almost a paraphrase of the Melian dialogue in Thucydides

Progressive dementia, perhaps. If you get human beings who are ideologically programmed to go on suicide missions and believe they're reaping an eternity in heaven it blows the most enormous hole in such transparently self-serving, as cartoonishly idiotic as insane logic.

The reality of course is that he is right. The entire history of the world including as late as 2022 demonstrates that.

The world is very techy these days. Someone is going to do the business where tech, AI and defence interact, and it happens to be Palantir.

So... is the complaint that a company fills this niche, or is it that of all possible companies doing this business, Palantir is particularly immoral?

I'm not sure it is possible for effectively a (cyber-)weapon producer to say, ah youre using our weapons immorally, we wont sell them to you. This is the domain of government regulation and export control.

So I personally wouldnt expect the contractor in this space to stand up to some high moral standard. I think the best we can hope for is compliance with laws, and there's your problem. US doesnt care how badly people get abused by the weaponry it exports, so long as IP and military secrets aren't leaked. Palantir is safe from US regulation.

Are other countries better? Some for sure. Germany blocked Eurofighter exports on ethical grounds. I'm not judging if they were right or wrong, but merely that they forewent cash for ethical points.

But most will sell anything to anyone, so long as the price is right.

Im not saying Palantir is a nice cuddly company, only, hate the game not the player.

That is a completely false premise.

The game would not exist if there were a consensus among players to not play.

Technically, this is not linear as you argue, instead, this is a feedback loop. The game influences the actors, the actors influence the game.

To prevent an unwanted outcome, you must interrupt the loop at an arbitrary point of your choice.

You're saying SV (& co) should convene some kind of gentleman's agreement that they should all leave a massive, profitable, legal, intellectually interesting niche with a stable customer base, because its immoral - perhaps.

Can you think of a single other industry where this worked? It seems implausible to me that it would.

Okay, here we go: No, I am not saying anything you said.

This was not about a gentleman's agreement at all - that was a rhetorical figure to demonstrate that it is not the game which is at fault, it’s both. The behaviour of the game and the behaviour of the actors in that game, and almost in any other game is not an input -> output scenario, but instead, the output of the loop will be the input of the exact same loop. That is the definition of a feedback loop. It’s all recursion.

By shifting the responsibility to the ominous “game”, which is just another term for a system, you exclude the elements of a system from being part of the system itself.

There is a whole branch of science occupied with this. System Dynamics, Cybernetics, Chaos Theory, Systems Theory and whatnot. The argument that actors in a system are decoupled from the system or the environment as in a closed system approach is factually wrong. Apart from laboratories, there is practically no closed system on this planet.

The phrase “hate the game not the player” is cybernetic nonsense with the sole purpose of giving up responsibility. It does not matter that it gets repeated more often than not. It won’t be correct, no matter how many times the figure is used.

The weapons industry in general this fits, for example anti-personnel mines. Massive, profitable, legal, intellectually interesting...?

But yes, I don't care about Palantir, but my country buys this shit and I want the ones responsible to take responsibility for that.

Wow, Americans will support anything for a company. The mental gymnastics is absurd for love of the corporates.

Palantir is doing in reality, not someone else. So come to reality and say who is evil in reality not in some hypothetical world.

If another company does it in future then say that company is evil when that actually happens.

It's very simple. But immoral people will think too hard to make things complex to support a immoral company.

I argue that Google and Apple are the most evil companies by making phones so very vulnerable in many ways to extensive tracking and hacking. Without the technical loopholes to provide data to Palantir, it would be more in the dark. Fwiw, Iran did the right thing recently in getting rid of smartphones.

Palatir is a Defense Contractor.

Historically people considered such companies to be in the business of building & selling defense equipment (like bombs).

But nowadays, this also includes cyber & AI.

https://www.palantir.com/offerings/defense/

For what it's worth the Tree component¹ of Palantir's blueprint.js React library was useful to me.

¹ https://blueprintjs.com/docs/#core/components/tree

If we include history I’m not even sure they could break into the top ten.

Was supporting Operation Warp Speed and the delivery of Covid vaccines evil? General Perna, the logistics lead for OWS regularly called out Palantir as being instrumental in helping the extract and loal local and state data into a single national dashboard, making the rapid rollout possible without losing vaccines to a poorly planned cold chain

"Perna: The system we set up was based on the foundation and the collaboration of local and federal government and industry. We did this, really, with almost perfection. Never been done before. We opened up over 70,000 locations across the country that could receive and administer vaccine. We had to create data-use agreements with the states in order to put an ERP in place to track the vaccine. Then we had to validate the 70,000 locations through the CDC, so that they could receive it and administer it. Because our goal was, we wanted people to have access in places they were comfortable being: a local doctor’s office, a hospital, CVS, Walgreens, Wal-Mart.

