6 ms·

The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pret

The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt. We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider world. There's more to life than intellectual satisfaction.

dan-robertson 2y ago
Doesn’t the article say the OP wanted to work on meaningful problems in healthcare and bio? I don’t think what you describe sounds like that.
- kome 2y ago
  he wanted, but he didn't - his first deployment was for airbus. then it follows a weak ethical discussion on why working for imperialist powers "is good, actually".
  - martijnarts 2y ago
    Do you (or anyone) have suggestions on higher quality ethical discussions on this topic? I've found it hard to find these, but I love reading these perspectives and dissections.
  - killjoywashere 2y ago
    > weak ethical discussion followed by a one clause stone-throw. Irony? So, the major democracies are imperialist powers? Do you live in a small dictatorship? If not, to be consistent with the rock you just threw, you don't pay your taxes? Do you just not take responsibility for anything? Because that's what he's arguing Palantir does. Here's another take: since WW2 there's been a messy but semi-stable competition between the great powers expressed most visibly through a series of proxy wars near the perimeter of Russia and China. However, the competition is also expressed in the global economy, on the networks, in space, in the oceans. Turns out good people are often forced into ethically tenuous situations and in a world with 8 billion people, every one of whom has lots of opinions, there's a lot of possibility for entirely reasonable people to find themselves in life-and-death struggles. Wolf packs defend their resources, mainly by marking their territorial boundaries but occasionally they fight. Are they unethical in doing so? Are we any different?
    - kome 2y ago
      ah yes, invoking the age-old "wolf pack" analogy to explain the complexities of global politics—because who hasn't looked at international relations and thought, "If only we acted more like wolves marking territory"? If those are the premises (and THOSE are your premises), then no discussion about ethics is necessary indeed.
Aeolun 2y ago
I sure don’t have any more glamorous reasons to work for the company I do. They pay well, and that’s where the interest ends. There’s a lot of challenges in gluing CRUD together at a large enough scale, but it’s not exactly valuable to the greater world.
curtisblaine 2y ago
Maybe OP was aware of Palantir's impact on the world and was ethically OK with it. Ethics are nuanced, an by all means not universal.
maxehmookau 2y ago
> We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. I think this is important, especially in tech. Our contributions often change the world, even in little ways, but this compounds.
clircle 2y ago
> We need to teach our students... Teach your values to your own kids, man
- cambaceres 2y ago
  The perfect response to this kind of preaching.
  - moolcool 2y ago
    I don't think it's preachy at all to say "Hey, the work you do has impacts on the wider world"
    - derkster 2y ago
      who are we to hold others accountable for their actions when money is at stake?
      - crabbone 2y ago
        Potentially the ones affected by the actions of those receiving the money?
    - next_xibalba 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - acdha 2y ago
        If you think ethics is “bureaucracy” and “useless classes”, you’re pretty loudly shouting that you needed that instruction. The problem with leaving it to parents is that parents are not uniformly qualified or interested in doing so, and it’s in society’s best interests not to leave important things to chance.
        deltarholamda 2y ago
yoaviram 2y ago
What a brilliant example of self-righteous post-rationalization. Maybe we all need to recalibrate our moral compasses. Yes, ethics is nuanced, but not in the case of Palantir, who directly enables the abuse of human rights on a massive scale. They are not in the grey, they are pitch black - arms dealers selling to the highest bidder[1][2]. Same as NSO but with better PR. The minimal standard we should teach our students is to be part of the solution, not the problem, and that sitting on the fence counts as being on the side of the problem. Working for a "neutral" employer is just not good enough. There are plenty of worthwhile alternatives out there. We all should try to make the world a better place in some small way. 1. https://archive.ph/LwvMA https://archive.ph/LwvMA 2. https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/ https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/
- kettleballroll 2y ago
  I'm sorry, but I fail to see how your sources are relevant. [1] is written by a science fiction author, and while it outlines how palantir is trying to get into a contract with the NHS (apparently mostly by acquiring companies that already have such contracts), it doesn't say _anything_ about what palantir did (or has planned to do) that would be detrimental to the NHS. [2] merely speculated how palantir might help Ukraine defend itself from Russia. Which... Uhh... I don't see as a bad thing?
- elefanten 2y ago
  This is a pretty wild claim, you're gonna need better evidence than strident rhetorical posturing to back that one up.
andsoitis 2y ago
> The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. That seems like a very uncharitable take. For instance, don't you think the section on morality[1] addresses this head on? [1] https://nabeelqu.substack.com/i/150188028/morality https://nabeelqu.substack.com/i/150188028/morality
- pell 2y ago
  This section is definitely interesting to read but also leaves me a bit hungry for the supposed intellectual "intensity" earlier paragraphs promised about the company and its (ex) employees. The model proposed for thinking about the morality here is incredibly limited.
whack 2y ago
The guy spends an entire section talking about this. Just because he has different moral opinions doesn't mean he doesn't care about morality. To quote the author: Grey areas. By this I mean I mean ‘involve morally thorny, difficult decisions’: examples include health insurance, immigration enforcement, oil companies, the military, spy agencies, police/crime, and so on. Every engineer faces a choice: you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things and basically fall into category 1. You can also go work on category 2 things like GiveDirectly or OpenPhilanthropy or whatever. The critical case against Palantir seemed to be something like “you shouldn’t work on category 3 things, because sometimes this involves making morally bad decisions”. An example was immigration enforcement during 2016-2020, aspects of which many people were uncomfortable with. But it seems to me that ignoring category 3 entirely, and just disengaging with it, is also an abdication of responsibility. Institutions in category 3 need to exist. The USA is defended by people with guns. The police have to enforce crime, and - in my experience - even people who are