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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

I've been working in the aerospace (now space) arena my entire career, and there's a lot of overlap there with the defense industry. What I've seen is that it's very easy for people to look at their work as a narrow area and to forget about the consequences of it (how it's used, what it actually does when used). I think many (I won't say the majority but it wouldn't surprise me) in the defense and intelligence sector don't think, either willfully or because of lack of introspection in general, about these things.

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> I think many (I won't say the majority but it wouldn't surprise me) in the defense and intelligence sector don't think, either willfully or because of lack of introspection in general, about these things.

I think it has more to do with the fact that many of the products built for defense are never actually used against adversaries in their useful life. Just look at our nuclear weapon stockpile.

Palantir on the other hand is an invisible weapon. They could be reading my comment right now and identifying me with sentiment "adversarial" for all I know. What implications that has on my daily life is innumerable...and I'm a US citizen!

> I think it has more to do with the fact that many of the products built for defense are never actually used against adversaries in their useful life. Just look at our nuclear weapon stockpile.

One only has to look at what the US military has been up to for the last few decades to realize that this is like saying "I knew he would use the gun to mug people, but I hoped he wouldn't fire it."

> What I've seen is that it's very easy for people to look at their work as a narrow area and to forget about the consequences of it (how it's used, what it actually does when used).

Or it's a lot more complicated and doesn't lend itself to blank-and-white answers. Say you're working on nuclear weapons technology: is your job building weapons to enable the genocidal destruction of another country, or to prevent that kind of thing through a credible MAD deterrent? Both things are simultaneously true.

And then there's no way to predict the future: what's true today when you build it may not be true tomorrow when it's used, because there's a different leader or political system in place.

> Or it's a lot more complicated and doesn't lend itself to blank-and-white answers.

Did I say it wasn't complicated? I'll admit I didn't say it was complicated, but you can't infer a sentiment from a non-existent statement in either direction.

Yes, it's complicated. But I stand by my statement that many people just don't think about it. They want to solve interesting problems or to get paid well, or both, and so they take jobs at places like Palantir without thinking through the consequences.

Many others do think it through and either find a way to justify it, or do work they don't like and live with the emotional consequences of it.

> Yes, it's complicated. But I stand by my statement that many people just don't think about it...so they take jobs at places like Palantir without thinking through the consequences.

> Many others do think it through and either find a way to justify it

Do they not think about it, or just not talk about it to you? I could totally see someone thinking about it in private, accepting some justification or reason, and then moving on to their work and not discussing it.

I'm the sort who asks. Many who answered just didn't think it through, they didn't think about what the thing they were working on actually did within the larger system. I won't generalize this to the whole population (why I won't claim it's the majority of all people in the field) but the majority I did discuss this with had, at best, a hand-wavey "national defense" justification but did not think about what the thing they worked on did. Its effectiveness for its job, or its ultimate purpose.

Though a lot actually just wouldn't even discuss it in the first place. I think, though, that if you're going to work on a weapon or a component for a weapon you owe it to yourself to think deeply about the topic. I've known too many people who thought about it too late and realized that they couldn't live with it. Better to figure that out at the start and change career paths than at the end and either kill yourself or drink yourself to death.

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