1

Both OpenAI and Palantir required backing by rich people with deep belief and willingness to fund them for years without any apparent or obvious breakthroughs (Elon/YC Research, and Peter Thiel, respectively). Palantir floundered for years, barely getting any real traction in the gov space, and doing the opposite of the ‘lean startup’ thing;... See more

• 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

... See more

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 the law, and - in my experience - even people who are morally uncomfortable with some aspects of policing are... See more

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... See more

1. Morally neutral . Normal corporate work, e.g. FedEx, CVS, finance companies, tech companies, and so on. Some people might have a problem with it, but on the whole people feel fine about these things.


2. Unambiguously good . For example, anti-pandemic response with the CDC; anti-child pornography work with NCMEC; and so on. Most people would agree

... See more

The morality question is a fascinating one. The company is unabashedly pro-West, a stance I mostly agree with – a world more CCP-aligned or Russia-aligned seems like a bad one to me, and that’s the choice that’s on the table.7 It’s easy to critique free countries when you live in one, harder when you’ve experienced the alternative (as I have - I... See more

Second, you had to be weird to want to join the company, at least after the initial hype wave died down (and especially during the Trump years, when the company was a pariah). Partly this was the aggressive ‘mission focus’ type branding back when this was uncommon, but also the company was loud about the fact that people worked long hours, were... See more

First, there were all the people who were pro defense/intelligence work back when that wasn’t fashionable, which selected for, e.g., smart engineers from the Midwest or red states more than usual, and also plenty of smart ex-army, ex-CIA/NSA types who wanted to serve the USA but also saw the appeal in working for a Silicon Valley company. My first... See more

There are plenty of good critiques of the ‘flat hierarchy’ stance -- The Tyranny of Structurelessness is a great one – and it largely seems to have fallen out of fashion in modern startups, where you quickly get CEO, COO, VPs, Founding Engineers, and so on. But my experience is that it worked well at Palantir. Some people were more influential than... See more