well, this assumes that the person who created Palantir identifies with the protagonists and not with mordor, and this issue with your interpretation is that peter thiel very explicitly identifies with mordor
“Gandalf’s the crazy person who wants to start a war… Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.” - Thiel 2011 Details
we really need to mandate that software engineers and ML researchers have some rudimentary ethics and aesthetics education, words really cannot describe how much of an abomination AI generated music is, it should be an outrage to our collective intelligence and creativity that tools trained illegally on the work of unaware artists are attempting to disposes those artists of their livelihoods and cultural functions
while we spin our wheels trying to displace those of us who have decided to produce culture, our adversaries will invest in medicine, energy production, transportation, etc...
what profound contempt for humanity a culture must have to produce tools such as these
not a very useful comment, respond to the claims on their merit, whether NYT sees SV as adversarially really has limited bearing on determining if their critiques are valid, especially given that they are reporting on real phenomenon
People will generally approach information differently if they know the source of that information has a financial interest in pushing a certain narrative.
E.g. hedge funds or short sellers publishing financial advice is seen as "talking their book" rather than high quality analysis.
I find it absurd to think that the NYT would hope to achieve some commercial advantage by (and being able to) "slander" big software as a whole.
That makes no sense to me.
You could also say that every member of this board should be considered biased towards journalism as a whole, because most work for companies who have nothing to win from independent journalism.
Maybe some even work for direct competitors (online media) or companies with an interest to thwart the independence of journalism?
Framing the NYT as a competitor to SV as a whole also says that SV would be a competitor to journalism: that makes no sense to me.
Which one of the MAG7 is a journalism company? I know Amazon owns The Washington Post and I know that Alphabet and MS want to use content from journalists without paying and best replace journalism with AI or at least become a gatekeeper.
> Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news
If the NYT was journalistic, your point would be valid. They are now activist, so their motives should factor into the weight you ascribe to their analysis.
Wild to come across people on HN who don't seem to understand that "knowing things" has a price tag, that there is no such thing as "no price is too high", that science that can economically justify itself shouldn't be publicly funded and that science that must be publicly funded should have to justify itself to tax payers.
wild to come across people on HN who don't understand that putting economic scrutiny on scientific studies and questioning the public funding of science will both slow the development of yet unknown useful knowledge, as well as slow down economic growth
the perniciousness of the "we need to economically justify the kind of scientific research we are doing" is that plenty of the research we've had that has been economically beneficial was NOT obvious when it was being conducted
by restricting research to programs that may have economic benefit, you restrict yourself to funding things that we pretty much already know, which is a bit more like R&D and less research
to give two examples
1) Gila monster venom - research in the 1990s on Gila Monster Venom formed the building blocks that would become GLP1 medications, which are likely to be some of the best performing medications of all time, as well as have the huge societal benefit of reducing the obesity load on the health system, when this research was being conducted its implications were not known and could have very well been on the chopping block if we were trying to "justify it to taxpayers"
2) CERN - the study of high energy particle physics at CERN is a classic case of "how useful is this knowledge?" It's pretty easy to look at this and wonder how it economically justifies itself. What difference does it make to the tax payer if we discover the Higgs Boson or not? Well, the entire digital economy is down stream of CERN. The internet was partially developed to facilitate the transfer of large quantities of data from colliders like CERN to be analyzed elsewhere in the world. For fuck suck, the world wide web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners Lee. If we didn't invest that money into CERN, or other research institutions, who knows what the web would look like today, and how large the digital economy would be.
Yes, these are just two examples of how research without clear ROI has had economic benefit and justified itself to tax payers. The crux of the issue is we don't know how valuable what we don't know is, and we don't know what branch of science will have the next society altering discovery, so a random walk through scientific research for the sake of knowing things is valuable, because there are undoubtedly things we don't know that will benefit us greatly.
So my argument is in a way like yours, the science does have to justify itself to taxpayers. But the evidence is that the process of science, and knowledge seeking at a high level have justified the funding of science, going study by study to figure out what will have ROI and what won't is a great way to ensure that we discover less and less, leaving more and more stones unturned.
the private sector made it to the moon 56 years after the public sector
it's going to take the management of our shared resources and spaces (orbit) for instance to leave earth, and this becomes especially important as Kessler syndrome risk rises with increasing debris in orbit
private companies launching without public oversight and controls are a recipe for cluttering earth's orbit and leaving us earth-bound for far into the future (same if the public sector launches without care but that seems less likely imo)
that semaphore article is pretty interesting, there is a whole body of work being developed by folks like Gil Duran, Naomi Klein, Emil Torres, etc. right now diving into the Tech Right and characters like Andreessen
one thing I'm struck by is the willingness of people who greatly benefitted from the downstream effects of basic research (ex: the entire internet economy being downstream of DARPA, CERN, etc.) to tear down basic research, to .... unleash science?
take Peter Thiel for instance, across Youtube, blogs, and articles you can hear him railing against science and how it's stuck in the 70s...there almost seems to be this Silicon Valley disdain for science & scientific research and I'd love to understand why engineer/innovator characters are so antagonistic to researchers
(aside: there is a strong chance these characters are hyper interested in race science, eugenics, and gene modification and they are simply upset about ethics which they euphemistically refer to as "dogmatism")
:100: the fact that these technofascists are willing to amputate the hand that feeds them (NSF, DARPA, NIH) tells you everything you need to know about how deluded they are. It's literally Terminal Engineer Brain.
Very much agree we need to make and shame these dufuses who think they'll be the God kings of federated techno states, like Thiel and his ersatz court philosopher Moldbug.
“Gandalf’s the crazy person who wants to start a war… Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.” - Thiel 2011 Details
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/takedemocracyback.org/post/3lk4u55a... it's an interview from the September issue of details magazine 2011, has largely been scrubbed from the internet
So in the case of Thiel, he read LOTR and identified with the villains, which is about as large a misreading of Tolkien as one can make