The undissmissable badges in settings irk me to no end. Using language like “finish setting up” in iOS to describe me opting out of Apple Intelligence by choice as leaving MY device in some sort of “unfinished state” is user hostile too. With the amount of effort it takes me to push back constantly on these dark patterns, I know for a fact all my less tech savvy friends and family just aren’t bothering and that’s what they count on.
Not as egregious as what windows is doing with copilot everywhere or sneakily flipping user-toggled options during updates, but it’s all some degree of gross.
Honestly, I always default to material icons unless a project calls for a very specific style. The coverage is just so dang good I rarely find a scenario without an appropriate icon and the style is neutral enough to blend in with a number of UI designs.
Even if it was meant as satire, I have definitely known a scary number of the people being parodied there. Small, sharp, hard-headed. No poetry in the soul. A person like that just fully doesn’t get the need for college to be a place to become a deep, well-rounded, open-minded person where your understanding of yourself, your fellow man, and the world around you can evolve in leaps and bounds. To the college-as-job-factory folks it is simply a place to install valuable marketplace skills and the student loans are a pure business transaction.
I feel the exact opposite, that we as a society should pay for (or at least heavily subsidize) a broad college education so that we put people on the track to being the best versions of themselves before we release them back into the wild world of civilization. I want to work with people driven by a mission, chat with people who are curious and interesting, buy from artisans who are performing a craft with all their heart, live near people who are considerate and kind, and vote with people who have a strong moral core.
Liberal arts education is not the only path, but I think it’s one of the ways people hone those qualities in themselves.
The board (in theory) represents the interests of investors, and even with all of the other duties of a CEO stripped away, they will want a ringable neck / PR mouthpiece / fall guy for strategic missteps or publicly unpopular moves by the company. The managerial equivalent of having your hands on the driving wheel of a self-driving car.
I’ve never worked at Palantir, but once you get past the noisy leadership’s villain virtue signaling, every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes. A lackluster software offering that is overhyped to institutional purchasers, then shoved down frontline employees’ throats because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem. Don’t give Palantir the bad-boy street cred they crave, focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
This is my understanding of Palantir too: it's a consultancy with a map, a graph database, and some "AI" nonsense. They sell expensive "forward deployed engineers" (aka, consultants) to customize this map and graph database to specific use cases.
I'm not trying to argue Palantir is an ethical company; my views on "company ethics" are nuanced but I wouldn't put them anywhere near my "places I want to work" bucket. But (contrary, perhaps, to their name), they're not some weird deep demonic trove of personal information; that's supplied to them by their customers, which is where change needs to happen.
I think Palintr ought to be nationalized and placed under the jurisdiction of several competing watchdog agencies - it can generate automatically our annual, quarterly and etc datasets for specific, selected things.
Anyone in disagreement needs to read about Palintr and what has intentionally been said about it
no i think you and the people you are replying to are getting it completely backwards
people think Palantir makes a lot of money. did Palantir make a lot of money? No. Accenture Federal Services, Leidos Defense Civil IT & Services, Booz Allen Hamilton Gov Consulting & Cyber, General Dynamics Technologies, SAIC, and CACI combined made $61.9b in 2024, compared to all of Palantir which made $2.9b. so if you just look at some IT and defense companies' gov IT sales segments - we're not even including Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or Boeing where calculating such a thing is complex - Palantir's revenue looks very, very small.
people think Palantir makes vanilla "consultants" and “typical enterprise vendor vibes" products. does the thing that Palantir make work? we're talking about it! I think the reason we don't talk about Raytheon's version of this app is that Raytheon's (or Accenture's or...) version doesn't work haha
In what way? I'm genuinely curious; I would describe an engineer who is provided to build a customer product alongside a customer as either a "contractor" or a "consultant," depending mostly on their employer. A security clearance just changes what customers and products they work for.
Contractor makes sense, consultant is a bit weird because the typical understanding is that a consultant comes in to share knowledge, not build product.
The fact that there is a demand for fake evil, functioning like fake piety did in the 1600s, is a flaw of difficult-to-encompass proportion. Our culture is totally bankrupt if companies are now pretending to be worse than they're in reality able to be.
Of course, in contrast to piety all fake evil is also real evil.
> Our culture is totally bankrupt if companies are now pretending to be worse than they're in reality able to be.
I mean, yeah - it’s “he’s not hurting the right people” turned into a product or enterprise and then sold specifically to people who really like that message, and which employs people who desperately want to be in charge of hurting those people as much as possible.
It doesn’t even have the plausible deniability of being a social media company.
The kind of vice-signaling Palantir employees do on this board is more pathetic than the guy who peaked in high school bragging about the time he woke up hungover in a pool of his own vomit.
"No really, I do consequential stuff! See, I met CCP premiers and shit, I supply analytics to help North Koreans assassins kill exiles living in the US! Trust me bro"
I've trolled so many Palantir employees since my freshman year in undergrad that if even 1% of their claims about their power and connections held any water, I would have been audited by the IRS at least once in my life and a "clerical error" would have happened with my car title leading to a weekend in jail for stealing my own car.
I only know 2 Palantir employees in real life, and they are both at least as lame as you would expect someone who says their uncle works for Nintendo to be.
One of them is married to a furry who cheated on him before they got married and supports "consensual love between adults and children", and the other displayed all the outward signs of an incel. The former looks like the old "Carl the Cuck" meme guy (Drew Pickles haircut and Frank Grimes glasses), and the latter told me some copypasta-tier story about how he was friends with "Chinese Princesses". I wish I had my screen caps of this conversation back in 2014, but I deleted Facebook a decade ago. It was bombastic compared to even the Navy Seal copypasta.
If I had to sum it all up, imagine a sysadmin for the Worcester, MA police department pretending to be Lex Luthor on HN for clout.
I do not agree at all. The problem is both Palantir AND their customers. You have a choise not to make the tools and you have a chiose not to use the tools.
I see this theory a lot (sometimes to justify their valuation, sometimes as a moral judgement, sometimes as an alarmist concern) but I genuinely don't see how this line of thought works in any of these dimensions. My understanding is that they're consultants building overpriced data processing products. As far as I know there isn't even usually a separate legal entity or some kind of corporate shenanigan at play; my understanding is that they send engineers to the customer to build a product that the customer owns and operates under the customer's identity as the customer. I certainly see how businesses like Flock are a "loophole;" they collect data which is unrestricted due to its "public" nature and provide a giant trove of tools to process it which are controlled only by what amounts to their own internal goodwill. But this isn't my understanding of how Palantir works; as far as I know they never take ownership of the data so it isn't "laundered" from its original form, and is still subject to whatever (possibly inadequate) controls or restrictions were already present on this data.
The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.
I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer allows you to discriminate on the basis of race while claiming plausible deniability, but SCOTUS has already constructively repealed the 14th Amendment between blessing Kavanaugh stops and the Roberts Court steadily repealing the Voting Rights Act, Bivens claims, etc.
> I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer
See also: Parallel Construction (i.e. evidence tampering) and most of the times a "drug-sniffing" dog is called to "test" something the police already want to search.
On a somewhat related note, it always bothers me that the discussion is about whether it’s appropriate for the government to buy this sort of data as opposed to whether it is appropriate for anyone to sell, or for that matter collect, that data.
I would prefer if neither the government nor any data brokers or advertisers had this data.
> The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.
Right; but as far as I know Palantir don't sell commercial data. That's my beef with this whole Palantir conspiracy theory. I am far from pro-Palantir but it really feels like they're working as a shield for the pitchforks in this case.
Right, and what I’m saying is that to the best of my knowledge, Palantir don’t sell data at all, which is the fundamental misunderstanding people seem to have about them.
There are two really two major concerning issues with Palantir:
1. They provide tech that is used to select targets for drone strikes and apparently also for targeting violent attacks on US civilians. I don't know too much about how the algorithm works but simply outsourcing decisions about who lives or dies to opaque algorithms is creepy. It also allows the people behind the operations to avoid personal responsibility for mistakes by blaming the mistakes on the software. It also could enable people to just not think about it and thus avoid the moral question entirely. It's an abstract concern but it is a legitimate one, IMO.
