It was deeply creepy, and left a very unpleasant taste in my mouth.
(Something about building a company of power-seeking people who don't notice, or aren't bothered by, ethical questionability? Some companies have herded those well enough, and thrived for decades, like that.)
This isn’t a cryptocurrency company. It’s at the core of a public service handling some of the nations most sensitive data.
From Wikipedia:
"A major theme of palantír usage is that while the stones show real objects or events, those using the stones had to "possess great strength of will and of mind" to direct the stone's gaze to its full capability.[T 2] The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones: in The Lord of the Rings, a palantír has fallen into the Enemy's hands, making the usefulness of all other existing stones questionable. Commentators such as the Tolkien scholar Paul Kocher note the hand of providence in their usage, while Joseph Pearce compares Sauron's use of the stones to broadcast wartime propaganda"
Pseudoscience yields anecdotes. Science yields empirical results.
* "ok, extrovert-feely, DJ this party and be quick about it!"
* "but the CEO said the quarterly results are due by EOD tomorrow!"
* "are you going to oppose the MBTI? you sure aren't a culture fit are you?"
edit1: formatting
edit2: the point of the above flippant story is that the 'test' marked a person for failure and made their departure a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you write a letter to the newspaper, you might hope to influence one person, or the general audience of the paper. If you feel so strongly about something that you compose an op-ed, you'll also have to do the work of persuading a feature editor to publish it (although this isn't too hard, if it seems like it fills the news hole). That's a bit less accessible than a letter to the editor. If you're buying full page ads, you're leveraging capital that most people don't have to go outside of regular interpersonal communication channels.
I've priced doing billboards just for funsies --- to make a (snarky) point, not to make money. It's not that expensive! Also: how could it be? Look at some of the terrible billboards out there. There are a series of I-55 billboards advertising a single self-published book of poetry.
Your original statement was "normal humans don't try to communicate directly with each other through the media". I think you're using a pretty idiosyncratic definition of "normal" there. The phenomenon you're labeling abnormal is I think actually pretty common.
That we fund this company with our taxes is repugnant.
I think it's practically guaranteed that Palantir is, or will be, blackmailing officials. Even if they never do, any lucid official will be very conscious of stepping on the toes of a private intelligence company.
The incentives are aligned that way so it would require surveillance and conspiracy to prevent it from happening.
Furthermore, collecting large amounts of information on your own population creates a lowest effort point of entry for an adversary to gather that info, and it's more useful to them.
What do you think they do that’s so above-and-beyond what a non-government organization should be able to do? I wonder if you’re falling for a lot of the marketing hype…
Publicly traded companies are required to report certain financial facts about the company, but they’re still extremely opaque.
In this case espionage and surveillance, traditionally domains of the state.
>What do you think they do that’s so above-and-beyond what a non-government organization should be able to do?
They're not subject to privacy legislation and limitations that the police is. There's a concrete exapmle of this, commercial storage of license plate data in the US is largely unregulated, so police units that have legal limitations on how long they can hold citizen data simply go to the private market and buy that data from those firms. That kind of circumvention of the law and outsourcing of responsibility is probably a large part of the Palantir business model.
Seems kind of insane to take your tax payer money and use it to buy surveillance data on you, a good chunk of which probably isn't even legal to otherwise collect and completely undermine the rule of law and democratic control of policing.
And they’re not police, so of course they’re not held to that standard, just like you or I aren’t held to that standard.
That's a strong claim given that Palantir has sold and deployed so called "predictive policing" technology to the police forces of New Orleans[1] (without city council knowledge, so much for the accountability) and even directly advertises itself as a defense company[2]. Their revenue is overwhelmingly contract with national governments, again mostly for police or defense work. That's not how you, I or most Fortune 500 companies do business.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...
And it absolutely is how you, I, and every other employed organization works. You seem to not understand what a contractor is.
Palantir will do a number of things to gain influence. They'll find out who are the decision makers on the space they want a contract, and they'll target them specifically. For example: if they know you take the train to work every morning, and read the news paper, they'll take a full page advertisement on the paper they know you like and that you'll see. They gain this information by, you guessed it, spying on their targets.