My understanding from being close to but not directly connected with part of a company successfully infested by Palantir’s sales is that it’s a lot of “oh yeah our tools do everything” but then it turns out you’ll be needing to hire them for a lot of expensive development to get anything cool out of it, because it’s not actually a stand-out product that magically does all the stuff they’ll try to convince you it will.
Just another data platform, not much different from the others except better at convincing execs they are.
This seems to be the way a lot of companies are organized. They have a data analysis product that can do everything you need no matter what that is. However, their product is actually a subscription service to their company to access what amounts to a list of their consultants who then implement some custom solution, for a price, into the platform.
Wouldn't it be easier to simply hire consultants directly?
One of the most successful sales stratergies for high end products is to sell "Black Magic", that is, procducts that are too complex to explain.
eg if you are selling a "hedge fund stratergy", you tell the client it is too hard for them or they are not large enough to invest. And they will fight to be included.
Palantir works great in as much as it is primarily meant to keep Peter Thiel in the same room as government officials. The software side of the project is by all accounts a pretty generic contracting business and works about as well as any other contractor.
After Doug Lenat passed away recently I also got the impression that Cycorp has been sustained for the past four decades with that exact business model.
At the end of the day customers have a working solution, but it’s all developed and operated in a completely bespoke way each time.
> Civil society groups have raised alarms about a single private company handling so much personal data, especially one dogged by concerns that its software can be used for mass surveillance. During the Trump administration, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency used Palantir software to help find undocumented immigrants.
Not just _any_ private company, but one chaired by _Peter Thiel_ ffs. Short of actually naming the company "Unethical & Impulsive People LLC" there isn't a bigger red flag I can imagine of to indicate to the NHS that they should not be in business with them.
I don't think impulsive is the right word, but it is concerning that someone who is fervently anti-democractic is a key stakeholder in these sorts of public private partnerships globally.
It's definitely possible to view his actions as part of some grand strategy, but I find his political manoeuvring to be short sighted and impulsive. As for the ethics, he started Palantir specifically to make money from the cascading need for government agencies (beyond the usual suspects) to encroach on the privacy of citizens.
I have to thank some of the comments above for causing me to look into Thiel more closely. As such, it seems you've cast what he thinks of the women's vote quite wrong. These are the two relevant quotes from an essay he wrote[1]:
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
> It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.
He's not saying that women shouldn't vote, but that they tend vote against his libertarian politics and thus he sees little hope for democratic solutions. Are we not allowed to think that certain politics are wrong or against our own wishes, and that groups tend to vote for certain types of politics? It seems to me to be very normal to feel a lack of hope or even apathy when looking at voting patterns.
If he really thought that libertarianism was a good system, would he be okay with me expressing my freedom to use the resources he considers his? Or would he want government enforcement to maintain "his" resources?
If that freedom of expression is speech and associated freedoms, then yes, why not?
Perhaps there are anarchist libertarians who say there is no need for property rights enforced by government. However, I suspect those same people would also support a right to bear arms (without a government who except themselves could enforce such a right?) and, without a government to enforce the even deeper property right of assault laws, I can see calamity there, probably for you.
Pretty much all libertarians favor some mechanism for the enforcement of property rights. They may differ as to how, but they agree that you shouldn’t be allowed to steal other people’s stuff.
(Please, I beg you, argue with the opinions that people actually have instead of something you just made up.)
What makes Peter Thiel unethical and impulsive specifically? I can read tittle tattle and tribalistic nonsense on almost any website that allows comments, let's try to get above that here by at least providing the substance behind such assertions.
Not sure what the parent meant by it, but he presents in public as a democracy skeptic and authoritarian technocrat (with the exact same “and by technocrat I mostly mean rich and sharing my opinions, of course” thing that nearly all such people end up at). He’s pretty up-front about it. Exactly the kind of person I’d like to see with no access to levers of power or anything else important.
He appears to follow the same pattern as lots of other rich captain-of-industry authoritarians we’ve seen… well, since the advent of modern democracy, really, to a T. The background on it’s kinda a boring read, because it’s so familiar. Wikipedia’s got the gist and links to the details, but I’m sure someone out there’s got a site that catalogs the whole thing.
While we're at it we might also strive for people not requiring every aspect of a debate to be catered to their familiarity with the subject at hand It seems plausible that anyone using HN for discussion could probably read a little about Thiel and see why someone might believe him to be unethical, certainly.
What he might describe as his political "strategy" is actually a bonfire for money often found to be burning in support of the most atavistic and reactionary candidates. I'm sure others would characterise it as a master plan but to me it seems impulsive and haphazard. (I accept that one clearing the hurdle of "set up a political action committee to funnel millions of dollars into hard line candidates" is not impulsivity in the same way that children exhibit it, but I hope that's clear.)
If you're genuinely in the dark about why Palantir – a company which exists to help inexpert government agencies and QUANGOs to spy on their citizens and which I believe counted the CIA among its first institutional investors – is the sort of company an unethical man might start, then I'm happy to share my reasoning, but these are not contentious points. I was really just astonished that the current UK government keeps finding ways to make itself more unelectable with every passing minute.
As I wrote, I can read tribalistic nonsense anywhere. Perhaps if you put more time into trying to show some reasoning beyond if you read about it you'll feel like me unless you're evil or stupid then you wouldn't get these kind of questions.