2. I don't know if this is 100% confirmed but we have heard reports that Elon Musk and DOGE collected every piece of government data that they could get their hands, across various government departments and databases. These databases were previously islands that served one specific purpose and didn't necessarily connect to all the other government databases from other departments. It's suspected that palantir software (perhaps along with Grok) is being used to link all of these databases together and cross reference data that was previously not available for law enforcement or immigration purposes. This could enable a lot of potential abuse and probably isn't being subjected to any kind of court or congressional oversight.
We agree, I think these are the more valid concerns than the "they are operating a data warehouse with all of the data in the entire universe" conspiracy theory that seems popular.
I certainly think that Palantir has ethical issues; as I stated in my parent comment, it wouldn't be high on my list of choices for places to work.
But, when it comes to things like (2), this is a failure of regulation and oversight and needs to be treated as such. Note that this doesn't make Palantir "right" (building a platform to do things that are probably bad is still bad), but there's no reason anyone with basic data warehousing skills couldn't have done this before or after.
Essentially, I think people give Palantir specifically too much credit and in turn ignore the fundamental issues they're worried about. Panic over "dismantle Palantir" or even the next step, "dismantle corporate data warehousing" is misguided and wouldn't address the issues at hand; worry about government data fusion needs to be directed towards government data fusion, and worry about computers making targeting decisions needs to be directed at computers making targeting decisions.
They sell data derived from the data. But it's not, like, a hash function - you can absolutely deduce the source data from it. In fact, that's the entire purpose. You use the aggregation and whatnot bullshit to find individuals, track them, gain insight into their living situation and patterns, and acquire evidence of crimes. Typically that requires a search warrant.
If you couldn't go backwards Palantir wouldn't have a market. So, I would consider that a loophole.
I have really strong knowledge of this from ~10 years ago and weak knowledge from more recently. I'm happy to be proven wrong but my understanding is that they don't sell any data at all, but rather just consulting services for processing data someone already has.
One of those consulting services is probably recommending vendors to supply more data, but as far as I know Palantir literally do not have a first-party data warehouse at all.
>because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
it's not just that. Alexandr Wang from Scale AI once said in a talk that they had to compete against Palantir for a gov contract. Palantir's salesmen have a high closing rate because they sell the software as if it were written by God itself. It's one hell of a sales strategy
There’s a lot of weird hype around Palantir, and I suspect bots that are propping them up in social media. For example look at how many meaningless comments on Twitter/X or YouTube videos mention Palantir’s “ontology”, whatever that means. Many of these comments literally will just say the word “Ontology” and nothing else, as if it is some mysterious superpower that Palantir has discovered. I suspect it is, as you said, just basic software but from a company that has no moral limits to what their software does.
> The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem ... focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
That's how Karp seems to justify these things. Palantir's job is to (in theory) make government better at doing government things. It's up to voters to keep the government in line.
I mean you can say stuff like that but the reality is they purposefully named themselves after a super villains magical spy apparatus so I'm not inclined to take his word about them being ethically neutral. Like I'm not really sure what they could name themselves after that would be more ominous
The palantirs were made by the elf lord prince Fëanor of Valinor, one of the good guys. The one we see in the film was given to the kings of Gondor and then pilfered by Saruman. (elvish palan 'far', tir 'watch over')
This almost makes it funnier? As if it’s the folly of creators to believe that their creations are by virtue untethered to morals and ethics, and it’s only through their use by amoral or unethical actors that they become so.
This is reductionist. Surely you’ve heard of the Torment Nexus?
This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.
The "torment nexus" is just as reductionist a claim. It is almost always an ad hominem selectively invoked under arbitrary standards. If one consistently follows the argument raised in the meme to its ultimate conclusion, then nothing should ever be invented or accomplished for fear of some speculative harm at some undefined point in the future.
Reasonably foreseeable is the tonic to cure your attempt at a dilemma. There's a certain beyond which you don't build things because it's evident that society can't be trusted with it.
I have unfortunately lived long enough to see my passion cross this line.
If you don't mind answering, what exactly was this particular passion of yours?
> There's a certain beyond which you don't build things because it's evident that society can't be trusted with it.
Where does one draw the line and under what conditions? Reasonable minds can differ on the definition of foreseeable.
After all, Some of the most beneficial inventions to mankind have also aided its worst tendencies. For instance, the 20th and 21st centuries as we know them wouldn't exist without the combustion engine. Simultaneously, it's this same device that has significantly contributed to the pollution of the air.
Secondly, how does one mean to stop society or any individual from learning and building on new ideas in the Information age? Is such a thing even possible?
Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition. I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.
> Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition.
If the conclusion of a meme is ridiculous, it stands to reason that the claim it makes is similarly so. Memes are not substantial enough to be considered as evidence or proof of moral pronouncements any more than other popularly-invoked and contextless aphorisms are.
> I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.
The character attack comes from the implied framing of the invention of the so-called "torment nexus" as the direct product of a person or people exhibiting moral failure through action or inaction. What that particular moral failure is or whether it is a moral failure one at all isn't even given a cursory examination by those crying torment nexus.
You’re bringing in something that’s (vaguely and poorly, for no one knows what it actually could be) defined as something that fits the narrative and present it: “see, if we think up a tool that’s inherently evil by definition of it, it cannot be neutral”. We might, but could such tool actually exist?
(And before we joke about building it, we can think up of its polar opposite too, something unquestionably good that just cannot be evil in the slightest. Again, I suspect, no such thing can exist in reality.)
Isn’t the purpose of all thought experiments to define something that is relevant to what you’re trying to philosophize about? “Fitting a narrative” is a thought-terminating cliché.
If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil - without a morsel of moral justification, then surely there exists a moral spectrum on which all inventions lie, and the inventors (and builders) are not absolved of their sins by virtue of not having actually used their inventions. Maybe you disagree that even in the case of the Torment Nexus the inventor has no moral reckoning (yikes). Maybe you disagree that it’s a spectrum, and rather binary: Torment Nexus immoral, everything else moral (weird).
> If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil
My issue is that your use of the phrase "exists ... theoretically" quietly steps across the boundary between ideal (where anything is possible), and real (where only some things are possible).
In other words, I think that Torment Nexus doesn't exist. Only its idea does, and I don't see how that's possibly sufficient. Kinda like faster-than-light travel - it would change a lot of things - but only it if would be a real thing. AFAIK to best of our understanding it's not. Even though the idea surely exists.
I rather think that it's the meme of Torment Nexus is the actual thought-stopper, because exploring what it could possibly be is what the meme warns one about.
It’s really not that difficult to come up with a Torment Nexus that, given enough money, could be built today. I’m not sure why you’re convinced it could not exist. Just browse a bunch of Wikipedia articles about torture and ethnic cleansing and general injustice and connect some dots.
Another point of the Torment Nexus is that it’s dark humor that science fiction writers especially will ideate something in their writing, and spend great lengths discussing the inevitable harm it unleashes, only to wait a few years and watch as someone actually builds the thing they basically warned everyone about. It’s a placeholder for “thing so bad that I don’t actually want to describe it lest some psychopath actually builds it.”
Let say someone creates a tool, an android which is designed to kill everyone that believes in a religion the creator does not like. Is that tool neutral?
Only way to repurpose that tool is to destroy part if the tool and replace parts. It is now a different tool.
I say intention of the tool design dictates if the tool is "neutral". That hammer analogy is tool simplistic to the tools we can now create and are attempting to create.
This is an incredibly silly thing to say. If someone makes a knife that is terrible at carving wood or cutting food but is the perfect shape for, say, clitorectomies... then maybe that tool is bad and we should probably stop making it.
Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?
This hypothetical knife that you've invented still doesn't make any choices. A person still makes the choice of how and when to use it. That's all that matters. Only things that can choose to act can be judged as ethical or unethical.
Morality requires agency and conscious agreement. A machine/device doesn't choose to be made or operated nor can it act against its maker/operator any more than rocks can act against the Earth. Regardless of motive, a moral conclusion can't be reached about the object.