Gilsinan: They say plans don’t survive first contact with the enemy. I’m curious what adjustments became warranted in those first few weeks and why.

Perna: That plan worked. We brought in Palantir. Palantir created a system that allowed us to see ourselves from manufacturing all the way down to the distribution sites."

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/12/gus-perna-...

Yes. It was. Railroading pharmaceutical products (lipid nanoparticles and RNA therapeutics) which had failed to pass safety tests for years when they were within cancer drug research is not a good thing.

There are plenty of reasons to critique Palantir but this article comes across as so ham-fisted, conspiratorial, and wanting facts that it actually makes me more sympathetic.

Critiques of Govt contractors really need to be grounded in first principles. Namely:

- should the government be able to wage war?

- should the government collect data? How much?

- how effective do we want these companies providing these services to be?

- how integrated do we want these different govt and non-govt tools and datasets.

Finally should these tools start or stop working when leaders you don’t like are democratically elected?

Palantir also did great work with hospitals and vaccines delivery during the pandemic and continues to do great work with hospitals.

Most of the critiques of Palantir come down to them being good at a job or mission the critic doesn't agree with.

Part of the question here is how much power one company should have and who is responsible for it. A government is ultimately beholden to its citizens; a company is only beholden to shareholders.

I agree, and personally think we need to be very careful about surrendering data privacy in order to stop the bad guys or creating a surveillance state to police immigration.

Is it really evil - or is it just the messenger. If you take humanity, datamine it all through the seeing stones (cellphones) and then give honest advice, the advice is gonna be harsh.

This species constantly gets high on idealization of others and self-idealization, constantly crashing and burning from the unrealistic plans it makes with this unrealistic self-image. And it is unable to learn from all these retardations. We are not really governable and thus fail as soon as push come to shove. And we then try to bury this lessons - without learning anything from them. What good is it to have a Fauci, if his plans do not have the actual behavior of the humanity baked in when the great plague hits? What good is it to invade another country, to build a democratic state - when you do not have a realistic behavior model to build a democratic state with other cultural backgrounds.

What good is it to wish for socialist economics, when it all boils down to centralized authoritarianism with witch hunts and collapsing economy.

Palantir is just the messenger for a uncomfortable message. We are not ready at all, not ready for climate change, for singularities, for high-tech where one can destroy half the planet. We are not ready for going off-planet, which is one and the same.

What is needed, is not unrealistic SciFi Visions, but basic measures to raise survive-ability of the species in crisis to come. Decentralize knowledge, create a panopticon by the people for the people, so order can be upheld even when the state collapses. The scenario-tress roots must be hardened, so we dont fall down never to recover.

Lmfao. This is pretty comical. Whine about how humanity gets lost in lofty ideals and then finish with you’re own nonsense ideas

> What is needed, is not unrealistic SciFi Visions, but basic measures to raise survive-ability of the species in crisis to come. Decentralize knowledge, create a panopticon by the people for the people, so order can be upheld even when the state collapses. The scenario-tress roots must be hardened, so we dont fall down never to recover.

When the state collapses. The power vacuum will be filled. By those with the most resources at the of collapse.

Really? Like it was filled in syria, in jugoslavia, lebanon? Libya, Sudan, Yemen? In Afghanistan it was never filled in the first place and is still not to this day! In pakistan, sri lanka the state is broke - and those giving credit, taking over only move into areas where they have interests, leaving other tribal regions to fend for themselves or sink into civil war (belotschistan). Russias borders are falling apart, with whole regions realigning - and putin soon to spark civil wars and proxxy actions there.

isn't palantir just a bottom-tier consulting company (ie a body shop) with a brand, track record & contacts that get them on those "evil" projects?

if not them, someone else would staff the grunts to fill up the demand in manpower

it's not like they have a magic box that "does evil" that they sell to others, even though in the beginning that's what they seemed to market (only for good causes on the right side of history, obviously)

They claim they've built more of a 'platform' now and so are less of a consulting shop. It's not a new narrative and I haven't really see a lot of examples of how this platform is especially powerful compared to other say low-code tools to build interfaces on top of datasets but given it's so secretive and there is so much money sloshing around, it seems like people are believing it.

