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.

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.

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.

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.

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.