It depends on your moral framework. For example if you believe killing is always wrong, then guns are not neutral - they're a tool designed for evil uses.
Feanor drew his sword on his half-brother and threatened to kill him because he was paranoid Fingolfin was trying to usurp his power. He compelled all of his sons to swear an oath to slay any man, elf or being in possession of the silmarils (which led to subsequent needless bloodshed).
Then he ordered and carried out the mass-murder of relatively unarmed Teleri in order to rob them of their ships.
And yet even Feanor was a “good guy” at one point in time. It wasn’t until many years after the invention of the palantiri that he went off the rails, and that was only after talking to Sauron for a while.
But I think that Feanor’s character is irrelevant. An evil person could create a tool that ends up being useful for good purposes. Tools are neutral; they don’t inherit the character of their creator or their user.
that it takes following the... (charitably) uncommon view that Fëanor was a "good guy" in spite of being a psychopathic thieving mass murderer to excuse the actions of Palantir (the company) should be an indicator that they're Bad, Actually.
> that it takes following the... (charitably) uncommon view that Fëanor was a "good guy" in spite of being a psychopathic thieving mass murderer to excuse the actions of Palantir (the company) should be an indicator that they're Bad, Actually.
While I agree with your assessment of Fëanor I don't think anything in Tolkien's texts indicate that there were nefarious intents for palantiri creation.
And more particularly, any remaining telescope after an apocalypse which caused all of them to be controlled and by a mind-destroying superhuman force of literal evil incarnate.
It’s not the palantir’s fault that Sauron exists. You might notice that there are several other psychic tools lying around that nobody is using because Sauron will enslave anyone who does. The Throne of Amon Hen, certain magic rings, etc, etc. The danger is Sauron, not the tools themselves.
So what? This was never about the moral culpability of the inanimate object itself. (Charitably ignoring, for the moment, that the One Ring was instead a part of Sauron, infused with his own life force. )
This is about the morality and judgment of any person who'd consciously choose to found "One-Ring Controls" (ORC inc.) selling the "Ringraith 3000" that spies on employees and punishes them for not working hard enough.
"Don't criticize me for my branding because fictional crystal-balls and rings are just objects" is not a credible defense.
I haven’t defended Palantir the company at all. I don’t know anything about them. I was merely correcting misstatements about the fictional devices called palantiri.
Frankly the name is amazingly great branding. It makes the customers think, even if only subconsciously, that they have bought a literal crystal ball. That’s genius marketing. Once you’ve got your customers thinking magically about your product you can bamboozle them until the end of time.
That's a common misunderstanding. The Palantir never corrupted anyone. They only became dangerous to use once Sauron got his hands on one. You know, that immortal demon god who always uses mind control to get what he wants? If you use a Palantir he’ll notice and start working you over. If he is stronger than you are then he can force your Palantir to show you things of his choosing.
When Denethor used Gondor’s Palantir he saw orc armies marching and pillaging, foundaries forging weapons, Southrons marching north with Oliphants, corsairs raiding the coast, wildmen pillaging Rohan, etc, etc. Sauron never let him see allies coming to his aid, or his own troops winning battles.
No, that’s normal. See also newspapers, radio news, television news, cable news, Facebook, Twitter, The Algorithm, etc, etc. It’s not like Tolkien invented a new thing here; the wicked Vizier who tells the King selective truths is a trope practically as old as time.
Even if they’re the most evil corpo ever, the buyer is still the government. If a democratically elected government buys this products, I would assume, in large scale of things, the general population wants the most evil corpo.
This works is if-and-only-if you assume everyone involved is a good actor. In fact, many if not most in politics are bad actors, and voters largely believe said bad actors.
Palantir reminds me of IBM 85 years ago, only following requirements and requests from the government, never an accomplice. Extracting shareholder value from human suffering should not be criticised because the effect is one step removed from the engineering and company leadership. Why do the ethical thing when instead you can become rich?
From what I understood they were to read our data and provide some kind of insights. I don't think any of this happened, at least while I was there.
They talk about government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) - it's most likely the reason the company got into this contract, so Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac get some kind of data that they need in their systems.
"Banality of evil." This does seem to be obliquely whitewash the company as it's adjacent to so much of tech. I don't think this exempts them from the hostile intent of their work.
This is just an inversion of culpability. We know that theres virtually no relationship in our Republic with popularity of an initiative and it's passing into law.
But don't people elect their representatives? oh of course!
If your issue is with policymakers, then it is with the people.
This is also very stupid because - essentially when the government is evil you become skeptical of your neighbors, not 538 people who really control your life.
Sorry, but Palantir doesn’t get off that easy. They know full well how their technology is used. Just because a market exists that doesn’t mean you need to fill it. The tech industry could have taken a moral stand like the chemical industry did with execution drugs.
If you watch any entrepreneur-focused channels, the entire premise of Palantir was "what if we just didn't care about what people think is ethically dubious? What if we went into business in all the places that people have traditionally shied away from for moral reasons?" It's part of Thiel's "Monopoly is good/You want to build the 0 to 1, not jump into a crowded market" mantra.
I started a company in that market 10 years ago. We compete with palantir. It’s a competitive market with lots of actors.
On of their strengths is the ability of thiel to raise lots of money, and win huge gov contracts by convincing everyone that what he built is magic. it is not.
palantir is regular enterprise software. morally, they are vilains for sure, but their superpower is being excellent at marketing themselves.
What I meant is that they espoused that attitude in the Silicon Valley world, which traditionally has not really invested in Defense. I imagine that's also why they're able to raise lots of money and build hype trains, they have one foot still in SV and SV VC.
I've worked at a company using it. Wrote this below.
> Probably mostly just people who work at companies that bought their software and know it's not special. It's a souped up version of Databricks. If you've worked with it it's always a laugh to see both their supporters on X who drank their koolaid, bought their stock and think it's some kind of one-of-a-kind magic, as well as people on places like HN who think they're data brokers. I guess HN is 90% people who have only worked in pure play tech plus academia. If you have any friends at Boeing, Airbus, Citibank, ask them if they've used it. Ironically most of it runs on the clouds from the average HNer's workplace, big enterprise contracts with AWS and Azure.
What you wrote here was accurate:
> the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The main advantage they had over other platforms was really granular permissioning, which execs love the idea of and always scores great on box-ticking exercises.
You know who's collecting all this data the gov is shoving on Palantir's platform? Flock (YC S17) - of this very platform everyone in this thread is currently commenting on and boosting engagement of. Having most of these comments on news.ycombinator.com is peak irony.
What other Databricks providers are designing “daddy’s home” style apartment complex bombing target solutions, in order to have AI provide 100x more targets per day than human processes were able to achieve? I understand such tech is not magical to achieve but I don’t believe that’s the accusation
Are they designing it, or is the DOD - sorry, the Department of War that you're likely paying your taxes towards - designing it on their platform? As mentioned, who is providing the data necessary for such applications? For ICE, which this thread is about, it's clearly the likes of news.ycombinator.com's Flock (S17). Whether they put it in a simple Postgres instance or on Databricks or on Palantir's platform or on Microsoft Fabric, I think that's much less core than whose gathering and providing the data.
I think its kind of a conspiracy/"Open Secret" that Palantir was funded by the government to side skirt any "Government cannot...." rules. It's not the government breaking privacy regulations, its a private company doing it....just under contract of the government.
Thats the rhetoric on good ole r/WallSteetBets, atleast.
Theil and Karp definitely play into this angle as well, but that doesn't really prove anything other than they're hungry for investors
Yeah, I don’t have any evidence for this but it certainly would make sense. It seems likely that the US government was catching wise to the data brokering loophole around the same time as the PayPal mafia was cashing out and Thiel would have been in the right circles to run into any well-connected gov’t types sniffing around for the most morally flexible big names in the valley. But it seems equally likely that Thiel just wanted to continue accumulating wealth and power to pursue his other authoritarian projects and the government had the biggest bag of cash around so he worked backwards from that.
If next I hear he’s planning to build a fabulous underwater city in international waters, I won’t be surprised. He enjoys his biblical themes, perhaps he can name it Rapture.
