Nabeel S. Qureshi: belief

Transcript context

…Let's talk about the moral question of Palantir. A lot of people probably seeing the title of this episode, hearing this, will not be excited about Palantir being highlighted and promoted, a lot of people kind of disagree with what Palantir's doing. Builds products that kill people in some ways, they work with governments they don't agree with. I know you wrote a really insightful way of how you approach this question when you decided to work at Palantir and how you see people tackle with this, can you just talk about the framework that you landed on and how you thought about this yourself? Yeah, it's a really interesting topic, it's definitely very nuanced. I think what I was trying to say in that post was a couple of things. One was that there was a lot of upside there. So I worked on the US Covid response, I have friends who worked on Operation Warp Speed, and these are all things that I think saved a lot of lives, and I was pretty focused while I was working at NIH on cancer research. And so to me, these were just obviously good things and you couldn't do them anywhere else, and so that was alone a reason to stay. The question I had in that post was, well, okay, there are definitely going to be other pieces of this that people object to. So during the 2016 to 2020 era, it became a pretty common thing to go into work in New York and you'd have people protesting outside your office or doing all kinds of things. And so there was this question of, well, is this okay? And I think the point I was trying to make was it's rare that disengagement is the correct answer, and I think it's more recognized now, but especially then it went a bit too far. So the famous example here is Google kind of disengaging with a Pentagon AI project just because some people felt that working with the Pentagon was itself morally bad. I think that's a way to sort of the left of what the median American would say, I think the median American would say it's fine to work on defense stuff within reason and assuming you're doing largely good things, and so there was just this kind of almost arbitrage there at some point of just hang on, it's not like working on defense is inherently evil, it's actually a pretty interesting thing. And then there's this question of, well, would you rather be in the room and making this better or not? And so I'm struggling with how much I can share here, but as a simple example, if you're doing even a workflow, which I think many people would not be super comfortable with, let's say you're targeting somebody for some kind of strike. If you compare the way it's done now to maybe the way it was done in 2010, it's going to be a lot more targeted, it's going to be a lot more accurate, and so you've actually improved that process and reduced the chance of error. Maybe you should feel good about that, right? Now, that is a bullet many people are not willing to bite. I didn't work on the defense side of the company myself, but I think you have to be okay with these kinds of grade zones and actually actively thinking about what you are doing. And that doesn't mean that it's always the right thing to do to work in a defense company. Maybe we go into a very dark future and we start being the bad guys in some ways, and then it's probably not a great idea to work at a defense company. So it's a shifting landscape but I kind of felt pretty strongly that a lot of people in tech just didn't want to think about this at all. n it's probably not a great idea to work at a defense company. So it's a shifting landscape but I kind of felt pretty strongly that a lot of people in tech just didn't want to think about this at all. So you have engineers now who are working on optimizing short form videos for higher engagement, and you sort of want to say to them like, "Hey, are you thinking about what this is doing to the brains of young children?" Or "Have you seen an 11-year-old kind of scrolling something for five hours and do you think this is a good thing?" And I think people don't want to think about this stuff too much. I'm not saying I know the answer, but there was almost this refusal to look at what tech was doing from a political lens for a very long time. It was just like, "Hey, let us play with our toys, let us sit in our little park, and don't bother us, and we're just going to build cool stuff and launch it." And 2025, we're in a very, very different state of the world, tech is involved in politics now, and politics basically came to tech. There's this famous image of Mark Zuckerberg, he's sitting in Congress and he kind of looks very pale, and he's like, "Why have they dragged me in here again?" But I think tech went through this journey of, oh, we're suddenly becoming important now, oh, we're really, really important now, oh, we better stop playing this game of politics. And so I think what I'm saying now is a lot more consensus than it was 10 years ago, but at the time, the feeling was just like, "Look what we are doing is political, so you better engage with that."…

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