morally uncomfortable with some aspects of policing are quick to call the police if their own home has been robbed. Oil companies have to provide energy. Health insurers have to make difficult decisions all the time. Yes, there are unsavory aspects to all of these things. But do we just disengage from all of these institutions entirely, and let them sort themselves out? I don’t believe there is a clear answer to whether you should work with category 3 customers; it’s a case by case thing. Palantir’s answer to this is something like “we will work with most category 3 organizations, unless they’re clearly bad, and we’ll trust the democratic process to get them trending in a good direction over time”. Thus: On the ICE question, they disengaged from ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) during the Trump era, while continuing to work with HSI (Homeland Security Investigations). They did work with most other category 3 organizations, on the argument that they’re mostly doing good in the world, even though it’s easy to point to bad things they did as well. I can’t speak to specific details here, but Palantir software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance. This is an uncomfortable stance for many, precisely because you’re not guaranteed to be doing 100% good at all times. You’re at the mercy of history, in some ways, and you’re betting that (a) more good is being done than bad (b) being in the room is better than not. This was good enough for me. Others preferred to go elsewhere. The danger of this stance, of course, is that it becomes a fully general argument for doing whatever the power structure wants. You are just amplifying existing processes. This is where the ‘case by case’ comes in: there’s no general answer, you have to be specific. For my own part, I spent most of my time there working on healthcare and bio stuff, and I feel good about my contributions. I’m betting the people who stopped the terror attacks feel good about theirs, too. Or the people who distributed medicines during the pandemic. Even though the tide has shifted and working on these ‘thorny’ areas is now trendy, these remain relevant questions for technologists. AI is a good example – many people are uncomfortable with some of the consequences of deploying AI. Maybe AI gets used for hacking; maybe deepfakes make the world worse in all these ways; maybe it causes job losses. But there are also major benefits to AI (Dario Amodei articulates some of these well in a recent essay). As with Palantir, working on AI probably isn’t 100% morally good, nor is it 100% evil. Not engaging with it – or calling for a pause/stop, which is a fantasy – is unlikely to be the best stance. Even if you don’t work at OpenAI or Anthropic, if you’re someone who could plausibly work in AI-related issues, you probably want to do so in some way. There are easy cases: build evals, work on alignment, work on societal resilience. But my claim here is that the grey area is worth engaging in too: work on government AI policy. Deploy AI into areas like healthcare. Sure, it’ll be difficult. Plunge in.8 When I think about the most influential people in AI today, they are almost all people in the room - whether at an AI lab, in government, or at an influential think tank. I’d rather be one of those than one of the pontificators. Sure, it’ll involve difficult decisions. But it’s better to be in the room when things happen, even if you later have to leave and sound the alarm.
cambaceres 2y ago
Certain situations that are likely to occur in professional settings would be suitable topics for university education. For example, doctors will encounter many challenging decisions where it's crucial to understand what past generations of medical professionals have learned from similar situations. However, this differs from universities teaching students which business areas are more moral to work in than others. Who would have the authority to decide which businesses are more ethical? Some argue that working in the defense industry is the least ethical career choice, while others claim it would be immoral not to support a country's right to purchase weapons for self-defense. These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases.
- crabbone 2y ago
  Ethics study is rarely about what decision to make, but mostly about how to make a decision. So, there's no problem with teaching ethics in the presence of defense industry. Similarly, doctors learn medical ethics, and, of course, not every question has the "right" answer. Partially, medical (and research) ethics are about knowing what constitutes malpractice under current law, but it's also about some more general ideas (on which the law might be based) that are hard to quantify. Here's one example: during a drug research, if the interim results show that the newly suggested treatment is unambiguously better than the one given to the control group, the researcher is compelled to stop the research and just move everyone to the new drug. But, the reality is rarely so clear-cut. The researcher might not be confident in the accuracy of the intermediate results. While the average success from a particular treatment might improve, it might also worsen the situation for some outliers in the target group etc. All this would lead the researcher to the situation where they need to select between continuing and stopping the research with no clear best choice.
- asoneth 2y ago
  > These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases. When I taught design I ended one of my courses with a lecture and discussion on ethics, and I'd like to think I was pretty even-handed. One common issue that most young designers encounter is being asked to implement dark patterns that improve the company's profits at the expense of the end-user's well-being. The goal of that lecture was not to tell students what is right and what is wrong but to get them to think critically about the effects of their decisions on end-users, customers, society, and the planet. But those answers are different for everyone, for example in my case I was more ethically comfortable working on US military projects than projects involving advertising, social media, gambling, or other forms of psychological manipulation.
gravitronic 2y ago
In 2012 I was at a conference in Montreal for CS students that had Maciej Ceglowski (Pinboard, bed bug registry) do the closing talk, and he was giving advice to students about what to work on. He said it out loud, "or if you want to work for evil go into the hallway and talk to the Palentir booth". It was a great moment of one man speaking truth to power in a packed room of their target audience.
immibis 2y ago
Each individual has to balance between working for the corrupt system in order to extract benefits from it (otherwise the system simply kills you through starvation), and working in ways that benefit society even though the system punishes them for it. The best individual outcome results from working with the system at all times, so the problem will never be solved.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