You’re missing the point. The villainy and noise is the superpower of the company.
Operating Palantir in the way ICE is illegal, full stop. Just the IRS integration alone makes most users in a position where they are committing felonies.
Basically, there is little difference between what they do and what Enron did. It’s all based on criminality, and instead of strippers and cocaine, they signal with weird faux Orthodox Christianity and crazy behavior. The “orthodox” selection is deliberate as it feels exotic but is not catholic, so the modern evangelical types somehow are ok with it.
the thing about supervillains is that you expect technical seriousness but thats just Hollywood not showing that psychopaths and narcissists are lazy and sell BS
a person cannot "be illegal". they can perform acts which are illegal, sure, but to call them "illegals" is just dehumanizing rhetoric that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.
Does US have such a lack of space to fail to absorb 2-5% increase over years?
What's so hard about naturalizing or legalizing them, so that they can more easily interact with current power structures on the territory?
Capital city in the country where I live got a 25% population bump over a few months a few years back, of people who didn't even speak the language. Barely anything appretiably negative overall happened.
In another comment, I referenced Eichmann. A train is not a good thing or a bad thing. A rail car is not a good thing or a bad thing. Having an app that aggregates multiple different data sources and puts them together is not a good thing or a bad thing. It's the morality behind the hands into which we put that tools that matters. The more capable the tool, the more good or evil you can do with it. Maybe we should ask ourselves if this kind of a tool should exist at all, or there should be some level of process before it can be used. But the engineer at Palantir is just as guilty or not guilty in your eyes as the engineer fixing the trains or laying new track.
any opinions on the german WW2 engineer laying neutral tracks toward Auschwitz
EDIT: sorry, that was glib. However I want to make the argument that the argument of doing "neutral" physical work is not absolutely morally absolving.
Yes. It's not, and I agree. There's no bright line that says you're morally culpable or you are not morally culpable for what you do. But all of us should think about our roles in that light. If Palantir uses Git, does that mean new Git contributions are part of what is arguably an ethnic cleansing? I wouldn't be able to sleep at night and work on this project. (I do not work at Palantir).
But the point is also that maybe we should take one step back and think about the morality of the people we put in decision making roles. The technology is morally neutral, but the intention is not. And helping to realize that intention is not. And sometimes the things we build can be used in horrible ways unless we also think about safeguarding their use.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is my very real fear that a lot of information has been aggregated into Palantir and other applications and is usable with no restraint. And that even if you just run the build system, across hundreds of apps, you might be culpable as well.
Well that's clearly an example of putting the cart before the horse. You should be able to sleep at night so long as you remember that Git isn't what enables Palantir to power an army of federalized brownshirts; it's the people making the tools explicitly for an army of federalized brownshirts with Git that are morally culpable.
Okay, that's where you draw the line. But someone provides power to their data center and their offices. Someone provides hand-held devices. Someone provides network connectivity. Someone has a contract to house and feed these agents. Someone has the logistical and fleet services for their vehicles. Someone is likely the landlord to their buildings. Someone has a contract to clean the buildings. Someone is a deciding to buy a block of Palantir stock versus some other software company. Someone runs the private prison into which people are herded. An attorney has a choice to file a charge or not file a charge. A judge has the choice to bend over backward to give ICE/CBP the benefit of the doubt, or be skeptical.
Baking a roll of bread is not immoral. Baking bread as part of a contract to feed the gestapo, is.
There are people who would not sleep at night knowing that the tool they created was enabling such things. I believe some are looking to make "semi-open" source licenses that add more restrictions.
Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently? So is building a system cataloguing all Jews and socialists in Berlin also a neutral thing? The officer ordering the legal building of large ovens and carpenter doing the bidding are not guilty? The soldier following the rules written by law that he should coral the ”visitors” and ”workers” is doing no good or bad thing because he has instructions and is not taking judgement on his work?
>Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently?
Without searching for references, it's my understanding that Fritz Haber developed this decades before the war, in conjunction with making synthetic fertilizer. It was later used for the purpose you referenced.
My point was, if you do invent something like Zyklon B, you need to consider its uses. While the gas itself is just a molecule, devoid of morality, not everyone who employs it will be a moral person.
In the case of Palantir, should we allow the federal government to combine databases (which may have been hoovered up by DOGE and held in a private sector company that isn't subject to FOIA)? Should there be judicial review, like for FISA warrants before you can field an application? Should we allow the government to buy that kind of app in the first place? I don't give Palantir a free pass.
But it's not the engineer at Palantir that decides to send poorly vetted and trained people into a home, fully stoked, believing your have complete immunity, and full of anabolic steroids, and praying any of the occupants shows an iota of resistance. 79 million voters chose this. This is the morality of the people employing the tool.
A thing clearly has no intention and it's impossible for us to know every possible use for a product. But at some level we need to feel responsible for what we create, we need to feel responsible for our choices, and we need to see the responsibility others have because of their choices.
No, but it's also the engineer at Palantir who is enabling it with their efforts. If every engineer there immediately resigned and no other agreed to work there, the situation would end. One can try to hide behind the idea that they are only 1/n_employees responsible (typical corollary: therefore not responsible at all), but this doesn't change the fact that they are participants in what is happening.
I think there is no significant disagreement between the two of us, perhaps only on the topic of intentionality of things and degrees of involvement.
A gun has the intent of projecting violence at a distance. No matter if it is used within the frame of the law or not.
A vaccine has the intention of protection against disease. No matter if it is used within or outside the law.
A fence contains the intent of separating things.
A system built to deeply and widely track and catalogue and eavesdrop on people has the intention of being intrusive.
The purpose of a system is what is does. If a system does help the violent actions towards civilians and citizens then that is the purpose of what the engineers at Palantir built.
(I also think I was a bit too confrontational in my earlier reply, sorry about that)
I think you're right and it's possible to have something that exists with no other purpose than to cause harm. And it's not moral to make that thing. I also don't think it's fruitful to find the specific circumstances it's moral to eat babies (go down philosophical rabbit holes until you find the one time that doing something despicably immoral is actually the moral thing to do). But I would say the technology is the least important part of the problem. A moral person uses dangerous tools sparingly and intentionally harmful tools never. If Palantir did not exist, would they perform the raids? I think so.
Germany has a system today cataloguing all the Jews in Berlin (the address registration includes your religion for the purpose of charging church tax), and everyone I've mentioned this to seems to feel it's neutral.
Germany in its constitutional law has protections against that data being used for any other purpose or government agencies. Does that help if a new antisemitic party would take over? Not likely for long, but hopefully long enough for other constitutional protections (like banning the party), anti-fascists or people working there themselves to intervene.
On the other hand folks like the CCC or other data protection NGOs have been trying to teach politicians data minimalism for a while, but in this particular case religious conservatives don't want the state to get out of collecting church tax and the churches don't want the state to get out of it.
In particular, Jewish communities could request the state not to collect taxes, tell their members to not enter that data into the tax forms and collected tithes/donations/similar on their own.
IBM wasn't only providing commodity infrastructure. They designed schema for labeling Jews and other categories of people for targeted internment and extermination
You're missing the part where they named their train after a iconic artifact of evil famously used to do evil train stuff with for this metaphor to work
Mmmmhhhhhh it depends on what the engineer knows about the realistic uses of the tool. As a sibling comments, fixing the railroads to Auswichz might me morally wrong.
Eichmann knew what he was doing and, in any case, forcing dozens of thousands of people to move with less than a week's notice does not soynd quite "amoral".
Yeah, for France just compare reactions to these measures to the marching in the streets and general striking behavior you get from austerity measures, and the subsequent backpedaling by authorities. I can only conclude the average person there either just isn’t aware of this, doesn’t understand the implications, or doesn’t value these sorts of digital access erosions in the same way.
I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
Would it be chaotic? Sure, in the same way that open source or any other form of self-organization is. But boy it sounds a whole lot better than our current model of slavery-with-extra-steps…
I've made my living working fulltime on a single open source project for more than 15 years now.
