I wonder how confident Thiel was of a Trump presidency back in May 2016, when he started being open about his support for Trump. Perhaps he was operating with more knowledge than available to the general public and national pollsters? I wonder how involved he was with CA for the purpose of the election. His $1.25 million donation in October 2016 seems even more interesting in light of all this.
I took out a bet on Trump when Thiel became open with his support. It was driven by my belief that he was operating with deeper knowledge about the state of the nation precisely due to his association with Palantir (mostly) and Facebook. I feel dirty about winning that one.
I've always thought of it in terms of asymmetric risk – something Thiel seems to have a preternatural intuition for. In other words, what he stood to gain with a Trump win far outweighed what he stood to lose with a Trump loss. Most business leaders were throwing in with Clinton. If Thiel had done the same, and Clinton won, he'd be one voice in a crowded field. By being one of the few to publicly back Trump, he all but guaranteed a prime seat at the table. This is exactly what played out post-election, with Thiel ushering in tech leaders in the lobby of Trump Tower.
Had Trump lost, Thiel would have probably diminished his standing with the Clinton administration significantly. But, due to the crowded field, it would have been a small standing to begin with.
And here's the crux: Thiel has held controversial opinions for a while. He probably figured his association with Trump wouldn't really move the dial on his likability much, and he seems to enjoy being contrarian anyway.
So, anyway, there's my theory. Risk asymmetry. A lot to gain in the event of a Trump win, little to lose in the event of a Trump loss.
I don't think thiel and palantir would have lost that much if Clinton won. If the bulk of palantir revenue comes from DoD and intelligence community (IC) contracts, he cares about whoever will increase the DoD budget in general. No matter whether it is Bush or Trump or Reagan, a republican president almost always increases defense and IC spending and green lights new toys for them to play with. Defense contractors who don't care about Democrat or republican ideology simply care about their bottom line.
True that the Republicans usually increase defense/IC spending, but the Democrats support them just as much. Feinstein is almost always pro IC operations. Clinton pushed for US involvement in Libya and Syria, and in a speech before the Democratic Convention was sabre rattling at China. Clinton also, according to Seymour Hersh, was aware of CIA gun running operations out of the US consulate in Benghazi. Obama's support for DoD/IC activities should be common knowledge.
Not making a partisan argument, as I don't affiliate with either party, just stating that both sides exhibit support for DoD/IC activities and both were likely to support equal, if not increased, levels of spending on them
And then the massive DoD budget increases under Bush, post 9/11 and Afghanistan/Iraq related which kept a lot of large and medium sized defense contractors riding the gravy train for a very long time.
As best I can remember Obama did not significantly shrink the DoD budget as a whole, though it did drop a bit from the 2006-2007 peak under Bush, though some programs were cancelled.
I have a simpler thesis. Is it possible that Thiel isn't particularly brilliant about politics? I mean I realize that he's rich and therefore he has to be smart about everything, but... maybe this isn't his field?
It could be that, like many right-wingers or libertarians, he saw in Trump an opportunity to break with the status quo and had the vague impression he'd get the things he wanted, or could manipulate Trump in the right direction.
But has Thiel personally profited in any way from this? He's reviled in Silicon Valley, and the Trump association hasn't obviously brought him anything new.
Have Thiel's ideological priorities been satisfied? He's known for being a hard libertarian, and he supported a man who was openly nativist and who has implemented tariffs. Failure on that score.
Thiel seems like a fairly callous person when it comes to race (as a student, he backed apartheid[1]). Trump may be more aligned with him there.
An analogy to this is why "bad boys" tend to do well at the dating game....
A Biker/Gang Member may not be attractive to most people, but to the portion of the population that prefer someone like that, they have much fewer anti-social males to choose from, and those individuals can do well at the bar.
> Am I the only one who thinks Thiel was just being true to his Libertarian views and wanted to
Given Trump's blatant admiration for authoritarians and authoritarianism, I'm skeptical that Thiel's support had anything to do with libertarianism.
Indeed, given Thiel's founding and constant promotion of Palantir (which feeds at the trough of the military-industrial complex and government contracts), I'm skeptical that he makes many life decisions based on libertarian principles.
Given the margin of Trump's victory was so small, and he lost the overall popular vote, I would be surprised that anyone can be confident of a victory looking at any data set.
There's no logical conflict between saying Clinton had a 10 to 1 chance of winning and Trump actually winning. 10 to 1 still means Trump wins 10% of the time.
