Reflections on Palantir

> We need to teach our students...

Teach your values to your own kids, man

The perfect response to this kind of preaching.

Students are adults. Teaching them that their choices have systemic consequences is not the same as forcing values on them. It might be factually incorrect, but it's not a value statement.

And I have no worries that the billionaires will make sure their views and values are aired and widely known, so students will be very much able to make up their own mind.

Most Computer Science and engineering curriculums include courses about professional ethics.

I don't think it's preachy at all to say "Hey, the work you do has impacts on the wider world"

You should write a book about how a society composed entirely of pure-bred mercenaries outlasted all other competing civilizations on the planet. I'd be very interested in reading it.

who are we to hold others accountable for their actions when money is at stake?

Pretty much every dysfunction of this society can be traced back to this attitude. Social responsibility to other people beyond your own kin is necessary to produce a society worth living in. This necessarily includes taking up the burden of teaching you the values your parents refused to teach you.

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.

This is a great example of the toxic individualism our society suffers from. There is no sense of community or doing what's right for the greater good because people think they always know better.

You have just re-invented the priestly caste.

If you live in the woods alone and don’t interact with society.

This comment is a great example of a straw man argument.

> leave moral instruction to parents and other institutions like it should be.

Should be, according to what doctrine? It certainly sounds like you're attempting to establish institutional moral instruction by imposing limits on when and where morality can be discussed.

Why are we allowed to teach students astronomy but not morality? Go back further and we couldn't even freely teach astronomy. Do you remember Galileo's trial for heresy? Or Socrates' condemnation to death for "corrupting the youth"? This war for teaching the ability to capably assess ethics and morality has been waging before you, I, Hacker News, universities, the internet, the printing press...

If you don't think it was right to kill Socrates for simply spreading the message of critical thinking, then you have to accept that adults can organize to teach whatever they wish at universities, assuming it doesn't run afoul of Constitutional protections.

The sad thing is that there is some truth to the parent comment.

For the most part it's an accurate representation of how morals are appropriated into institutions like academia.

As important qualities like community and a shared notion of a common good in humanity are, the system as it stands will render them according to its own interests and students will exit none the wiser. Character becomes standardized into a set of "values" of an entirely different sort.

The problem is that Students inevitably become parents, and some inevitably branch out into "other institutions" professionally, espousing Moral Character® and we're left to figure out who contaminated what?

The baby or the bathwater?

Surely you have the capability of making a distinction between doctrine established for hierarchical control and a teaching a basic system of deriving ethics or morality, with the exact intention of preventing such hierarchical control within an industry that has the power to make any extreme institutional system a reality. You've seen the effects of a generation of social media technologies and how it compared to the previous generation of internet communication such as BBS, forums, etc.

I assume you've lived long enough to witness an internet stewarded by those who place ethics or morality above purely capitalistic motivation, vs. an internet stewarded by a generation of new-age, fake-ethical "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks" tech entrepreneurs.

Potentially the ones affected by the actions of those receiving the money?

Do you think a civics class is a taught by a “priestly caste”? Or the ethics course in a medical or engineering program?

Words have meanings and neither of the terms you used are appropriate for this context. It’s possible that there could be an issue with the way standards are formulated but that’d be specific to a particular situation rather than inherent to the concept.

The post I was replying to explicitly said we couldn't leave the teaching of things like ethics and morality up to parents. That's a priestly caste.

It's all well and good to say that your chosen priest caste won't exert hierarchical control, pinky swear, but history and human nature disagrees with you.

It's also odd to suggest that we can teach a system of deriving ethics or morality. Philosophers have been hard at work on this for a long time and haven't gotten terribly far, and they disagree with each other quite strenuously.

It's naive to think that a civics class or an ethics class is free of foundational prejudices. You suggest empowering a group of people to choose what to teach, and what not to teach, and thereby decide what constitutes "civics" or "ethics". And you advocate that this is outside of a parent's scope.