I think it is important to differentiate between different kinds of projects that people might undertake, and 3 particular categories always come to my mind (you may have more):
* "plumbing" - all that infrastructure that isn't something you'd ever use directly, but the tools you do use wouldn't function without it. This work is generally intense during a "startup" phase, but then eases back to light-to-occasional as a stable phase is reached. It will likely happen whether there is funding or not, but may take longer and reach a different result without it.
* "well defined goal" - something that a person or a team can actually finish. It might or might not benefit from funding during its creation, but at some point, it is just done, and there's almost no reason to think about continuing work other than availability and minimal upgrades to follow other tools or platforms.
* "ever-evolving" - something that has no fixed end-goal, and will continue to evolve essentially forever. Depending on the scale of the task, this may or may not benefit from being funded so that there are people working on it full time, for a long time.
These descriptions originate in my work on software, but I think something similar can be said for lots of other human activities as well, without much modification.
> There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it
Very true. In a UBU world I have no doubt we’d have many exciting libraries, lots of pottery, and many books.
But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
If you think that literally no one is motivated by making more money than the minimal amount they need to survive, how do you explain rich people who still work? UBI isn't a proposal to make salaries illegal, so the problem of "how do we financially motivate people to work" isn't going to change if people happen to get a subsistence wage without employment. The assumption that there's a binary of "people will either be motivated to work or they won't" is nonsensical; there's a entire spectrum of what motivates different people (and how much they're motivated by them). Some people who work now might stop under a system of UBI, but plenty still would continue to. There's a fair question about what the correct amount of money for this is to balance things properly, but without the flawed assumption that motivation is a binary, I don't think the answer is nearly as obvious as you imply.
Seems like you are making same binary assumption that people either work or they don't. The important question is probably how well/hard do people work. Lower productivity means people that work produce less so prices rise. Many make mistake thinking only about having money, but forget the supply part of the equation. If productivity is lower, there are literally less things available to everyone. And these equations are not linear. Look at the current RAM situation for example.
But the major issue is that the progress slows down. Effects of slower progress accumulate with time. At first you are only a few years behind, then you are a few decades behind etc. Imagine inventions, cures being available decades or hundreds of years later (depending on what timescale we look at).
I think UBI sounds nice, but is far from an optimal solution. Wouldn't be better, if we could solve same issues UBI promises to solve in a more efficient way (with less negative side effects)? UBI is just throwing money at the problem, hoping it will solve itself.
No matter how many janitors, cooks, etc you have you'll never invent a rocket. Most hard working people are just doing societal plumbing not inventing. So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.
But, I still think there's a flawed premise here. Loosing a janitor to UBI means that they can occasionally help their friend with rocketry or some other pursuit they have interest in. Providing UBI means that geologists don't need to hoard data because they won't starve if they don't get a cut from it's usage. The people involved in technological break through are often doing it for self-interest or fame and don't stop once they've hit some financial breakpoint.
We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody and at this point it's all gravy. For obvious reasons we couldn't feed/house everybody if they wanted to solely live in NYC but IIUC no UBI proposal is about that; UBI lets you live in below median-desired places without additional income.
> So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.
This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, where a civilization decides that phone sanitizers are useless, until removing them quietly collapses everything else. Declaring work “non-essential to progress” usually just means we don’t understand its role.
But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.
You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. You call work cooks and janitors are doing worthless for progress, but researches (or children in school) need to eat, need to have functional workplace/classroom, etc. While they might not make progress directly, they enable other people to make progress.
> We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody
Why would we need UBI then? The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap, if that were really true. Value of anything is completely relative (which I find that many people have trouble grasping). If something requires very little work, then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
> But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.
Do you think that the people who do valuable research are doing it purely because of financial motivation, or is something else going on there? The point I was trying to make is that giving people a basic income so that they won't literally starve if they don't work isn't going to completely eliminate all motivation to work. Some people will be motivated because they want more money than what UBI provides (as I think there's pretty ample evidence that desire for more money is something a lot of people seem to have independent of how stable their situation is), and plenty of people will be motivated to work for the myriad of other reasons that already motivate them. There's an argument you can make that the money from UBI will be enough to change the decision some people have, but exactly how many people that will be and the effects that have on society will depend quite a bit on how much money is being given. To me, that means the question isn't a binary question of "would UBI be good", but a spectrum of potential amounts of money (with $0 being the choice of "no UNI" that's presented as half of the original binary). Maybe there's a compelling argument that the value should be $0, but I've yet to see an argument for it that actually engages with it as a spectrum in the first place, which is why none of those arguments end up seeming particularly compelling.
Of course money is not the only thing that motivates people. But there's a lot of empirical evidence that it matters. A lot, unfortunately. And I say unfortunately as I would rather have it matter less. But me whishing it doesn't change the data.
UBI is a high concept pitch, that is memorable and catchy, but AFAIK it's not well supported either by psychological models or by empirical economics data. It gives some social safety net. Problem is that it gives a rather weak safety net. We can actually do better.
Can I ask you why exactly does it need to be UBI? If another system (more complex, with less sexy pitch) could provide a bigger safety net and have a more positive economic impact, wouldn't you rather choose that?
> Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own.
Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.
> The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap ... then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
We don't live in an ideal free market.
Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.
SROs not in say NYC are cheap as well. Everybody trying to live in the same major cities will never be cheap.
> Why would we need UBI then?
Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.
Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.
Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.
> Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.
You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? They were already motivated to maximize profits. Optimization is also an additional work which you are conveniently ignoring.
> Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.
Food prices sometimes fall below costs because agriculture is volatile. It's not proof that food is inherently "extremely cheap" to produce. Also, absolute prices cannot be easily compared between countries and low quality food has negative health effects.
> Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.
If basic needs are so cheap that UBI can cover it, then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.
> Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.
Opportunity cost is the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how? And even with UBI they would still benefit, if they get that additional money.
> Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.
> You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant.
We've added a change; of course the world will change! But yeah sure if we introduce UBI and hold the rest of the world the same then UBI will have an unobservable effect.
> If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before?
I mean people aren't actually rational so there's a million angles there. However, the cost of a janitor is going to go up with UBI as the opportunity cost has increased.
> then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.
No, I just don't think you understand the world around you. Have you never heard of remote nomads? Plenty of people work full-time for parts of the year or part-time all of the year.
> Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how?
Giving the information away for free costs you the money that you could've gotten for charging for it. When you need that money to survive then you have to restrict access. When you don't then you're able to volunteer it.
If we want to have any meaningful debate on what effect something has, we need to try to separate what are the reactions/side effects caused by it and to try to avoid additional confounding changes that were not caused by it. Trying to undo the negative side effect you don't like by, for example, introducing new technological innovations, or in your case a new optimization even though there is no increase in anything that would help do develop this new optimization, is making a confounding change.
While speculating what might happen in some particular cases can be fun, the real questions that need to be answered are regarding the macroeconomic effects of UBI. Starting with what % of GDP will be needed for UBI that will cover all the basic needs (food, housing, healthcare, etc.)? And then focus, not just on what few good Samaritans might do, but on how households, firms, and governments would respond at scale: labor supply, wages and prices, inflationary pressure, taxes, effects on productivity, growth, etc.
But I think our discussion has run its course. While we clearly have different opinions, it was still fun and I hope we both learned something. Be well!
I don't disagree that people work with different amounts of efforts, but if anything, to me it seems far more likely that people who have to work only because they won't be able to survive otherwise are going to be more stressed and less likely to be able to work productively. If the only people who work are the ones who choose to rather than an additional set who are forced to in order to survive, the average motivation level is going to be higher, and it's not obvious to me that this wouldn't be better even if the total number of workers is lower. This just seems like another balancing problem, and there's still no obvious reason to me why the default assumption is that maximizing the number of people who work will end up being the best option.
> But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
You're making the mistake of conflating UBI with "no one works anymore". This is a silly mistake to make. It's like believing that providing a universal healthcare service that provides basic care to everyone somehow meant supply and demand for private health services would be eliminated. In the meantime, look at pretty much any European country which already provides free universal healthcare.