Part of the problem is a confusion between raw poll results—where 59-41 means almost certain victory to one side—and statistical likelihood.
On election night, Fivethirtyeight gave Trump a 29 percent chance of winning the electoral college. Not a 71-29 poll result, a nearly three-in-ten chance of winning. Let that sink in for a second, and reevaluate the media narrative that the pollsters got it wrong.
When you take a bet, you play the odds. You evaluate your expected return should you take many such bets, and if it's positive and you can afford to lose, the smart money is in taking the bet.
In fact this is true of most anything you do in life - when you drove to work this morning you played the odds and the wager was your life against your salary. I'm sure you didn't think about it that way, but you took the bet
Fun fact, Trump carried more states in 2016 (30) than Obama carried in 2008 (28). Our country is so polarized that pretty much all elections are close.
States aren't a particularly meaningful counting unit: California encompasses more than 68 Wyomings by population. And the meaning of "carrying" a state by a 44.1% to 44.0% plurality is questionable.
The current division in the US is urban vs rural, with turnout differences and suburbs deciding elections.
D.C. is usually counted as a state in discussion of Presidential elections since it was alotted electors under the 23rd Amendment. (This actually comports with a common practice in federal statute law where any of the federal territories that are treated equal to a state in the particular law are simply lumped into the law’s particular definition of “state”, which is then used to refer to actual stated plus the equivalent-to-state territories in the context of that law.)
The national party apparatuses should be able to find a way to have moderating voices. Most large cities in the U.S. are a one party system dominated by Democrats. Yet if you look at the politicians who are mayors and council members, there's a lot of diversity in ideas and bitter policy disputes.
Let's not turn this in to a pointless political debate. But stories such as the Republican appointee to the DoI saying "diversity isn't important" [0] lead some people to conclude that there's effort to cast other goals as more important than diversity. There are enough threads on HN debating the relative merits of diversity and meritocracy that there's no need to add them here, but this is just an answer to the citation request.
We should be looking for the individuals that will most improve the organization. That may mean hiring someone adequate today instead of someone spectacular who can start in 3 months. That could also mean choosing someone with a different background to most people in the organization. People with different backgrounds will have different biases and think about things differently. Having multiple perspectives is valuable in many organizations.
This is the bailey in the motte-and-bailey defense of diversity. Of course people from different backgrounds will contribute differing perspectives. But in practice, it always ends up being race, gender, and sexual orientation. No talk about getting representatives from groups that actually think in ways that are different. Where are the quotas for libertarians, green party members, immigrants, aspies, former attorneys, artists, competitive athletes, scoutmasters, stamp collectors, gearheads, all shades of personality types?
Spot on. While the idea behind can be interesting, it is implemented by accepting people who have the same "social status" background (same schools, same opinions), but are of different gender/race.
I think that a white factory worker could add way more insight into how other communities views things, than hiring a black/female attorney does...
Having said that, I'm really afraid what the backlash against this type of diversity-thinking will be. The system will surely corrects itself in the future (it's already starting), but I'm not certain going back to another extreme would be very wise...
> diverse and multicultural, something that the GOP has been trying to cast as a negative since at least Reagan.
reply
> stories such as the Republican appointee to the DoI saying "diversity isn't important" [0] lead some people to conclude that there's effort to cast other goals as more important than diversity.
Diversity being negative, and diversity being unimportant are two different statements.
> Our country is so polarized that pretty much all elections are close.
I assume you mean pretty much all Presidential elections (because otherwise it's not true; lots of elections aren't close, and some electoral districts are so structurally guaranteed to be not close that elections are usually uncontested), but even then polarization does nothing to explain that, but the incentive to seek a winning coalition with minimal compromise on issues in a two-party system does.
Imagine you train an algorithm to influence the voters to
win the election. What would be the objective ?
Maximize the probability that your candidate wins.
This does not imply winning the popular vote, nor maximizing the margin of the electoral vote.
Thiel went with Trump for standard VC reasons: because it was a low-cost, low-odds, high-reward play on an unpopular undervalued asset. Also because Trump fits his "maverick" style of operating independently outside of the big establishment machines.
If Trump lost Thiel would move along to doing the best he could with the winners, who wouldn't have a reason to shun him for irrelevant past actions.
