- 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.”
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Almost a paraphrase of the Melian dialogue in Thucydides
- 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
- 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.
- > 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- For what it's worth the Tree component¹ of Palantir's blueprint.js React library was useful to me.
- 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.
- If we include history I’m not even sure they could break into the top ten.
- 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.
- 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.
- [flagged]
- Truly blows my mind how anyone could spend more than 60 seconds googling Alex Karp and think "what a sane guy". Blows my mind even more to know he has legitimate fans.
- Agreed. We should disarm and hope for the best.
- It's naive to frame this as a binary choice between disarmament and creating a single unaccountable entity for all of the world's data.
- 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.
- 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.
- flagged because Palestine and Palestinians are mentioned. hypocrites
- 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 someone were stabbed to death, would you speak of the most evil knife?
- FTR I don't necessarily believe that designing better arms is inherently unethical. But if one did, this is why your counterargument wouldn't make sense:
Knife sales are close to zero-sum, but Palantir is innovating with its lethal technology for the sole purpose of being a more effective weapon. If you were stabbed to death by a knife that is somehow designed specifically to be deadlier or harder to defend against, would you call its designer evil?
- > If you were stabbed to death by a knife that is somehow designed specifically to be deadlier or harder to defend against, would you call its designer evil?
No, I’d call them innovative if that’s what the market was looking for.
Would you have said the same thing about a medieval blacksmith cresting a new type of sword?
- Peter Scully was morally just because there was a market for his content
- > No, I’d call them innovative if that’s what the market was looking for.
Well you wouldn't call them anything because you'd be dead. But it's nice that even in death, you're still considering shareholder value above all else.
> Would you have said the same thing about a medieval blacksmith cresting a new type of sword?
I mean yeah, probably, if it's uniquely bad and uniquely dangerous.
Yes building evil things is evil. To me, that isn't controversial. If I build the torment nexus I'm probably an evil person.
Obviously, there's levels here, and I think appealing to... sigh... knives is pretty disingenuous.
Everything is a matter of scale. What's the difference between a nuclear bomb and a knife? I mean, besides plutonium. Scale. One can harvest the lives of millions in the blink of an eye, and one is a knife.
That's why I don't cut my bread with a nuclear warhead.
- Knives are useful for things that help everybody. Everything Palantir makes hurts somebody.
- it's not their fault but we still have a social need to regulate the tool. We shouldn't enable mass surveillance on Americans. There is a 100% chance that it will be abused.
- Selling knives might not be evil, but that doesn't imply that there's no level of weaponry that would be immoral to sell. Would selling fully automatic rifles be evil? What about chemical weapons, or nuclear bombs? The question is where to draw the line, which is subjective, but I'd argue that most people would draw the line _somewhere_, and I don't think it's as clear-cut as you're trying to imply where stuff like auotmated surveillance software falls.
- If that knife was a legal person, then yes
- this would be more like an autonomous knife stabbing machine than a knife. palantir automates the use of weapons. they don't make weapons themselves
- It needs to be a "cloud connected" autonomous knife stabbing machine if you want that sweet VC money.
- That is so ten years ago. Back then, we needed mobile-first knife-stabbing machine control software. Today's VC money only goes to knife stabbing machines with onboard ML for autonomous, on-the-fly targeting decisions.
- I personally wouldn't, but to play devil's advocate and going with the Lord of the Rings theme.
Yeah weapons and objects themselves are often referred to explicitly as imbued with lightness and darkness in universe.
- A company is not an inanimate object; it is a collection of people working towards a shared goal. A knife cannot be evil, but a company (or, if you wish to be pedantic, the people who make up the company) can be.
- What would a knife manufacturer have to do to be considered evil?
- Make knives that can only be used to kill people and solicit/provide the knives to bad actors who you know will use the knives for the purpose they were developed for?
- The manufacturer giving the knives out to government agencies explicitly so that they can stab civilians more efficiently
- make an AI-powered knife that wants to stab as many people as possible, then market and sell it to despotic regimes.
- I mean, I kind of reject where this line of questioning is going; I consider most of Palantir's product line to be inherently unethical, so I reject the notion that they can be considered a simple tool manufacturer, like a knife manufacturer could be.
- I think it would be fitting to call knives which sole purpose is to stab people evil. A trench knife for instance would have no purpose in the modern world outside of being evil.
- I might say the knife sales man who stands outside bars known for violence yelling “my knife stabs better!” could be evil.
- ...would you pay for the upkeep of the knife because of its notoreity, and the hopes that it doesn't stab you?
- I think this analogy is dishonest.
What is a company if not the people who work there and drive some vision forward?
What would Tesla be without Elon?
It sure looks like the company is a tool for Peter and his ilk, to enable and extend state surveillance, to limit people’s capacity to stand up to corrupt and evil governments.
I’d suggest you read up on Thiel’s and Yarvin’s beliefs. Palantir sure seems more of a projection of those beliefs rather than a mere tool that by itself has no purpose.
- You sound as if you think he would go on with it even if he had no customers.
- Doing unethical things for a profit motive doesn't magically make them ethical.
- It’s worth reading 0 to 1, it outlines Thiel’s views on startups, which can be illuminating on his broader views.
He emphasizes that sales and distribution are just as important as the product itself, and he is particularly blunt about the need to convince people to become customers, even if your product is truly superior.
> “If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business — no matter how good the product.”
Thiel argues that great products don’t sell themselves, contrary to the romanticized idea many founders have. Even if your product is objectively better, people won’t automatically understand or adopt it. You must persuade them, market effectively, and create distribution channels — either through salespeople, viral growth loops, partnerships, or targeted marketing — to bridge the gap between product and user adoption.
- ...all of which (vile and horrifying in its own right, but not at all original) applies to mass-market products. The market for Palantir is extremely small and the demand -- even, or especially, at the level of a wish-list -- extremely inelastic. I still say, without that demand, no Palantir -- unless Thiel had funded its entire development out of his own pocket. (Perhaps he did; all the sicker.)
Yes, demand can be created; but where it is spontaneous, it is also the only possible target of blame.
- If said knife were used to murder a child then, yes, I would consider the knife to be an evil object.
- A knife developed and sold by a company that collects usage and personal data of everyone that touches it and does central analysis for political purposes: Yes, that's an evil knife company.
- 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?
- > 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.
- 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
- 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
- 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
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.
- "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.
- 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 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.
- 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 the sort of black and white, American supremacy thinking that produces the state of the world we are in. What a false dichotomy.
- 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.
