Co-founder Joe Lonsdale: Palantir was founded to kill communists | Hacker News Reader

Co-founder Joe Lonsdale: Palantir was founded to kill communists

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Joe Lonsdale, previously:

>If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law.

>We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.

https://x.com/JTLonsdale/status/1996947600533066185

https://thehill.com/opinion/robbys-radar/5640692-public-exec...

Basic question to ask these people: is there evidence that capital punishment is an effective deterrent?

Answer: No

I wonder if it increases false accusations and turning in "enemies".

EDIT: This in regards to knowing: "We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes."

The point is not deterrence. It’s gleeful sadism.

There is the whole thing where if no suitable victims can be found they'll make do with whoever is available.

It doesn't matter to them. What they want is to hurt people (ideally, people from groups they hate). It isn't about building a flourishing society.

Yes, there is some (if not conclusive) evidence that speedy trial and persistent execution of the worst, most violent offenders reduces violence in the next generation: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10480901/ It turns out killing the worst per cent of a generation's males provides a powerful selection effect. It's by no means the only cause or conclusive but worth considering.

The evidence presented:

The State killed a lot of people between the 14th and 20th centuries and also the homicide rate went down.

Wow!

QED

Good thing there weren't other major confounding changes between errmmm... the longbow and the atomic bomb. Or Dante's Divine Comedy and jazz.

I'm convinced. Why'd you even put the note "if not conclusive" with evidence this strong?

I'd be more shocked if culling a full per cent of men yearly did nothing. Plus a lot died at the scene of crimes or in prison awaiting trial. The question is how much and precisely what. Doing reliable social science is hard enough on current data or interventions. It's very hard with historical data over that sort of time period. However, we get better knowledge by discussing interesting hypotheses and how to study them better. This one is interesting and there may be something to it. It's also at least quasi-testable; someone could fund a study on examining alleles associated with aggression in historical remains.

Note that Frost and Harpending are pretty conservative in their estimates; they figure only ballpark half the decline could be explained by this.

If you were to approach this question with intellectual honesty, you would identify pretty quickly that there are far better ways to try to answer it.

Case-control methods, natural experiments, surveys of criminals, and meta-analyses of the prior.

Literally any method other than "pick 600 year period and say 'vibes shifted generally across a continent and then homicide went down'"

Of course this question has been studied extensively for decades and the current conclusion is: completely inconclusive!

There's some evidence it increases violent crime, some that it decreases it, most evidence doesn't clearly show any effect at all.

So whatever effect it may have, it almost certainly isn't very strong, or is countervailed by opposing effects.

I think that if we're proposing the State, which we know to be fallible in so many cases, should make irreversible decisions like "executing suspected bad guys" more frequently, then we should have extremely strong evidence that it would actually achieve the desired result.

> It's also at least quasi-testable; someone could fund a study on examining alleles associated with aggression in historical remains.

Good luck establishing how "alleles associated with aggression" contributes to violence. I'm pretty sure most of the people who adopt your position would argue that their "aggressiveness" is a virtue in whatever competitive landscape they choose to occupy.

You are talking about the kind of research we can do today. You can't really do case-control for medieval populations easily, nor surveys of criminals, nor of the broader population since everyone is several centuries dead. Natural experiments might work and are exactly one of the things we should see further researched in this area. Meta-analyses can't happen until there's other research to meta-analyze.

I think we're in violent agreement here; yes, this obviously bears further investigation. The way good science gets done is "We have some preliminary evidence that could support a certain hypothesis. We think people should do further investigation." Then you go do that further investigation to see if you can reject the null.

The alleles point, though, is weaker. You're not just looking at stuff like MAO-A activity, also CDH13, COMT, other variants. We actually have a pretty good set worth analyzing that are pretty well-characterized in research, so we don't have to depend on any one particular allele. We have a pretty good set of those that aren't associated with, I don't know, aggression in boardrooms.

Palantir is a data analytics gov contractor with MAGA branding. It is not an ultra-omnipotent warfighter superdemon, even if their leadership or employees wishes it to be so. Ignore dumb X bluster if you want to stay sane.

Ignoring a cornerstone of how the lists are being compiled is historically a bad idea.

Reading posts like this is ignoring Palantir. There are better sources of information that divulge their bad ethics.

Although the idea is obviously completely untenable by this point, many people probably still have their heads in the sand with the idea that Palantir exists to "Defend the Shire" and take out far-flung 'bad hombres' halfway around the world. It's good for them to have this perception corrected by a source with some authority.

I agree. Their heads are in the sand in part because they obsess over empty calorie boast posts instead of investigative journalism like this:

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-irs-share-tax-recor...

There's a growing list of things we're told to ignore, from Trump constantly saying he'll annex Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, to new executive orders to chill free speech. "Take them seriously, not literally. On second thought, please don't even take them seriously..."

Umm..

At least it's truth in advertising. I guess Auschwitz.com or Dehomag.com must have been already taken.

He left Palantir in 2009 according to Wikipedia.

He's discussing motivations at the time of its founding. I suppose one could argue that perhaps Peter Thiel's heart has grown two sizes since that day?

I'd be curious to hear the backstory of his relationship with Alex Karp from 2008 to present.

Perhaps he's the one who maintained the summoning circle around Alex Karp until Alex Karp was fully materialized/housebroken.

The reason that the abolition of an arbitrary and cruel legal system was sought in the enlightenment was because although it often had a monopoly on legitimate usage, the state did not have supreme military power over the public (who were widely opposed to both the perceived disproportion of punishments and the rate of false positives).

If either side of any struggle acquires supreme force, the other side suffers without limit or recourse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...