Trump had ~50% odds of winning but general betting odds were <30%
Parent comment probably means access to the administration and administration supporters for Thiel and related companies. Much easier to be a voice in a room of 10 people than a voice in a room of 1000. Trump and his picks were more likely to support large defence projects and big business operations that Palantir could profit from.
I just want to point out that what you're talking about here is corruption. To restate: For someone in Thiel's position, the upside to supporting a particular political candidate is the expectation that he will benefit from corruption while that candidate is in office. Everyone knows this but I believe it is worth being explicit about it from time to time. (I don't mean this as a dig against the party or even the person currently occupying the Presidency; this cuts both ways.)
Argh, enough. Cambridge Analytica and friends didn't have secret knowledge. People need to stop lifting up these big data woo casters and weigh their impact on the election beyond their actual ability.
Machine learning/machine vision just killed a person on a well lit street. You people need to calm down on the thinking that Silicon Valley data scientists have figured out everything others haven't other than how to boost ad dollars (and even that is in dispute as recent articles on Hacker News have pointed out.)
> I wonder how confident Thiel was of a Trump presidency back in May 2016
Well how many other companies are there with the capabilities of Palantir? If the answer was "none" then he knew for sure the Clinton campaign couldn't match Trump on social media manipulation. Which means he must have been pretty confident
Eric Schmidt was a big Clinton supporter and I believe helped with her tech campaign. If the chain of events from Nix->Sophie Schmidt->Eric Schmidt->Thiel/Palantir is true then I don't know how the concern wouldn't have been raised to Clinton. I think the real question is what did FB know and when did they know it. Thiel being on the FB board and all. It's also weird that the What's App guy is on the board and just called for everyone to #deletefacebook.
If all it takes is being a "better" psychopath along with an organization lead by psychopaths that only care about popularity and not truth, then with initial testing for calculations - they likely had a very good idea what would happen once they added fuel to the fire.
Is it possible you have the causality reversed here? What if Thiel's confidence was born of a conviction, backed by research, that he could help swing the election for Trump?
Not "our data suggest he may win" but "our data suggest we can help him win".
It's possible that Thiel knew something deeper about the state of the nation through Palantir. However, I seriously doubt that Palantir secretly worked on the data that Kogan sold to CA years after he collected it, as this Wylie guy alleges. He has presented no evidence, and Palantir flatly denies it. I think he has seen the media run with his previous claims, and thinks that nobody will call BS on him now.
I have started wondering what could be driving this guy to make what at first seemed like believable allegations, that now seem more and more wild. I have been unable to find any current employer for him. My suspicion is that he is out of work and thought the attention from this would get him hired somewhere, not realizing that nobody - even the most liberal of firms - will hire him because he has proven, in the most public of ways, that he can't be trusted to not disclose confidential information.
According to [1], he is a dyslexic high school dropout with ADHD who sued his elementary school because he was bullied and "...he describes himself as the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating "Steve Bannon's psychological warfare mindf--k tool." That is certainly a grandiose claim, but there seems to be no evidence that this tool even worked, and in fact there is some evidence to the contrary [2]. It appears that campaigns hired CA not because its data analysis techniques were helpful, but because doing so was a prerequisite for obtaining campaign contributions from the Mercer family [3].
So, we have an out of work programmer with social issues who has no degree and can't be trusted, whose most famous work apparently didn't work at all (according to its customers), and whose biggest asset is that the media will take everything he says as fact. My guess is that Wylie's claims will get even more bizarre as he and his stories quickly disappear from the headlines with no work forthcoming.
First of all, a significant part your comment is ad hominem. For example, bringing up his dyslexia and sexuality in the context of his credibility does no credit to your argument.
More importantly, some very big players have decided that Wylie is very credible. Channel 4's investigation, which featured Cambridge Analytica's CEO bragging about conducting campaign bribery and blackmail on camera, was based primarily upon his whistleblowing to The Guardian's Carole Cadwalladr. Britain's libel laws are quite strict, so Wylie was extensively vetted before Guardian was confident enough to publish without fear of being sued. And Channel 4 approved the undercover investigation of CA on the basis of Wylie's information. Also, with these kinds of blockbuster investigative reports, the legal department gets involved in vetting whistleblowers.
Based on all this, along with Wylie's testimony to parliament today, as well as his willingness to testify under oath to the US Congress, I'd say his credibility is quite high unless specifically proven otherwise.
Bringing up his dyslexia and sexuality in the context of his credibility does no credit to your argument.
