Reflections on Palantir

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.

> We need to teach our students...

Teach your values to your own kids, man

The perfect response to this kind of preaching.

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

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.

You have just re-invented the priestly caste.

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.

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.

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?