dan-robertson 2y ago

Doesn’t the article say the OP wanted to work on meaningful problems in healthcare and bio? I don’t think what you describe sounds like that.

kome 2y ago
he wanted, but he didn't - his first deployment was for airbus. then it follows a weak ethical discussion on why working for imperialist powers "is good, actually".
- martijnarts 2y ago
  Do you (or anyone) have suggestions on higher quality ethical discussions on this topic? I've found it hard to find these, but I love reading these perspectives and dissections.
- killjoywashere 2y ago
  > weak ethical discussion followed by a one clause stone-throw. Irony? So, the major democracies are imperialist powers? Do you live in a small dictatorship? If not, to be consistent with the rock you just threw, you don't pay your taxes? Do you just not take responsibility for anything? Because that's what he's arguing Palantir does. Here's another take: since WW2 there's been a messy but semi-stable competition between the great powers expressed most visibly through a series of proxy wars near the perimeter of Russia and China. However, the competition is also expressed in the global economy, on the networks, in space, in the oceans. Turns out good people are often forced into ethically tenuous situations and in a world with 8 billion people, every one of whom has lots of opinions, there's a lot of possibility for entirely reasonable people to find themselves in life-and-death struggles. Wolf packs defend their resources, mainly by marking their territorial boundaries but occasionally they fight. Are they unethical in doing so? Are we any different?
  - kome 2y ago
    ah yes, invoking the age-old "wolf pack" analogy to explain the complexities of global politics—because who hasn't looked at international relations and thought, "If only we acted more like wolves marking territory"? If those are the premises (and THOSE are your premises), then no discussion about ethics is necessary indeed.

