Reflections on Palantir

> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.

Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that Palantir IPO'd and is a magnet for investors doesn't contradict this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and surveillance.

So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants.

I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.

Factually untrue.

I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this summary is good enough.

> The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S., but internationally as well.

About "sin" industries:

> "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, miltech) can be seen as morally contentious by some workers. As a result, individuals may seek higher wages to compensate for any discomfort or societal stigma attached to their work in those sectors.

Julian,

I know that on the Internet the demand for sources can be a preemptive concern when structuring an argument.

However—please—there is no need to resort to large language model applications in order to support your subjective claims.

You can do this on your own, son. If the machine can find it, so can you! Take your time, think things through. What you're saying would sound more reasonable in your own words.

Since you asked, I think I'll explain myself.

I did look for sources. I estimate it would've taken about 15 minutes to collect the sources and link them. Basically if you do the search yourself, you'll see the first page or so of links is very academic ones. So I would need to scroll past all those, and read the abstract to find one that corroborated my argument.

This is not, as they say, a paid position: it's fair to say "that takes to long" and choose not to do this. Which is what I did here.

Now I'm not sure what the correct thing to do here was, in retrospect. I can see that an LLM is not a popular choice, though I thought it was a defensible compromise between "no source" and "spending too long finding actual sources."

I could've handwaved and said "academics say" without sourcing (probably the best choice).

I won't cite an LLM next time. I'll probably just frankly say "you can look it up, I won't do that because it takes too long, but..." I believe that's a fair compromise between "saying nothing" and "spending 15-20 minutes on a thankless research task."

The one thing I'm unwilling to do here is to just spend 15-20 minutes on this, however. I'd rather be downvoted, or simply say nothing.