I pasted his own quote. That is how he describes himself in the media. That is the only reason I found it relevant - because he found it relevant. In the quote I copied, he also said that he is both Canadian and a vegan, but somehow you didn’t take issue with that. Is it now not PC to copy and paste exact quotes from people? The rules change so often...I can’t keep up.
With regard to the rest of your comment, again, my comment was in response to his Palantir claim. Did he present any evidence of his Palantir claim?
> Is it now not PC to copy and paste exact quotes from people? The rules change so often...I can’t keep up.
You brought it up in the context of questioning his motives and credibility. By the way, I'm a big admirer of folks like Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson, just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from. I hate PC. But I also can't stand ad hominem attacks, and a very significant part of your comment discussed things that have no bearing on your argument.
> With regard to the rest of your comment, again, my comment was in response to his Palantir claim. Did he present any evidence of his Palantir claim?
There's turned out to be a ton of evidence to back up his Cambridge Analytica claims. And his Palantir claims just came out today. On the basis of those two facts alone, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. If he's lying, I'm sure it will come out. But I'm skeptical he's making this all up.
Because all of those factors add up to someone desperate for attention that would do anything for it. That speaks to credibility. Further, suing a school for bullying...something that millions of people experience...is a bit out of the ordinary is it not? What percentage of school children do that? It shows a certain hunger for money and attention, from a very young age, that others don’t have.
I suggest you watch his testimony before UK lawmakers this morning. He appears to know what he's talking about and bases his claims on evidence supplied to the Parliamentary committee.
It doesn't look like he was jobless the whole time.
At 3:01 in the hearing, they get into a discussion regarding Wylie pitching the company he was at in January, 2016, to the VoteLeave people (but not being accepted). Wylie was doing something in Canada at the time though.
And CA was introduced to Palantir by none other than Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of one Eric Schmidt. It’s turtles all the way down, and anyone who thinks their private data is not being abused elsewhere (wink, wink) needs to perhaps think again.
I worked at a small Beltway Bandit-style federal contracting firm. The CEO bragged to me that he was the Democrat and his wife was the Republican in their relationship. His wife gave to Republican candidates. He gave to Democrat candidates. Through their duplicitous actions they could be assured they always had a seat at the table, but had plausible deniability that they were apolitical mercenaries just buying a seat at the table. My point, money is what most of these politicians actually care about.
And children have the same beliefs and motivations as their parents? What reason do we have to believe that Sophie executes her father's will or even agrees with his views on various issues? She has a career and life of her own, I'd wager.
You don't get to live under daddy's roof unless you're following his rules. If you rise into the same industry as your father, with your career-minded father guiding you along the way, you're not off scot-free when you've "paid your dues." You can take the entire Trump lineage for a very notable and public example. Trump Sr. held Trump Jr. under his thumb, Trump Jr. holds Ivanka et al. under his thumb.
As long as the person that helped you get to where you are today is still in "power," you're indebted until he loses his throne.
Their CFO, Ruth Porat, publicly wept at the weekly company meeting when Clinton lost. Google also heavily censored their otherwise automatic search autocomplete so it doesn’t bring up negative suggestions for HRC. No such courtesy was afforded to Trump. Bing, to their credit, did not censor either.
Not refuting your specific claim about Clinton autocompletes as I don't know either way, but in general Google removes autocompletes that are negative.
For autocomplete you can find plenty of evidence. For Google TGIF, that’s what I heard from googlers over some beers, so that claim will have to remain, as you put it, “loose”. It would be kind of strange if there was an official Google PR confirmation for something like that.
"""
Wylie claimed that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was introduced to Palantir by Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
"""
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - Henry Ford
s/banking/data
s/monetary system/psychology
Power is the corrupter that turns people against people.
Thiel would tell you it's government, but that's just people with power. We like to focus on the abstraction in those cases; makes it easier to hide the truth.
Let's let a rando billionaire test drugs in uncontrolled experiments. Cause there's no chance some random side-effect could see it mutate into a human killing oopsie.
They're a rando billionaire, and have been emotionally captured by the nonsense notion he's somehow earned special privilege outside the financial and tech business contexts.
If Cambridge Analytica violated (a) the CFAA [1] or (b) federal election law [2][3], Palantir could be--best case--dragged into years of lawsuits. If they knew about said violations and did nothing, it could be more serious. Either way, I'd write off the near-term odds of their managing an IPO.
