The biggest problem that Palantir solves is: we (CIA, FBI, whatever) have to pull together data from 500 software systems that don't share a common taxonomy, hold petabytes of data in totally different ways, live in agencies across the world, and have all sorts of nuanced permissions models (e.g. "Five Eyes" or "this data was shared to New Zealand by a country that doesn't share data directly with the US, but New Zealand does share data to the US. I'm a US agent looking at NZ data, do I see this?").
They basically clean and centralize information. It's super unsexy (probably my least favorite thing to do as an engineer.) But that is the problem that these organizations have.
[edit: clarity]
Exactly. You can find this in almost any 'stodgy' business around. If you see very little computers around or only computers with glowing Word screens, you can be sure, if you find some business person to talk with, he or she can tell you what really would boost their business. And then you suddenly have a business if the competitors also do not have it (usually they don't). Gov is a good one as they are usually slow and not very creative (generally! don't want to step on toes but what I saw so far in the world shows me that this is generally true).
> Stories like this call that snark to mind. "Look at this database databasing!"
This isn't a technical story, it's a social and governmental one.
> if you're angry at Palantir for assisting mass deportation, you should be equally angry at Oracle and Cisco. I am --- in fact, a little more so.
Isn't Palantir's assistance clearer and more direct? Aren't they building applications with a lot of knowledge of what they'll be used to do? As far as I know, Cisco doesn't sell products like "gigabit mass-deporation cloud router 2239." Any assistance they give is much more indirect.
Nobody bats an eyelash when doctors refuse to help with executions or torture, or pharma companies resist selling execution drug cocktails. But for some reason technologists are just fine selling the technical building blocks of a surveillance and mass deportation system. That's not right; it's a sign of the diminished professionalism of our field versus other professions, and it does need to change.
And where is the line? Is the programmer who writes code for a surveillance drone ( immoral? What about one who writes code for a submarine that may carry ballistic missiles? Or for the missile guidance system itself?
When a doctor assists in an execution, they participate in what is a murder, just under some other context. Lift that action up and out of the auspices of state and governance, and you have a murderer, accessory to before or after, or an accomplice to.
This isn't a particularly rare occurrence, but someone is there to cut the life short, do harm, and achieve a goal. Justice, revenge, passion, grudges aside. There's a winner and a loser.
It could be a misanthrope and henchmen, or it could be a doctor, somehow more distinguished than a common thug. The doctor chooses gets hands dirty for different reasons, there they are all the same. But the doctor gets to walk away from his murder, and commit more, so long as the state and government are not deposed.
All of this is just distracting from the real issues at hand.
As anyone with the pleasure of having contracted with IBM or Lockheed can tell you, there is a significant difference between working with giant government contractors versus the best funded Silicon Valley firms.
What what we debating here? ICE's conduct or Palantir being an enabler? Because if we're talking about Palantir, "someone else would have done it" is not a good excuse.
I think the long term question is: how can we make these choices less okay and less profitable?
How so? Exposing and holding people and companies accountable for wrong behavior does not stop anyone from trying to change the government policies that encourage the wrong behavior. The added media exposure probably helps, especially with people that are interested in the person/company but are not aware of the government policies and their impact.
That's the question, right? Is this wrong behavior? It's legal, that's for sure. Just because you don't agree with ICE's actions doesn't mean every Palantir employee agrees with you.
1. "Someone else would have done it."
2. False dichotomy.
And now piling on:
3. Moral relativism.
4. Finish the Job. (#49 in http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/engl1311/fallacies.htm)
But it turns out that no one (initially) cares when doctors do help with torture, either. The APA helped design the American torture program, and despite some inflammatory articles never saw any real consequences for it.
I don't think this devalues your point about technologists, but it does make me suspect that our uniqueness is overstated; quite a few 'respectable' professions have at one point or another joined in on horrific government overreach.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/report-says-american-p...
Are (using your example) Cisco and/or Oracle offering material support, other than making the products that are used? If not, I don't see how they could prevent the government from using their products - the government would just buy the products through a cutout if they had to.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-...