Aeolun 2y ago

I sure don’t have any more glamorous reasons to work for the company I do. They pay well, and that’s where the interest ends. There’s a lot of challenges in gluing CRUD together at a large enough scale, but it’s not exactly valuable to the greater world.

curtisblaine 2y ago

Maybe OP was aware of Palantir's impact on the world and was ethically OK with it. Ethics are nuanced, an by all means not universal.

maxehmookau 2y ago

> We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. I think this is important, especially in tech. Our contributions often change the world, even in little ways, but this compounds.

clircle 2y ago

> We need to teach our students... Teach your values to your own kids, man

cambaceres 2y ago
The perfect response to this kind of preaching.
- moolcool 2y ago
  I don't think it's preachy at all to say "Hey, the work you do has impacts on the wider world"
  - derkster 2y ago
    who are we to hold others accountable for their actions when money is at stake?
    - crabbone 2y ago
      Potentially the ones affected by the actions of those receiving the money?
  - next_xibalba 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - acdha 2y ago
      If you think ethics is “bureaucracy” and “useless classes”, you’re pretty loudly shouting that you needed that instruction. The problem with leaving it to parents is that parents are not uniformly qualified or interested in doing so, and it’s in society’s best interests not to leave important things to chance.
      - deltarholamda 2y ago

yoaviram 2y ago

What a brilliant example of self-righteous post-rationalization. Maybe we all need to recalibrate our moral compasses. Yes, ethics is nuanced, but not in the case of Palantir, who directly enables the abuse of human rights on a massive scale. They are not in the grey, they are pitch black - arms dealers selling to the highest bidder[1][2]. Same as NSO but with better PR. The minimal standard we should teach our students is to be part of the solution, not the problem, and that sitting on the fence counts as being on the side of the problem. Working for a "neutral" employer is just not good enough. There are plenty of worthwhile alternatives out there. We all should try to make the world a better place in some small way. 1. https://archive.ph/LwvMA https://archive.ph/LwvMA 2. https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/ https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/

kettleballroll 2y ago
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how your sources are relevant. [1] is written by a science fiction author, and while it outlines how palantir is trying to get into a contract with the NHS (apparently mostly by acquiring companies that already have such contracts), it doesn't say _anything_ about what palantir did (or has planned to do) that would be detrimental to the NHS. [2] merely speculated how palantir might help Ukraine defend itself from Russia. Which... Uhh... I don't see as a bad thing?
elefanten 2y ago
This is a pretty wild claim, you're gonna need better evidence than strident rhetorical posturing to back that one up.

andsoitis 2y ago

> The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. That seems like a very uncharitable take. For instance, don't you think the section on morality[1] addresses this head on? [1] https://nabeelqu.substack.com/i/150188028/morality https://nabeelqu.substack.com/i/150188028/morality

pell 2y ago
This section is definitely interesting to read but also leaves me a bit hungry for the supposed intellectual "intensity" earlier paragraphs promised about the company and its (ex) employees. The model proposed for thinking about the morality here is incredibly limited.