If Palantir had staff donating their expertise to CA free of charge then it could also be considered an unreported donation in kind, and therefore a violation for the FEC to investigate.
FEC: "The Commission is made up of six members, who are appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate. Each member serves a six-year term, and two seats are subject to appointment every two years.[1] By law, no more than three Commissioners can be members of the same political party, and at least four votes are required for any official Commission action."
- Wikipedia
Given the Republican's enthusiasm for pursuing Trump pecadillos, nothing will ever come from there.
Every state has election laws and an Attorney General to enforce them. They have already taken an interest in Cambridge Analytica [1]. Palantir shouldn’t expect partisan protection.
It became pretty clear right after Trump won the election (as early as December 2016) during this meeting: https://youtu.be/oX_9yD2lN2g. Trump met with 13 tech company giants and somehow Alex Karp (CEO of Palantir) is at the table. The rest of the executives are from companies with market caps well into the hundreds of billions.
FWIW Palantir gave a pretty ironclad denial on the record for this article:
> A spokesperson for Palantir told CNBC the company has never had a relationship with Cambridge Analytica and has never worked on any Cambridge Analytica data. Cambridge Analytica was not immediately available for comment.
Yes, this. It seems SCL associates have exploited the commercial veil very effectively and we need to look behind that veil to work out what happened. I would also say that SCL has very cleverly exploited the difference between equity and contract payments to subvert spending caps. Invest a business...no spending cap.... I hate these guys. I'm a proud Brit, I do biz globally, and these guys have trashes Brand UK. I'm sometimes close to tears at what these guys have done.
Aaaaand it turns out that a Palantir dude did talk to CA and suggest ideas. Palantir still says they turned down all opportunities and had no interest in doing any kind of partisan election work.
The sad part isn't that CA mined the data or that Palantir helped build models, it's that those 50 million people believed in the campaigns they were fed. If a few powerful people can influence the masses to achieve their objectives, what good is democracy bringing to the table? More importantly, how different is mental manipulation compared to physical manipulation as commonly seen with dictatorship?
Back when propaganda was first being developed as a field, particularly between the two World Wars, it was greeted with a great deal of excitement by the powers that be precisely for this reason: It provided a non-physical means of coercing the will of the masses. There is plenty of material from those days about the wonders of propaganda, that it would enable the ruling elite to guide the caprices of the people while avoiding physical conflict (win/win!). It was always a half-baked idea, and the other shoe dropped very quickly (Nazi Germany was very forward thinking in its use of propaganda), but nothing changed.
I doubt that you can remove all social inequality, and it seems throughout history there have always been people who have exerted their wills more in order to accomplish their ends in society. The deep issue that we face is that there is no ingrained morality. Imagine if wealth and power were viewed as a weighty responsibility rather than a privilege--as the holder is responsible for using it to accomplish what they will, the choice of what one does reflects the quality and worth of the person. That's the reality in any case, but imagine if that were universally ingrained as how we, as a society, defined success....
Fake news is the specific phenomenon observed recently of websites, operated primarily by Romanian citizens, which made up events entirely to drive ad click revenue.
The sites were made to look like they were for legitimate news papers, but there were no actual newspapers with those names in existence.
Soon after the term was coined it was co-opted by president trump to mean all media, leading to the blurring of its meaning.
Fake news is neither journalism nor politically motivated. It’s pure avarice sans morality.
Yellow journalism was still about news and journalism. The root of fake news is hard to even put into words.
It’s people who didn’t care about news, they just a/b tested text and saw what got the most shares and likes.
Then they conned people into believing it was a legitimate source by putting it under a news site like banner.
>More importantly, how different is mental manipulation compared to physical manipulation as commonly seen with dictatorship?
A number of futurists from many decades ago foretold this transition of power from brute physical force to subtle information warfare:
"World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)"
-Culture is Our Business, Marshall McLuhan (1970)
"World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts."
-Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, Marshall McLuhan (1972)
> how different is mental manipulation compared to physical manipulation as commonly seen with dictatorship?
While I think propaganda is a serious problem, all you need to do is look at the raging debate and issues being raised to see the difference between an open society and a dictatorship. Nobody said democracies and open societies don't have serious problems.
Ha. I was just talking here the other day about how my friend at Facebook would always say that Palantir has even more data, including just about everything from Facebook, and a commenter responded that they couldn't see how Palantir would actually be able to scrape up Facebook's data...