> Isn't Palantir's assistance clearer and more direct?
Are you aware that the name "Oracle" comes from the original CIA contract?
(crappy reference I found via wikipedia in case you didn't realise this, but it's not a secret part of company history: https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,215072,00.html )
I'm not saying that companies should shun the CIA, so that's irrelevant. The distinction I was making was between providing generic products which can be used to implement a policy and products specifically designed to that policy's business requirements. My understanding is Palantir produces the later, and if the policy in question is problematic then they are more culpable than if they developed something generic.
Also, your link doesn't really support your characterization that Oracle Database was developed for the CIA:
> Ampex was developing a giant database for the CIA, and Ellison was assigned to the project, along with Bob Miner and Ed Oates. The CIA's codename for the project was Oracle. The project was something of a disaster, but it led eventually to the formation of Oracle Corporation and its current hugely successful range of databases.
If you pay attention, it says Ampex was the company with the CIA contract, and that project inspired Ellison to found Oracle.
"Ellison was wrong about the success of massively parallel processing computers (though he invested his own money in the idea), wrong about the success of so-called video-on-demand (as Oracle found when it ran a pilot with British Telecom), wrong about network computers replacing PCs (or at least, there's no evidence yet), and wrong about several other things - though we might have to revise that view in 10 years and say he was right but too early."
looks like history has proven that he was right about all of these things!
Genuinely curious what you base this opinion on. If it's based solely upon his support of Donald Trump, this is a ridiculous statement. If there is something else that would make a reasonable, politically neutral person agree that he is a "monster," I am not aware of it, so I would be interested to hear what it is.
"Politically neutral" is a big qualifier to throw in there. You're basically asking why, ignoring his most controversial aspects, someone would find him controversial.
I'm a little unsure how anyone would even approach your question. Thiel is a deeply political person - member of the Libertarian party, for one - how does a "politically neutral" analysis of him rate that? Ignore his politics entirely? To do so is to remove the obvious reason that some consider him to be a "monster". It's certainly possible to consider libertarianism to be monstrous, if your politics aligns as such.
Even in the context of this article: he co-founded Palantir, who are a very controversial company, and will potentially assist the administration in mass deportations. Depending your political leanings, that may well make him monstrous. He co-wrote a book named "The Diversity Myth", statements in which had to apologise for in 2016. Again, those statements might make him monstrous to a person.
I hesitate to even bring it up, but many of the tyrants of the 20th Century were responsible for the death of millions, and for decidedly political reasons. Does a politically neutral person object to calling Stalin a monster on the basis that, aside from his politics, he was a good family man?
(No, I'm not saying Peter Thiel is Stalin. Politics exists in a vast, vast spectrum - but I'm not convinced there is a place where that spectrum doesn't exist)
I'm not suggesting in any way that his actions are on the same level as Stalin's, but where is the "monster line" drawn? I don't see how you could ever answer that question without factoring in someone's own political opinions. So I don't know how you could do a politically neutral examination of Thiel's supposed monstrousness.
You added your parenthesis after I responded (or perhaps while I was responding). But nevertheless, I can't come close to relating the two. Nothing I am aware of with Thiel would make a reasonable person consider him to be a "monster".
This will be my last response to this, since I apparently forgot how many ultra-liberals that hate Thiel and everyone like him would be brought out by such a seemingly simple, non-controversial, genuine question that I posed to OP (not necessarily referring to you, but there seem to be alot of people backing up this opinion based upon nothing other than politics, which makes me sad both for HN and the state of political discourse in the US).
I'll follow your lead and say that this will be my last response too, because your post has shown to me that we're talking past each other entirely.
> there seem to be alot of people backing up this opinion based upon nothing other than politics
The point I've been making this whole time is that you simply cannot separate politics from "other" in the way you wish to. Politics is intertwined in every decision we make and every opinion we hold. The fact that you choose (without evidence) to label those you disagree with as "ultra-liberals" underlines this. You paint yourself as politically neutral yet you are clearly evaluating others in political terms.
