4 ms·

Every time that Palantir comes up on HN people go crazy about the overreach and the Palantir "drones" flying around killing everyone, but it seems to me like th

Every time that Palantir comes up on HN people go crazy about the overreach and the Palantir "drones" flying around killing everyone, but it seems to me like the military side of Palantir is really just a giant correlation machine...so what's wrong with that? Yes, perhaps it's output is used at some point when deciding something about a drone strike (although I can't find a source for this), but I'm not sure why the sentiment about this is so incredibly negative?

BWStearns 11y ago
Because the government is evil man. I half seriously want to see if you could get people to protest MS Word's ubiquitous use in overreaching government programs. I think it has to do with a bit of iceberg effect. The part that shows up in news articles is all outrage inspiring so any mention of it becomes so just by association. I think it's kind of similar how for some reason every time I say I like Hemingway the only response is "he was sexist". Sure, especially so if you reapply modern norms out of temporal context, however a) it doesn't add a lot to the conversation that wasn't covered in middle school english, and b) it's hardly a whole treatment of the originator of a rather large body of creative work. People jump to it because it's an easy opinion to hold and kinda makes it sound like they've done the thinking about it (which to be fair, maybe they have and have determined that to be the only relevant facet of the author). Similarly the "Drones!" response is a) nothing that isn't true of many other systems, and b) not a full representation of Palantir's uses. It's hard to get voted down for being cynical on the internet, and it shows that the author has read a WashPo article or two about drones and Palantir, but again, maybe they've researched the company and the product fully and determined the only relevant thing is that there probably exist drone targeting packages informed by the use of the software.

BWStearns 11y ago

Because the government is evil man. I half seriously want to see if you could get people to protest MS Word's ubiquitous use in overreaching government programs. I think it has to do with a bit of iceberg effect. The part that shows up in news articles is all outrage inspiring so any mention of it becomes so just by association. I think it's kind of similar how for some reason every time I say I like Hemingway the only response is "he was sexist". Sure, especially so if you reapply modern norms out of temporal context, however a) it doesn't add a lot to the conversation that wasn't covered in middle school english, and b) it's hardly a whole treatment of the originator of a rather large body of creative work. People jump to it because it's an easy opinion to hold and kinda makes it sound like they've done the thinking about it (which to be fair, maybe they have and have determined that to be the only relevant facet of the author). Similarly the "Drones!" response is a) nothing that isn't true of many other systems, and b) not a full representation of Palantir's uses. It's hard to get voted down for being cynical on the internet, and it shows that the author has read a WashPo article or two about drones and Palantir, but again, maybe they've researched the company and the product fully and determined the only relevant thing is that there probably exist drone targeting packages informed by the use of the software.