I don't think tech companies are literally run by three-letter agencies, but after Yahoo and Lavabit (showing two very different reactions to surveillance requests), it's become pretty clear that any large US-based company is at minimum a backup or validation source for surveillance. The standing questions seem to be "do they accept non-warrant surveillance?" and "do they allow bulk surveillance?". If anyone still thinks they don't comply with targeted surveillance, I'd be shocked.
Well, my friend at Facebook transferred there directly from the Hillary State Department (where he specialized in Libya and Syria!) when Kerry took over...
It's fantastic that they do collect and share this information - I imagine many thousands of arrests made based on data collected, if not 10K's+ I wouldn't be surprised if hundreds of lives were saved... and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Scraping stuff from Facebook is tedious in the extreme due to all the obfuscatory javascript, but that doesn't seem like it would be a problem for a firm with Palantir's resources.
Subpoenas need some probable cause to be issued. It'd be interesting to estimate what percentage of target population you'd need to subpoena complete details on in order to build a social graph of the whole population, but I feel that that volume of legal activity would create waves even if it were only around 1%. Most court systems are overburdended as is, a significant increase would be noticeable.
Of course, if you were just getting that information as a matter of course in many arrests and were willing to accumulate it slowly over time it's very possible. I'm preoccupied with scraping issues as that's my only available avenue.
Perhaps companies contracted to provide data processing services should be required to check that the source of the data was legitimate and within the allowances of data protection regulations.
Just like AML rules, where companies processing large amounts of funds have to check the source of the funds to ensure they were obtained legitimately.
What I want to know: who were the ones who took that data and did the ad buys, picked/wrote the rage-bait content, etc? I don't think I have seen that detail anywhere. Did I miss it somewhere?
(follow the money, etc)
Psychographic profiles/privacy issues aside, to me it's the tension-stoking-Willie-Horton-propaganda tactics that deserve public scorn, if, alas, not prosecution. Unless it was (also) Russia.
Could be a company in Texas named Harris Media was involved in the Kenyan election at the behest of CA according to the Channel 4 investigation. They also are a prime choice for republican campaigns in the US.
Their list of clients seems pretty much aligned with CA's client list.
This title really should be updated. Even the title in the linked story says that this is “alleged,” and there is zero evidence in the story other than the say-so of one media-hungry individual. Further, Palantir has issued a flat out denial, yet this headline appears on HN as a statement of fact.
Not at all surprised that Palantir sees itself as being more powerful than national governments.
The upside is that Palantir and Mr. Thiel will suffer the same fate as most business associates of Mr. Trump, out of the money and with a permanently tainted reputation to boot.
Is anyone getting the sense that Palantir, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook aligned on a rather coherent political axis, with Google and Apple staking out an opposing axis, and Amazon is staking out a sort of arms-dealer neutrality?
no because the headline here is wrong, the CEO of Palantir is a known Trump critic and CA isn't even prominent enough to be on the same level as any of these other companies.
"Mr. Wylie said that he and Mr. Nix visited Palantir's London office on Soho Square. One side was set up like a high-security office, Mr. Wylie said, with separate rooms that could be entered only with particular codes. The other side, he said, was like a tech start-up - "weird inspirational quotes and stuff on the wall and free beer, and there's a Ping-Pong table.""
I think you're being sarcastic but it actually is. The Palantiri are tools made for a good purpose which were co-opted for malicious purposes -- and well-intentioned people got swept up in their wake.
There will be those that are wanting to use data for good - other bad people who have bad or evil intentions, and this is where chain of command and chain of trust must exist especially when mass data is involved; I'm not sure any companies/organizations have chain of command/trust as how I see it, though I'd hope major militaries of the world have this down - and hopefully are full of sane, reasonable people.
Could you repost your original comment please? People seem to think any and all outrageous tales where X told Y some shady Z was happening means schizophrenia.
Your response is extremely rude, both in terms of reviving a deleted comment, speaking of my suicidal ideation as if my demise via suicide is certain, and also using third person in my presence. Further, your representation is false, misleading, and disparaging.
Mods can you please delete this entire sub thread?
I took out a bet on Trump when Thiel became open with his support. It was driven by my belief that he was operating with deeper knowledge about the state of the nation precisely due to his association with Palantir (mostly) and Facebook. I feel dirty about winning that one.