We can't have "politically neutral" political discourse, it makes no sense. There is no "non-political Peter Thiel".
Making an analogy between two things/people/events/actions is not the same as claiming the two are equal.
Of course, Peter Thiel is nowhere near as bad as Stalin. Then again, "better than Stalin" is a pretty low bar.
Read: "My safety has never been at risk because of the consequences of someone's political leanings and have either never met or do not consider sufficiently valuable anyone whose safety is"
You're projecting. At least let him explain his reasoning. Creating your own fictional version which you can denounce prior that that explanation doesn't really help the conversation.
Hope that helps.
Peter Think is not situated equally to all Trump voters. Even if we accept that it is a priori unreasonable that nearly half of the voting population on the recent election could be described as "monsters" (I don't, as popularity of an act does not contradict depravity of the act), it's quite possible to believe that voting for Trump reveals that one is either a monster or decieved by a monster, and believes that there are things about Think that make it particularly unlikely that he is a dupe, and thus that he is a monster but not all those voting for Trump are.
> No, I am not projecting.
And then you go on to pull out a bunch of statistics and imply the statement was about half of all US voters, and calling them "monsters", instead of the actual statement, which was about a single person.
Then you specifically acknowledge you still don't know what his justifications are:
> If it's just more politically-motivated Valley-bubble drivel, then there is nothing to see here.
Perhaps you need to look up what projecting means. Or, if you prefer, we can call what you're doing a Straw Man man argument. Not quite the same, but related, and it also applies.
My original comment could have been paraphrased as "hey, please don't bring that stuff up without real cause or evidence if it's not the current topic. It's makes things toxic fairly quickly."
Last time I checked, 46.09% of 55.3% was a little under 25.5% of all voters.
Please.. you have to register to vote, you have to stand in a line for hours before you can vote. How many people don't vote because it's too much of a hassle? Their opinions are irrelevant?
Since some fraction of eligible non-voters wouldn't have voted no matter who the candidate was, the truth of the matter is obviously somewhere in between a quarter and a half. But there's no sense in which "half the vote" isn't misleading.
- People who voted in the last election
- People who have voted previously in an election
- People who are capable of voting (citizens of voting age not otherwise constrained from voting).
It's probably usually obvious which one is meant in a conversation, but there are also likely cases where it can be somewhat ambiguous.
Because that's the issue here. This is what the actual process of mass deportation looks like. There are any number of more humane ways of dealing with this, among them what the Obama administration was doing for eight years, but Trump supporters voted for destroying people's lives en masse, at gunpoint, without consideration of any consequences.
This is inhumane. Full stop. This is not about romanticizing any one or any thing, this about asking people to look reality in the face and defend the thing that they're supporting.
> Meh. I'm a legal immigrant
mean in context, in response to talking about illegal immigrants being needlessly mistreated, to mention that random legal immigrant doesn't understand the "glorification" of people? What does "glorification" mean here? The idea that you shouldn't trample on someone just because you can? Just how much do you have to contort and squint to not get a slight... whiff here?
Is that putting words into one's mouth, or explaining their own words to them, because they're too lazy or dishonest to do it themselves. You can't pussyfoot around this stuff on the one hand and then sit on the moral high horse: (likely not even) putting words into someone's mouth is a complete joke to looking the other way when brownshirts do their job. Not minding what the parent poster said, not following up on it with these questions, that's the real WTF here. Please learn from your betters rather than pointlessly berating them. One poster responded correctly, the rest fucking has to live with themselves, how's that for a different view point.
a) That isn't what projecting means.
b) He asked him about his reasoning and then criticized an explicitly hypothetical scenario. Note the 'if'.
"transfer or attribute one's own emotion or desire to (another person), especially unconsciously."
That seems to apply here, to my eyes.
I don't think it's clearly that, since there are sources that contradict the narrowness of that view.