That's a priestly caste. Of if, as you say, there may be a problem in the formulated standards, then the body that formulates the standards would be the priestly caste. I don't have a problem with the concept, actually, but it's best to call it what it is. Pretending that this would be perfectly neutral is daft.

Have you taken a university level ethics course before?

They teach the different ethical frameworks, where they come from, and then get you to apply them to different situations. The classes don't tell you what's right and what's wrong, but rather, the different frameworks people can use to determine that.

By this logic every class other than pure math involves a “priestly caste” because teaching involves decisions about what to cover and how to do so. In reality, what happens is that professionals in the field set standards for what should be covered and those are periodically reviewed and updated, and what keeps that from being the exercise in dogma which you appear to be worried about is having that process and the results public. The problem with priests occurs when they’re given special privileges without accountability, and that’s far less of a concern when, say, the standard is “a panel of experts recognized in the field accepted this standard after public comment” than “$DEITY says you have to do it my way, no questions”.

Put another way, real engineers, doctors, scientists who work with human subjects, lawyers, finance people, etc. do not seem to have a conceptual hazard from professional ethics codes. Why would we expect software development to be so different?

Bureaucracy and useless classes are major drivers of the insane increase in higher ed costs. "The average cost of college tuition & fees at public 4-year institutions* has risen 141% over the last 20 years." Student debt was $300 billion in 2000 and it is now closer to $2 trillion. Starting in 2009, the median graduate had more student loan debt 10 years post graduation than at the time they graduated. It beggars belief to claim that administrative bloat and mission drift are not major variables of the current student loan crisis. And your proposal is to do more of it?

In terms of parents not being qualified, who are you, or anyone else for that matter, to say who is and is not qualified to instruct their own in morality? It is an entirely subjective topic and certainly should not be given over to corrupted institutions. Moreover, do you really believe folks like Elizabeth Holmes, Jeff Skilling, SBF (whose mother is a legal ethicist!!), and all the nameless, white-shoed McKinsey criminals haven't received "ethical" instruction in their coursework? And how has that panned out? SBF is a particularly great example as his mother, who you would no doubt have deemed "qualified", reared one of the worst criminals of this generation.

Let the universities focus on the efficient discovery and dissemination of truth, and discard the wasteful, useless mis-education. Fire 90% of the admins, and tie student lending to financial outcomes of students. All of the grievance studies degrees that purport to provide ethical and moral training would vaporize overnight!

SBF's mom is a legal ethicist at Stanford. Beyond her son, how many others has she mis-educated? Or, perhaps, a semester or two of ethics is insufficient and thus a waste of time and money?

“grievance studies degrees”? That escalated quickly from “maybe software engineers should have ethics classes like real engineers”.

>Why would we expect software development to be so different?

It isn't. Recall the big push on DEI initiatives, quite similar to the push to remove blacklist/whitelist or master/slave in the software world. Or the guardrails put onto LLMs so they don't become antisemitic or whatever. Why was it a good thing to do? Because the priestly caste said it was, and tolerated no questions about it. You seem to be unaware of the concept of institutional capture.

And, yes, all teaching involves some sort of bias. We haven't yet created the human that is free from bias.

Is it required that you attend a university-level ethics course to learn how to apply ethical frameworks? Very ecclesiastical. But it would explain why we can't leave this sort of thing to the laity of parents.

In any event, the poster I replied to also included "morality" alongside "ethics", which is why I suggest it's not as cut and dried as you imply.

It's important because ethics is a really complicated subject built on thousands of years of study and thought. It's worthy of being taught by an actual scholar who dedicated their life to understanding the field.

Parents can teach right and wrong, but they seldom teach about things like utilitarianism or hedonic treadmills.

Evidence of individual corruption is not an indication that we should not teach ethics altogether. This is why ethics need to be taught, so that people are better equipped to weed out bad actors.

That said, who did SBF largely derive his ethics from? His parents, at home, not at his mom's lectures. So all this does is illuminate why it's important for people to get exposed to a wider variety of opinions and ethical considerations.