They sell survailance tools and platforms with heavy AI/ML integration. Tools that frankly have no real rivals for most western countries, since we still consider it better to hand all our data over to USA than other nations with similar products. I think you could view them as a company with the capabilities of the Captain American Hydra styled algorithm to determine whether you are a good citizen or not.

Whether you consider that to be evil or not, is probably up to your personal morals. One of the reasons they are in the "spotlight" in countries like mine (Denmark) is because of their ownership and managment being questionable. The reason we still buy their platforms is because we have no alternative, and frankly, the USA has all our data anyway.

If anyone is skeptical, I'd encourage them to read the tweets of Lonsdale, or Karp, and see what kind of twisted mindset the creators of this huge surveillance machine have

Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. who profit off intoxicating abilify are very evil. New York's Northwell for-profit hospital monopoly said they would inject me for asking for a Quran, "Muslims are a delusion," they will decide who is Muslim, etc. 1 million New Yorkers are psych patients at risk of losing all freedoms and getting face spasm, painful headaches and diabetes. Even worse companies in bigger Florida, Texas, California.

If you want to live in a uni-polar world, you should support companies like Palantir which bolster American hegemony over global security. If you would prefer to live in a multi-polar world, with multiple superpowers vying for supremacy, then you should support Chinese espionage operations and invest in Indian oil refineries.

If you think wanting to live in a unipolar world is "evil", then there's no helping you.

That dichotomy is absurd, there are many more possible stances than that.

This is the sort of black and white, American supremacy thinking that produces the state of the world we are in. What a false dichotomy.

this is a wild mindset. either the US rules the world with an iron fist or there's complete anarchy? how much do you have to hate humanity to believe this?

this is to oversimplify world to binary options, and presenting false choices.

we should be able to imagine something better than China/US/Russia govt, and put work to implement it.

It is evil because you presume too much.

Your unipolar world is devoid of any meaning. Your democracy is an opiate for the masses with no meaningful choice. Your neo liberalism has destroyed any sense of togetherness and has robbed us of our sovereign resources. And your only answer to descent is to kill millions and bomb countries and people into the stone age.

Sorry if your moralising is now falling on death ears.

If you don’t invest to some company because of ethical reasons, then investing isn’t for you.

Anything can be used for good and bad reasons.

I'm somehow more inclined to condemn Raytheon over Dick's Sporting Goods.

What do you have against the PRT 2000?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dViKRvCKDY8

The author's primary lament seems to be he purposely didn't invest in a rapidly growing company because of:

1. Some personal dislike of the principals or their product or petty political disagreement

2. Company grows 500% (as predicted)

3. Everyone else makes money except the author who deliberately didn't invest ( see #1 above)

4. It's not fair!

5. Write angry sour grapes substack blaming the current administration for all your problems.

"petty political disagreement" literally donated massive amounts of money to donald trump and supporting a genocide. the post discusses Thiel and Trumps misconduct and the ethical reasons the author is choosing not to invest, but sweet strawman.

> petty political disagreement

Politics isn't a sports game. These aren't teams, and you aren't rooting on a championship game.

People die. Lots and lots of people. This isn't some abstract things that just exists in your mind to get mad about, it's real life.

If ethics don’t influence your investment choice, then you have no ethics.

> If ethics don’t influence your investment choice, then you have no ethics.

yeah, I have no ethics

TC $800k

Not true. We can be capitalists and have ethics. We don't have to be full throated supporters of the craziness of Palantir's founders (they are very open about their insanity) to be investors

It's not like Palantir invents the algorithms, but it select where to apply them.

So it turns out it's very possible to invest in good or bad ethics

> Anything can be used for good and bad reasons.

Yes, and that's why we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a 1935 Buick Century.

These "anything can be anything (if you try hard enough)" arguments are so tired and elementary.

Yes, you're technically right. But don't go bragging yet. That "if you try hard enough" tidbit is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Effort isn't free, nor is it infinite. Everything is a matter of scale.

That's why I can own a kitchen knife, and even a gun, but not a minigun. That's why even if I was granted a minigun, I surely wouldn't be granted a nuclear warhead. Would you trust Americans with a nuclear warhead? Second Amendment 2.5: everyone has the right to bear legs, and by legs we mean nuclear warheads. Sounds great.

There's a difference between doing something small, and doing something big. Doing something small and bad is bad, but it's less bad than doing something big and bad. If that sounds like goo goo ga ga level logic, that's because it is. I think children learn this pretty quickly.

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