Sure, but I wasn't alive then, and the work I've done personally hasn't contributed to nuclear war or anything of that sort. Through my college years I had a couple of opportunities to work in the defense industry, but chose not to.

Which doesn't mean people aren't getting shot and blown up, it just means I'm not closely involved with it. My stance is not beating people over the head with morality, it's purely personal and self-centered. It helps me sleep better at night when I'm not building tools that directly spy on people. I'd like to be as many degrees removed from that as possible, really. Don't take my post to mean that I'm prescribing this morality onto others.

We could do a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon that proves that my work actually does lead to pain, death, and suffering throughout the world in a convoluted and indirect way, and it may in fact be true - but I don't think it's a stretch to say that there is a large moral difference between directly working on something with ill effects and being far removed from it with no intentional contribution.

Side note though: I don't buy this argument that we can't condemn things unless our hands our perfectly clean. The fact that we all are products of war, suffering, and other terrible things does not remove our ability to steer the ship forward.

> the work I've done personally hasn't contributed to nuclear war or anything of that sort.

You might find this interesting: https://gist.github.com/zmaril/5326884

TL;DR: if you've contributed to open source in some way, you've probably given Palantir the tools they need to do their work.

I don't agree with the post you're replying to, but your argument seems pretty specious to me.

Software developers are generally no more responsible for the misdeeds of others using their software than anyone else that produces almost any kind of tool.

I agree, its "first do no harm" mantra

I'd go further than that. A bunch of people are expressing surprise/outrage that a bunch of companies that spy on for profit you at the service of the advertising industry are sharing the fruits of that spying with the government for national security.

The greatest minds of our generation are figuring out how to get a sated consumer to click

No, the greatest minds of our generation are still working where they always have: in academia, research labs, etc. The people figuring out how to get consumers to click are the top 5-0.5% minds. When I look back at people from my high school, most of the tippy-top people are getting PhD's and figuring out how to do nuclear fusion. It's the next rung down that are working on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.

Speculating about who has the bigger brain seems pretty silly.

There's no way you could ever realistically prove your position (ditto the parent).

Perched so high, looking down on mere mortals. The view from the Ivory Tower is never cloudy.

Whats wrong with preparing for nuclear war, especially if preparation is an effective deterrent to actual nuclear war. Ensuring a credible second strike ability is probably one of the more rational ethical actions someone can take outside of pacifism.

Of course creating a credible second strike ability is so easy ( merely hide x weapons with delivery systems controlled by PALs ) that it has been a solved problem from the 1960s.

If you're implying that the internet would not exist if the US government had not seen it as a way to prepare for nuclear war, I disagree.

(I do not have an opinion on the morality of working for Palantir.)

How does this logic work? Because people in this profession 80 years ago contributed to those efforts we should somehow be grateful to them or something??