Listen, UBI stands for Universal Basic Income. Universal means everyone gets it, Income means an inflow of cash, and Basic means it's not much, just enough to cover basic needs. Think of a kind of unemployment benefit for all that doesn't go away once you find a job. Once you get a job, you get paid an income that supplements your basic income. That's it. The biggest impact is that if you find yourself out of a job, you still get an inflow of cache that allows you to meet basic needs.
UBIs does change the economy. For example, most if not all poverty-mitigation policies can be effectively replaced by UBI. Instead of food stamps, use your income to buy food. There's no longer a pressing need for unemployment benefits if you already are guaranteed a basic income.
My main objection to UBI: won't landlords, grocery stores, power companies and the like simply raise their prices to suck up that money that everyone is guaranteed to have now until it ultimately doesn't cover basic needs like it was designed to do? Maybe I'm being too pessimistic.
I actually volunteer to take care of parts of the trash in our neighborhood. Like with a proper garbage truck. And the amount of volunteers so big that I only have to do it a few times a year. All the money they make with recycling goes to the local school. It is fun to do, even in cold rain. The garbage truck driver gets paid, but I am sure in an IBU world even drivers would chip in if they could afford it. People want to contribute and feel useful.
I’ve met a lot of people who are passionate about public cleanliness to the point of organizing rubbish pickups, beach cleanups, and river dredging using their own power. With UBI, you may have to take your own trash to the landfill but rest assured the larger ecology will still be taken care of by passionate people.
I think a bigger issue will be that the people who are passionate for a project may not be the most effective at accomplishing it, and without income you can’t motivate those more effective people into working on the project.
UBI is not in contradiction to paid work to make more than the minimum that is guaranteed. Think of it as being like food stamps that you get in addition to whatever you do or do not make.
Interestingly, UBI would be compatible with ending the minimum wage. If survival is guaranteed, then there is no reason to insist that a low end job pay a living wage. As long as someone wants to pay for the work and someone else wants to do it, let them!
This sounds like it'd be one of the many ideas that sounds great on paper but in reality just creates an even greater stratification in society. I think you're completely correct that in many places, particularly higher end - people would come together to keep the place looking great, possibly even better since you get to 'own' it on some ways.
But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly. But I also think we're looking at things superficially. There's a lot of technical work that can't be casually done like plumbing or electrical that is currently moderately compensated. In an UBI world costs for this would likely skyrocket which would lead to an even higher UBI which would lead to even higher costs which would lead to Zimbabwe.
Pessimism aside I would probably actually support it, simply because I think it would be the ultimate expression of liberty - but you have to realize that you're not going to create anything like the same society we have, but with everybody being able to independently support themselves. You're going to completely destroy the contemporary economy and create a new entity that would probably be much closer to something of times long since past when the overwhelming majority of America was self employed. 'The Expanse' offers a realistic take on what UBI would probably entail.
> But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly.
You're letting your prejudice get in the way of making a rational argument. There is no difference between what you chose to call "urban" and any other place, be it rural, suburban or urban. You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.
Of course OP is silly in making the mistake of believing UBI will get all people working on urban waste management fired and out of a job. It's like believing that if a service provides a free tier, all other services will suddenly vanish. But presuming people don't care about their surroundings because they live in an 'urban' neighborhood reflects a problem that's about prejudice and not UBI.
This is rather a tangent but I spent years living in these areas. Have you ever wondered why it seems so many people who grew in these sort of places tend to have seemingly so much less 'empathy' for them than those who grew up e.g. upper middle class? You are probably seeing things through a foreign perspective where you assume everybody is, more or less, like you and so these awful differences must be caused by reparable externalities. You probably imagine that if you were granted infinite power, you could create a utopia.
But what you learn living in these areas for years is that no - not everybody is like you, or even remotely like it. There are a significant number of people who are simply broken and beyond repair. It reminds me of this video [1] which is from a minister of the UAE speaking on a perfect analog. The one thing I'd certainly agree with you about is that prejudice is bad, but the direction of one's prejudice, good or bad, matters not. We should always form our opinions based on reality, and not ideals.
> You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.
I think that is what observation actually is, you get to see what others have done in the recent and not so distant past, or am i missing your point.
Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about. There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study.
I personally know that some crucial open source work is maintained by people with schizoid-avoidant spectrum issues. I know a lot of them but I won't out them here. hikikomori are driven to be invisible because their extreme pathological avoidance of attention. You don't know them and their contributions because they don't want you to know that they still live at home, out of their car door dashing because no company ever hires them, are shut-in because of serious unhealed trauma, are still deeply in poverty in such a wealthy industry etc.
A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
Many prominent pseudonymous devs have had hikikomori traits.
_why practically inspired a generation of Ruby devs. visualidiot (RIP) was a crucial driver behind a lot of web dev culture in the 2010s. Heck, I made significant contributions to Joomla and WP themes back in the day -- you have probably used sites with themes or plugins I made. Also I ran a blog a decade ago that used to rank prominently in google and receive dozens of emails a month from people struggling with mental illness -- many people crediting me with saving their lives. Surely that is something of value to society.
Don't go around spreading bullshit like it is facts about a group of people we know little about.
>> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
> Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about.
Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?
> A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
"likely", "might" - this is all speculation on your part too. There is no reason to believe that a lot of humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would, in fact, contribute more to society, nor that the contributions from those that do would, in fact, offset those that don't.
It's speculation on both sides of this particular argument I see no compelling evidence at all.
> Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?
If we can't tell, the "they aren't" bit is of course made up. Are you not arguing in good faith, or are you just not paying attention to what you're quoting?
"they aren't, plain and simple" is the made up bit I was calling out. There is literally not much more to the original comment to be calling made up.
"A lot of these humans" was me referring the humans I personally know mentioned in the prior paragraph. And I was speculating on the effect UBI would have on them.
Because anecdotally my experience is that hikikomori are a hotbed of creativity and that financial assistance with no strings attached has helped us increase contributions. However, it is very possible I have a skewed sample point because of course I would only know the hikikomori that are hotbeds of creativity -- I wouldn't ever encounter those silently scrolling and never building community online. That said, it feels intuitively correct to me that people with no irl connections would be pretty motivated to build connections some other way. I certainly was. But perhaps that is simply outlier behavior maybe it is more typical for hikikomori to spend their lives watching anime. We don't know.
The thesis of my comment is that we don't know enough about the demographic of hikikomori to state absolutes about them -- to do so is to spread bullshit. I said "There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study." Which seems to also be the thesis of your comment. I suspect from your comment history that you are just being deliberately argumentative so you can pass reading off as new insight.
People who are specifically not employed because they aren't motivated to do anything at all don't seem to be the best sample for what average people could do if they had more free time during their waking hours.
It seems unlikely that the most motivated people will take up UBI; the most likely UBI recipients are those who are marginally employed, and likely marginally motivated.
a) I'm not sure it logically follows that the hikikomori would be a particularly artistic group, thus don't understand the assertion; b) how do we know they aren't? By definition, they wouldn't be out promoting their works or gaining recognition.
Also, there is at least one example of UBI contributing to an increase in activity:
"According to the research, 31% of BIA recipients reported an increased ability to sustain themselves through arts work alone, and the number of people who reported low pay as a career barrier went down from one third to 17%. These changes were identified after the first six months of the scheme and remained stable as the scheme continued." [1]
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: the flourishing of the arts in Bohemian districts[1] in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Maybe there’s a feedback loop with societal expectations regarding the hikikomori / NEETs? The more they are demonized as unproductive, the less productive they become.
Hikikomori seems to be largely a symptom of mental illness. NEETs almost by definition are not productive.
The fact that these groups are not producing mass amounts of creative works in no way implies that currently-productive people would not produce significantly more creative works if they had the time and resources to do so.
No that wouldn’t. If the zeitgeist, culture, society at large are antagonizing toward you, if you are meant to feel like a useless negative part of society, why would we expect amazing output from them?
This reinforces others talking about the flaws of hustle and grind culture. The status quo create the conditions for the negatives and then point to that and say “see”.
NEETs are, by definition, people who are either unwilling or unable to do anything productive, so I don't think they are a good example. I expect you'd get better results if you include the people who are employed today.
> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
It's funny how you chose to frame groups as "NEET", but you somehow failed to refer to "aspiring artist" or "aspiring musician" or "aspiring novelist". I mean "aspiring artist" already implies engaging in an activity albeit not professionally or reaching success.
You also somehow failed to refer to "amateur artist". As if not enjoying enough success to live comfortably with your art to the point of requiring to hold a job to pay rent is something that would validate your argument.
I'm not sure you are even aware of the fact that most of the mainstream artists you see around are not even professional, in the sense that in spite of their success and touring they still need to hold a job to make ends meet. Check out any summer festival, pick any random non-headliner band, and see how many members hold jobs, and had to take time off to go touring. Even some music legends have a history of holding humble jobs at least up to the time they made it. See Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, who famously lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident while working at a sheet metal factory.
It's not just music, either. Luminaries like Fernando Pessoa could very well be classified as the ultimate NEET as he spent years of his early life not in education, employment, or training.
I don't think that's the only reason since the dole exists today too and there's not as much good music coming out.
Jazz and other music genres in the US came without government welfare, they came from struggle and oppression. Motivated artists will still work part time to fund their dream, they don't necessarily wait for welfare to start making art.
IF you were to give a lot of people free money today, will you get more and higher quality art in return, or will most people just drink and smoke that money while playing videogames at home?
Society, people and the world today are vastly different than back in the 1960s, so we need new polices targeting the society of today, not 1960s policies.
What do you mean there isn't much good music coming out? Maybe the genres people are creating more of don't match your personal preference, or you aren't looking for it and are just relying on major media companies to show it to you, but ive never had more high quality music of more variety than ever before.
Much of it is farther in the electronica genres that many people somehow still ignore the existence of but I haven't had to listen to the same song twice unless I wanted to in a number of years. Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.
>Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.
How is that proof of "good music"? That's just background noise.
What do you think those policies might look like? It's true that we have more screen based entertainment options today. We also have a very different music distribution system that is likely influencing things substantially. In the 1960s, I imagine getting on the radio was what it took to launch a career, now it's matching the algorithm on spotify.
I don't know what the right policies would be, but I noticed that smart, driven and disciplined driven people will always find a way to work around algorithms to get to the top, it's not something the government can legislate in order to get a desired outcome.
It's not like becoming famous back then was easy either. Plenty of good bands never got anywhere. The Mona Lisa wasn't a famous painting until someone stole it in 1911, before that nobody gave damn and now it's the most famous of them all. Survivorship bias and randomness in art is real.
Um, hikikomori are a hotbed of creative works, though. Your entire premise is false. I don't know that you could get reliable statistics proving this claim, but Japan likely has the highest number of creatives per capita of any country in the world, and a ton of them are NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels. The vast majority of this creative work isn't commercially successful, of course, which is part of why they're NEETs.
> "NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels"
And you expect the voting public to be persuaded to support UBI because of the immense societal value of an tsunami of gooner fanart (yes, I do have some passing familiarity with the sort of output Japanese NEETs generate) and "trashy webnovels"? I'm pretty sure that when the person I'm replying to talked about "the incredible artworks [and] literature ... that would spring into existence", that's probably not what they were hoping for.
I'm not commenting in any way on UBI, as I try to avoid having strong opinions about topics I don't have expertise on. My only stake in this matter is addressing the patently false claim that NEETs are not creative, when the exact opposite is true which perhaps is incidentally harmful to the argument you were building against UBI given that you staked it on an inversion of the truth.
That you boil it down to "gooner fanart" reflects entirely on yourself and what you view. I believe this is known as "telling on yourself". The overwhelming majority of the artistic output is actually not lewd; somewhere in the region of 85-90% of what gets published is SFW. Not only that, a pretty considerable amount of output is in fact professional-quality; if anything keeps them from being professionals, it's merely the fact that they spend their time creating what they want to see in the world. Being an actually professional artist generally entails creating what other people want to see in the world; specifically what a critical mass of people willing to pay want, which renders commercially viable art to a limited subset of possibilities, mostly only possibilities that appeal to the lowest common denominator if you want to ensure the safety of your income.
You could indeed say that literature is a weak point relative to the very high quality art, music, games, etc, in the NEET cultural sphere, but it's because people aren't trying to be literary. There is simply a subcultural preference, among both creators and consumers, for easier-to-digest writing. The forms of creativity people take an interest in don't have to match the exact ones you value in order for them to have merit. People read and write trashy webnovels because they like trashy webnovels, and that's fine too. It is still an expression of creativity all the same. And some small percentage of those trashy webnovels do go on to be extremely commercially successful, so even if that's your cynical metric for creative value to society it would still be incorrect to say they don't have value.
>There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
As it happens, the Japanese internet is absolutely rich with content created by individuals, most of it done for the sake of love for creative work rather than financial motivation. I spend much of my free time either consuming it or contributing to the pool of such work myself. The entire point of this discussion thread was about the potential for creativity if you were to unshackle it from the demands of financial self-sustenance.
As an aside, I believe this phenomenon manifested as strongly as it has in Japan because of the extremely low cost of living relative to the level of economic development; a studio apartment can be had for less than the equivalent of $200 USD per month, and many parents can afford to and are willing to pay this price to get the NEETs out of their house. In essence enabling them, not that they want to enable their adult children to depend on them but the burden is small enough that they can tolerate it.
People valuing something is not at all the same as people spending money for it. For one, there is always competition with an abundance of freely available material. At the very least, you’d have to compare with a situation where nothing of the sort whatsoever would be freely available, and that’s very hard to do.
That being said, I’m skeptical of UBI being workable as well.
I think that's an unbelievably cynical worldview, one I don't agree with at all, but within that view: what of the things people value, but which they do not pay for? Much of the tech of the world is built on the free labour of FOSS developers. Are they not contributing to society because they are not compensated for their contributions?
I contribute to FOSS, and everything from issue reports to branches and pull requests are indications of a project’s value! True value is difficult to measure, but there are many projects which contribute no value.
It's quite possible to be creative while not contributing to society or whatnot.
A crappy sand castle from a eight-year old that will be torn down when the tide comes in is not really contributing to anything useful, but can be quite creative.
I never disputed the fact that shut-ins can be ‘creative’, but instead focused on ‘hotbed’. I would characterize artistic failures as being more ‘original’ and perhaps ‘creative’ than successes, but they still lack value (to anyone but the creator). Regardless, this seems pointlessly semantic.
Counterexample:Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered in the 1840s that hand-washing dramatically reduced deaths in childbirth. The medical establishment rejected his findings, and he was institutionalized and died tragically, vindicated only after his death.
Surely this was a contribution even if not valued at the point of making it.
Even given the other objections to your argument, there are an extraordinary number of examples of now-very-appreciated artists, writers, etc whose work was not valued at the time they were creating it.
Hikkis will barely have their (speaking from Maslow) physiological needs met, and seldom their safety and security needs. This leaves them with very few mental-emotional resources to put into even having any creative thoughts. UBI would absolutely uplift these people into a position where they can start producing output.
and yet their hypothesis is true, there are already many people, with or without UBI, that volunteer, create things and in general help people surrounding them without any reward and they are the backbone of every society, not the career-chasers
I think phenomena like hikkikomori have more to do with (at least perceived) social rejection than lack of motivation. If the only acceptable message you receive from society is that you must chase the brass ring constantly and any setback means you are an abject failure, then withdrawing from the pain of that rejection makes sense for anyone who has experienced enough setbacks or strongly feels alien to that culture. A broader societal shift would occur if it was truly universally understood that everyone has value as a human being separate from their labor market leverage or capital accumulation.
There will always be strivers who measure their self worth against superficial standards (Russ Hanneman “doors go up” hand gesture here), I just don’t see why everyone should be forced to play that game or starve I suppose. Giving everyone the option to settle for a life of basic dignity while caring for those around them, or going all in on some academic / creative pursuit seems equally valid investments for society.
Yes. The only real conclusion from people like NEETs is that society failed them. Outside of a fraction of total people (or when addictions are at play), it is very rare that someone never wants to be productive.
> Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
If people find these things useful, they can actually pay for them. If you can't find people who value it enough to pay for it, then may be it's not as valuable as you think it is.
By that measure, doing something for a poor person who cannot pay would be entirely worthless, while delivering food to a particularly generous billionaire would be more valuable than an entire month of an average person's work.
The error of your argument lies in the assumption that any participant in the market possesses enough money to pay the true "value-to-them" of a thing.
I support UBI, funded by high capital gains taxes, to offset the growing value of capital relative to labor due to ever-improving automation, but I think it's silly to think a significant number of people will ever be happy with UBI alone.
First of all, "baseline needs" are fluid. These days, electricity and internet are broadly considered baseline needs, but would have been unimaginable luxuries for previous generations. The future will inevitably bring new "baseline needs" we can hardly yet comprehend.
Secondly, the vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum, no matter what that minimum is. If you have a friend who can afford fancy things, and you can't, then more likely than not, you will not be satisfied. It's also much easier to attract a partner if you're financially successful, for similar reasons. That's just human nature. Just because you don't have to worry about starving or succumbing to the elements does not mean people will stop competing with one another.
> The vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum
Isn't that a benefit for UBI? If everyone's basic needs are met and they want more, nothing would stop them from taking a job and making more money right?
Ya. I'm saying I support UBI, and that the concern most people raise about UBI (usually along the lines of "I don't think anybody should just coast by without working") is completely unfounded.
The parent post was talking about how everybody would have more time for unpaid pursuits if only we had UBI. I'm saying that I don't think UBI would change that much. People will continue to pursue unpaid hobbies much like they do today, but making money will still be just as important.
UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.
You need to impose a tax called the Land Value Tax to prevent landowners eating up the public money. Even then we got a long list of much needed public spending before we can even think about a Citizen's Dividend.
> UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.
This is only true if there’s a static supply of rental units, which isn’t true in most places (despite new construction being constrained by regulation in many places). I support an LVT, but it is not a necessary precondition for redistribution.
I'm generally an advocate for a robust safety-net such that people shouldn't be on their knees every month just to scrape by with food/housing/healthcare, and would love it if we reached Star Trek/The Culture levels of post-scarcity, but I'm simultaneously not convinced by this idea, but possibly from another angle.
1) I'm not sure I want Github to be the arbiter of FOSS resource distribution (See: Spotify and small artists).
2) A second order effect could be creating a reliance on it which enables a future rug pull once the current framework is eroded.
TL;DR: I wholly agree with your overall vision of the future, but not necessarily this step towards it.
“Strong” social safety can be achieved only by enslaving producers who have to provide the ground for “many many” caring people. This is always the case. Consider Russian support of young families: the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have. Personally, I cannot imagine a worse moral depravity than supporting this atrocity as a matter of justice.
Capitalism is not “slavery with extra steps,” it’s freedom in a fragile world repleted with conflicting goals. Just because people don’t agree with your goals doesn’t make you a slave.
>the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have
IDK, this seems perfectly reasonable if the state also provides an old age insurance / pension system for retirees. Without a younger generation of people paying into the system (i.e. the children of parents) these systems collapse. It seems appropriate to support the people that keep the government functioning.
Of course, I’m guessing you oppose systems like social security too, given your comment. I just find it odd that you can’t imagine anything worse than giving money to parents, given most governments give money to a lot of people, most of whom aren’t opting into anything as noble as parenthood.
Giving uncharacteristically large direct stimuli for procreation disproportionately incentivizes the people in dire need of money, meddling with the rationality of the decision and increasing social tension later.
The only other way to be promised a big pile of cash from the govt there is a military contract.
UBI is an idea from another money-centric ideology, namely “libertarianism”. It’s not an idea for fostering creativity. It’s an idea for dealing with less employable dependents of society, while the true dependents (parasitic capitalists) take the real spoils of industrialized productivity.
Doesn't UBI come from taxes? I can't reconcile the idea of welfare for everyone resonating very well with any of the libertarians I know. Personal charity, sure, absolutely, but not government controlled payouts to people, even if that includes everyone. They would probably consider it better than the current welfare system with all it's bureaucracy, but that's as positive a response as I can expect.
Most libertarians I know (and I consider myself an on and off libertarian as I learn more about it) want the government to stick to making sure people's rights aren't being trodden upon and otherwise leave us alone.
I'm not agreeing with the OP proposal, but with LLMs today, no matter how you license your code and no matter what ToS or other prohibition you put on it, there does not seem to be any way to prevent LLMs from absorbing and using it to implement a replacement based on your code unless you choose to only do closed source code - there's no "opt out" for someone's source code, let alone an opt-in (again, unless we give up open source). (A very different situation from the AI companies themselves, where companies such as Anthropic make Claude Code closed source, and their ToS provide strict prohibitions on using it to work on something that could compete with them - can you imagine if Windows or MacOS's ToS prohibited people from using their OS to work on a competing OS, of if the VSCode ToS prohibited people from using VSCode to work on another editor?)
> The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary
Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly that's it includes levying taxes, so that's pretty much a meaningless characterization.
Let's put it in more concrete terms: if the US government passes a law to raise taxes to fund UBI, that probably wouldn't even make the last of the top 100 most oppressive things it's done to innocent people in the past year. If the strongest objection to this policy would be "I don't want to pay taxes to fund things for other people", it's in pretty good company.
> Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly
Yes, and that's why great care and respect should be applied to how the government uses the tax money which they have raised from oppression.
Paying somebody to work for free for a giant corporation is not a justified use of that money. Those corporations should pay for their labour themselves.
I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour. When it's done to pay for an army to defend ourselves against enemies, for the justice system to protect all citizens, or for healthcare to save lives, then that's palatable. As well as for a myriad of other things. But to pay a programmer so that he can make server infrastructure so that Amazon doesn't have to pay him? That's not palatable.
Not among the standard things which every government always does. Are you thinking about crimes against humanity and such?
For example, I am a very strong supporter of free speech. And many or most governments oppress free speech. But I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech. I still think taxing labour is worse than oppressing the population with curfews, which is also something almost every government engaged in during the covid pandemic, and which I am against.
I think you've missed the point again, it's more like this:
1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.
3. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
If you can't go to step 3, then you are doing it wrong and need to change step 1 from "giving it away for free" to something like "giving it away for free to the common people and at a price for corporate."
Which you could say "but that's not open source!" and you'd be right, which is exactly my point here: I don't think you want to do fully open source software, you want to do software and get paid for it somehow. If you do open source and get paid eventually and non binding, that's a nice little bonus, but it's not the main goal, never was with open source.
Although I agree with your overall point, there is a middle ground here: (commercially) non-free but open source software.
I believe that's where the biggest disagreement ITT lies. There are currently good ways to do FOSS, proprietary closed-source and free closed-source software development. But if the OSS is worth charging for (commercial) use, devs are left with asking for donations, SaaS or "pay me to work on this issue/feature".
There arguably should be better mechanisms to reward OSS development, even if the largest part of an OSSndev's motivation is intrinsic.
You're not wrong, but I think it is increasingly harder (and perhaps socially taboo) to stay far away from proprietary software while still being part of a functioning society.
FOSS zealots love to dunk on capitalism, but unless you're prepared to go off-grid and live in the woods, and try to convince other people to be poor along with you, you might be very lonely.
Yeah, it’s good to see a sensible response to community pressure here. While I take the point that they only conceded after pressure, at least they did concede. I’ve upgraded their brand in my mind from “planned obsolescence e-waste villain” to “cares about PR and will do the right thing while being watched”. I think the only truly trustworthy companies regarding end of support handling in consumer tech are those whose brand is explicitly tied to openness / repairablity ala home assistant, framework laptops, etc…
Sadly those tend to be niche companies already focused on power users, but any other firms should be considered guilty until proven innocent of enshittification (forced bricking, closed source, subscription creep, privacy violations and data brokering).
Not as egregious as what windows is doing with copilot everywhere or sneakily flipping user-toggled options during updates, but it’s all some degree of gross.
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