"to regard (something within the mind, as a feeling, thought, or attitude) as having some form of reality outside the mind"[1]
Specifically, that method in which I was using it is when someone is applying their preconceptions to someone or something else. Which is fine, everyone does that in the normal course of dealing with other people. I was simply trying to point out that there was no solid evidence that tptacek was going by that reasoning, and putting it out there in that manner was non-constructive. All it did was open the door to a political flamewar about what percentage of people voted for Trump, whether everyone that voted for trump is also a monster, etc.
That doesn't comport with your prior statements. You could describe literally any ideological statement as 'projecting' by that standard, which renders your prior comment utterly meaningless. Which of course, in turn, implies that that was not your intended meaning.
> I was simply trying to point out that there was no solid evidence that tptacek was going by that reasoning, and putting it out there in that manner was non-constructive. All it did was open the door to a political flamewar about what percentage of people voted for Trump, whether everyone that voted for trump is also a monster, etc.
No solid evidence, no. But not an unreasonable hypothesis, and one that he gave the OP an opportunity to rebut. Nothing wrong with that. He wasn't asserting that that is what tptacek believes, he was saying "IF this is what he believes, then that is ridiculous".
Yes. It's a natural part of communication, where we model others and use those models to interpret meaning. In this case, I could have said "You're assuming too much" and it would likely have conveyed my meaning more clearly and prevented an ultimately pointless digression into what "projecting" means. That's a failure on my part.
> No solid evidence, no. But not an unreasonable hypothesis, and one that he gave the OP an opportunity to rebut. Nothing wrong with that.
I beg to differ. It pulled in an entire topic that didn't necessarily have any place in the discussion. I could make any number of assertions here that might imply my belief about your state of mind, and doing so and allowing them to be rebutted does not justify their use. For example, "do you think I'm wrong because he's black, because that's ridiculous?" With that statement, I've implied there may be some racism on your part, which is uncalled for without far more evidence, regardless of whether that's the only interpretation I can think of or not, given the little information present (a hypothetical, to be clear). In this case, the possible implication (possible only, because the interpretation allows for some ambiguity) was that tptacek might be capable of branding someone a monster purely because they support President Trump, or supported candidate Trump. If someone feels the need to discount this specific scenario, there are far clearer ways to do so while avoiding that implication. For example, pointing out the natural shortcomings in communication while interpreting someone else's statements. E.g. "Is that because of support for President Trump? I can't think of any other reason you'd call him a monster, but that seems extreme, so likely I'm just failing to see the point you're making. Care to explain?"
But since a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret, a woman might ‘realize’ that she had been ‘raped’ the next day or even many days later.
----
The purpose of the rape crisis movement seems as much about vilifying men as about raising ‘awareness’.
----
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
This would be a good place to use the thread collapse [-] button, and also a good place for the monitors to snip off a political subthread.
"I sort of have a single idée fixe that I'm completely obsessed with on the business side which is that if you're starting a company, if you’re the founder, entrepreneur, starting a company you always want to aim for monopoly and you want to always avoid competition" https://youtu.be/5_0dVHMpJlo?t=26s
But, you could also say, from a virus' view, to reproduce and monopolize a body is also a correct point of view.
However, what Thiel ignores is the world is not just capitalist domain, it has living organisms which those monopolies can make life miserable or worse kill. Just like the virus though, he isn't considering the whole body his views are infecting.
Isn't that the same as saying from Theils' capitalist view the solution is to prevent capitalism from functioning? How do you have capitalism without competition?
You're giving it more credit than necessary. It's just expensive consultingware. It's only incidentally a database.
Not all technologies or companies are neutral in practice.
Stories like this call that snark to mind. "Look at this database databasing!"
I'm loathe to stick up for Palantir, because I think Peter Thiel is a monster, and I have no particular reason to believe that Palantir is an especially moral team in its operations and management. But I think most commentary about Palantir's role in surveillance is overblown. From what I can tell, it's a very expensive consultingware database with a name that has special valence with nerds.
Be mean to Palantir all you want, I guess. But don't let other tech companies off the hook. I've been trying to make this point for years with, I think, pretty limited success: if you're angry at Palantir for assisting mass deportation, you should be equally angry at Oracle and Cisco. I am --- in fact, a little more so.