whack 2y ago

The guy spends an entire section talking about this. Just because he has different moral opinions doesn't mean he doesn't care about morality. To quote the author: Grey areas. By this I mean I mean ‘involve morally thorny, difficult decisions’: examples include health insurance, immigration enforcement, oil companies, the military, spy agencies, police/crime, and so on. Every engineer faces a choice: you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things and basically fall into category 1. You can also go work on category 2 things like GiveDirectly or OpenPhilanthropy or whatever. The critical case against Palantir seemed to be something like “you shouldn’t work on category 3 things, because sometimes this involves making morally bad decisions”. An example was immigration enforcement during 2016-2020, aspects of which many people were uncomfortable with. But it seems to me that ignoring category 3 entirely, and just disengaging with it, is also an abdication of responsibility. Institutions in category 3 need to exist. The USA is defended by people with guns. The police have to enforce crime, and - in my experience - even people who are morally uncomfortable with some aspects of policing are quick to call the police if their own home has been robbed. Oil companies have to provide energy. Health insurers have to make difficult decisions all the time. Yes, there are unsavory aspects to all of these things. But do we just disengage from all of these institutions entirely, and let them sort themselves out? I don’t believe there is a clear answer to whether you should work with category 3 customers; it’s a case by case thing. Palantir’s answer to this is something like “we will work with most category 3 organizations, unless they’re clearly bad, and we’ll trust the democratic process to get them trending in a good direction over time”. Thus: On the ICE question, they disengaged from ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) during the Trump era, while continuing to work with HSI (Homeland Security Investigations). They did work with most other category 3 organizations, on the argument that they’re mostly doing good in the world, even though it’s easy to point to bad things they did as well. I can’t speak to specific details here, but Palantir software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance. This is an uncomfortable stance for many, precisely because you’re not guaranteed to be doing 100% good at all times. You’re at the mercy of history, in some ways, and you’re betting that (a) more good is being done than bad (b) being in the room is better than not. This was good enough for me. Others preferred to go elsewhere. The danger of this stance, of course, is that it becomes a fully general argument for doing whatever the power structure wants. You are just amplifying existing processes. This is where the ‘case by case’ comes in: there’s no general answer, you have to be specific. For my own part, I spent most of my time there working on healthcare and bio stuff, and I feel good about my contributions. I’m betting the people who stopped the terror attacks feel good about theirs, too. Or the people who distributed medicines during the pandemic. Even though the tide has shifted and working on these ‘thorny’ areas is now trendy, these remain relevant questions for technologists. AI is a good example – many people are uncomfortable with some of the consequences of deploying AI. Maybe AI gets used for hacking; maybe deepfakes make the world worse in all these ways; maybe it causes job losses. But there are also major benefits to AI (Dario Amodei articulates some of these well in a recent essay). As with Palantir, working on AI probably isn’t 100% morally good, nor is it 100% evil. Not engaging with it – or calling for a pause/stop, which is a fantasy – is unlikely to be the best stance. Even if you don’t work at OpenAI or Anthropic, if you’re someone who could plausibly work in AI-related issues, you probably want to do so in some way. There are easy cases: build evals, work on alignment, work on societal resilience. But my claim here is that the grey area is worth engaging in too: work on government AI policy. Deploy AI into areas like healthcare. Sure, it’ll be difficult. Plunge in.8 When I think about the most influential people in AI today, they are almost all people in the room - whether at an AI lab, in government, or at an influential think tank. I’d rather be one of those than one of the pontificators. Sure, it’ll involve difficult decisions. But it’s better to be in the room when things happen, even if you later have to leave and sound the alarm.

cambaceres 2y ago

Certain situations that are likely to occur in professional settings would be suitable topics for university education. For example, doctors will encounter many challenging decisions where it's crucial to understand what past generations of medical professionals have learned from similar situations. However, this differs from universities teaching students which business areas are more moral to work in than others. Who would have the authority to decide which businesses are more ethical? Some argue that working in the defense industry is the least ethical career choice, while others claim it would be immoral not to support a country's right to purchase weapons for self-defense. These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases.

crabbone 2y ago
Ethics study is rarely about what decision to make, but mostly about how to make a decision. So, there's no problem with teaching ethics in the presence of defense industry. Similarly, doctors learn medical ethics, and, of course, not every question has the "right" answer. Partially, medical (and research) ethics are about knowing what constitutes malpractice under current law, but it's also about some more general ideas (on which the law might be based) that are hard to quantify. Here's one example: during a drug research, if the interim results show that the newly suggested treatment is unambiguously better than the one given to the control group, the researcher is compelled to stop the research and just move everyone to the new drug. But, the reality is rarely so clear-cut. The researcher might not be confident in the accuracy of the intermediate results. While the average success from a particular treatment might improve, it might also worsen the situation for some outliers in the target group etc. All this would lead the researcher to the situation where they need to select between continuing and stopping the research with no clear best choice.
asoneth 2y ago
> These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases. When I taught design I ended one of my courses with a lecture and discussion on ethics, and I'd like to think I was pretty even-handed. One common issue that most young designers encounter is being asked to implement dark patterns that improve the company's profits at the expense of the end-user's well-being. The goal of that lecture was not to tell students what is right and what is wrong but to get them to think critically about the effects of their decisions on end-users, customers, society, and the planet. But those answers are different for everyone, for example in my case I was more ethically comfortable working on US military projects than projects involving advertising, social media, gambling, or other forms of psychological manipulation.

gravitronic 2y ago

In 2012 I was at a conference in Montreal for CS students that had Maciej Ceglowski (Pinboard, bed bug registry) do the closing talk, and he was giving advice to students about what to work on. He said it out loud, "or if you want to work for evil go into the hallway and talk to the Palentir booth". It was a great moment of one man speaking truth to power in a packed room of their target audience.

immibis 2y ago

Each individual has to balance between working for the corrupt system in order to extract benefits from it (otherwise the system simply kills you through starvation), and working in ways that benefit society even though the system punishes them for it. The best individual outcome results from working with the system at all times, so the problem will never be solved.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]