The 20th century features a number of blood soaked horrors where the CIA gave lists of names to the anticommunist party of some country who went on to commit _a statistic_ against their political foes. As I understand it, Palantir is in the business of supplying names and addresses to go on lists for domestic and foreign intelligence, right?

Thanks to the motor voter act, there's already a list of Republicans.

I'm a little skeptical that Palantir pre-2009 (when Joe was there) focused on communists at all

Communists were probably just one of the domestic counterinsurgency concerns that drove its founding.

> drove its founding

IMO drove its funding.

Yes, the "spontaneous lab experiment that proved wildly successful" mythology around many of these companies is just elaborate camouflage.

I don't think this has to do with counterinsurgency but more like what the actual communists and fascists did: destroying an ideology by physically destroying the persons that associate with it. An ideology in this case communism (a broad term) that Palantir founders considered even an intellectual threat to their own ambitions. People who have understood Marx' theories and can apply them to analyze what's going on might be in theory immune to the hypercapitalist spectacle that a coalition which includes Palantir might stage. Which is kinda what happens the spectacle I mean with the current administration.

Sure, it may be post-hoc chest thumping theatrics, but also he was a tween during the fall of the Soviet Union and the end days of the Cold War along with having close family of Jewish descent since his mother was Jewish (Irish Catholic father). So there could be some baked-in, rather than acquired later, antipathy- understandably- towards communism. Especially the Soviet variety since its still warm corpse was around in the '03/'04 era when Palantir was founded. At that time, Hanssen had just recently been arrested, poking those coals again. Heck we're still living with the scars of all that and its fallout- if Lonsdale meant specifically former members/supporters of the CPSU and its shambling corpse then the statement is a little bit less over the top.

I mean, I’m even more skeptical that Palantir or its customers were concerned about killing former members or supporters of the Soviet Union prior to 2009. The focus was probably the War on Terror and related crimes.

Alex Karp was calling himself a self-described socialist as recently as 2018.

If it's about the War on Terror and related crimes, why have they also (since their inception) gathered such vast troves of data and profiles on U.S. citizens?

I am talking about at the founding. Their mission has obviously shifted from then.

Hasn't Palantir been gathering and storing data on U.S. citizens since the earliest days of the company?

War on Terror means watching all of the brown people, many of whom are citizens

CIA, FBI, foreign government, and corporate security needs drove its initial services. Basically, software to protect rich people and eliminate troublemakers in the way of profits.

Mercenaries. Like KBR/Halliburton/et al. except focused on tech rather than just physical security.

Then Palantir needs to be sued for fraud. This is absolutely counter to the pitch they were giving their investors, specifically that Palantir was built as a response to 9/11 to bridge the gap between various intelligence agencies and their disconnected datasets

It was a war on terror analyst notebook, and correct me if I’m wrong but Islamic extremism is not communism.

Uh huh "everything is securities fraud"

Your personal motivations for pursuing a particular commercial enterprise and the business of the enterprise itself are not the same. One is the purpose of the company, the other is your purpose in working for or founding it.

You'd have a very hard time arguing the materiality of Lonsdale's personal political beliefs and anti-communist stance for the investors of Palantir. Even a good attorney would have a hard time arguing this. He'd have an impossible time arguing it against another very able attorney. He'd also have an impossible time proving actual damages, which means you couldn't win a securities fraud civil case. Or common law fraud.

Oh also any investor who sued someone who made him boatloads of money over his political beliefs would have a very tough time finding someone to take his dollars and give him board seats in the future.

Is this considered normal person behavior in USA now? If so, this is scary. Where is this hate coming from? Obviously they couldn't have had issues with communists ad there aren't any beyond "in my option" types?

Good thing is that there are effectively no communists on Earth. Just a spectrum of socialists. Job done, time to disband Palantir.

I’m 40+. Lived in 2 countries, Southern California, Northern California. Visited all the major cities on the West Coast, did a road trip through Nevada, NYC, Miami, Denver, Boulder. I talk politics pretty much with everyone.

I haven’t met a single communist in my life. These delusions people have truly scare me.

Edit: Forgot to mention I’ve also been to Mexico, Jamaica, 2 different states in Brazil, Netherlands, France, England, and Canada. I must repel communists.

How do you know you haven’t met a communist?

I talk politics with people and very openly describe myself as a leftist. I think it’s safe to say they would tell me they’re communists.

Considering the political climate in the US I would not openly signal I have communist ideals to a stranger, “leftist” or not.

Ok.

If we are to assume communists do not out themselves, how do these people find those communists?

Presumably in a communist party meeting.

The prototypal modern day communist is in their 20s and (along with most/all young people) thinks its impossible for the old to understand anything deeper about political theory than what's within the American overton window. They are talking communism with their college classmates, not you, and they know not to reveal their power level to strangers.

I think that makes you the communist

That's exactly what a commie in disguise would say to get away.

Thiel has never espoused anything remotely close to this, and has even shown, in his lectures, a willingness to engage with Marxist thought, even if he disagrees with it, and to try to separate and highlight the intellectual wheat from the chaff.

However, the "Paradox of Tolerance" left doesn't really have much of a leg to stand on here, when they've been asserting their right to assault or even kill anyone they deem a Nazi, or even just a "fascist" (a horribly overloaded term), since even before the first Trump administration. The comments extremistwashing Charlie Kirk and implicitly or even explicitly ("[ Removed by Redit ]") justifying his execution did well enough to alienate moderate rightwingers to the degree that few, if any, will voice their opposition to the normalization of this kind of rhetoric targeting communists.

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