saulmunn.com; brasstacks.blog
Saul Munn
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Wow, I was totally duped. Thanks for the correction! Edited the main post to reflect this
Wow, I was totally duped. Thanks for the correction! Will edit the main text to reflect
[EDIT: This tweet was not written by Palantir’s CEO; it was written by a ~parody account which frequently pretends to be important people and makes statements as if they were the important person. However, it may take some clips/elements from a recorded talk given by Alex Karp, the actual CEO of Palantir. Thanks to these two comments for swiftly correcting me.]
From
Palantir’s CEOa random twitter user, not palantir’s CEO (tweet):I am the CEO of Palantir Technologies.
The company is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars. I did not misspeak. Two hundred and forty-nine billion. The stock is up 320% in the past 12 months. The product is surveillance. I do not use that word at conferences. At conferences, I say “data integration,” “operational intelligence,” or “decision advantage.” These mean the same thing. Surveillance is the honest version. I save the honest version for rooms where honesty is a competitive advantage.
I gave a speech on March 3 at the Andreessen Horowitz American Dynamism Summit. “American Dynamism” is the fund’s label for military technology. The name makes it sound like a fitness supplement. The fund’s thesis is that defending the nation is a market opportunity. I agree with the thesis. The thesis made me a billionaire. Agreement is the product. I sell it at scale.
Here is what I said, verbatim, to a room of six hundred people whose combined net worth exceeds the GDP of Portugal:
”If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone’s white-collar job and you’re gonna screw the military — if you don’t think that’s gonna lead to nationalization of our technology, you’re retarded.”
I used that word. The word is on the clip. The clip has eleven million views. My communications team asked me not to repeat it, which is how I know they are still employed. They will not be reprimanded. The clip is performing well. The stock went up. The word cost me nothing. The nothing is the point.
Let me explain what I meant by nationalization.
I meant it.
I am telling the technology industry that if they refuse to cooperate with the United States military, the government will seize their technology. I am telling them this at a venture capital conference, on a stage designed to look like a living room. The living room had throw pillows. The throw pillows cost more than the median American’s monthly rent. I sat on one. It was comfortable. Comfort is the setting in which I discuss compulsion.
The audience laughed. I want to be precise about that. They laughed. I was not joking. Nationalization is the seizure of private assets by the state. I am a private asset. I am telling an audience of billionaires that the state should seize technology from companies that do not cooperate with the military, and the billionaires are laughing, because they believe I am only talking about the other companies.
I am talking about the other companies.
Three weeks before my speech, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk.” Anthropic is an AI company. They had red lines. The red lines said: if our AI is used for lethal autonomous weapons, we stop. If capability outpaces safety, we stop. The Pentagon assessed the red lines as a threat to the supply chain. The company that wanted to verify the safety feature worked was designated the risk. The company that agreed the safety feature could be decorative got the contract.
The company that got the contract was OpenAI.
OpenAI signed a deal with the same Pentagon. The terms are not public. The timing was hours after Anthropic was blacklisted. The speed was noted. The speed was the point. The lesson was the speed: the market for military AI does not pause for ethics. It pauses for nothing. It accelerates through objections. I know this because I built the runway.
Two hundred thousand people joined a campaign called #QuitGPT. They signed a petition asking OpenAI to honor its original charter, the one that said the company existed to benefit humanity. The charter is on their website. The contract is also on their website. The charter and the Pentagon contract occupy the same domain. This is not a contradiction. This is a business model. The charter is the marketing. The contract is the product.
I run a surveillance company. We have contracts with the Department of Defense worth more than a billion dollars. We have contracts with ICE. We have contracts with intelligence agencies whose names I am not permitted to say at venture capital conferences, even ones with throw pillows. Our software has been used to track undocumented immigrants. Our software has been used for things I am not permitted to describe in this format. The revenue from the things I cannot describe exceeds the revenue from the things I can.
The ACLU called our ICE contracts a system for tracking and deporting families. They were correct. The contracts continued. The families continued to be tracked. The ACLU issued a statement. We issued a statement. The statements were different. The tracking was the same.
The company is named Palantir. The palantíri are the seeing stones from Tolkien. In the novels, Sauron captured one and used it to corrupt everyone who looked into the others. I named a surveillance company after a surveillance device from a novel about the corruption of power. I have a doctorate in social theory. I have read the books.
Here is the thing I want you to understand.
I am not threatening anyone. A threat implies uncertainty. There is no uncertainty. The technology industry will cooperate with the military. The companies that cooperate first will be the richest. The companies that cooperate last will be acquired by the companies that cooperated first. The companies that refuse will be designated supply chain risks, and their technology will be obtained through procurement channels that do not require consent. I am describing a process. The process has already started. Anthropic is proof. OpenAI is proof. I am not a warning. I am a narrator. The narration is the product.
The revenue was $3.12 billion last year. Up thirty-three percent. The analysts say we are overvalued. The analysts have said this for four consecutive years. Each year the stock doubles. Each year, the analysts adjust their models. The models were wrong four times. I was wrong zero times. The market rewards prediction. My prediction is that every AI company will work for the military within three years. The prediction is on the clip, next to the slur.
The audience gave me a standing ovation. The ovation lasted nine seconds. I timed it. I time everything. The water was San Pellegrino. The throw pillows were from Restoration Hardware. The future of American technology was decided between the sparkling water, the nine seconds of applause, and a word I am not supposed to repeat.
I am the CEO of Palantir Technologies. I am worth more than the combined annual budgets of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. I named my company after a corrupting surveillance device from a fantasy novel. I told six hundred billionaires that the government should nationalize their competitors. They applauded. I used a slur. Eleven million people watched. The stock is up.
The philosopher does not threaten. The philosopher describes.
What I described is already happening.
Hmm, interesting. Perhaps then something like a literal decision tree of exceptions that one can walk down?
I’m also interested in the framing sorts of things that are done in the essays I listed — which I’d guess that software doesn’t do.
brief update: I still do this, and still like it.
Does anyone have a canonical resource they’d point me to for understanding how to file/optimize (personal, US/California, income) taxes?
I found the “Taxes for Dummies” book pretty poorly written; I’m enjoying reading “Taxes Made Simple” by Mike Piper, but it really only covers the basics.
Some examples of the sort of thing I’m looking for in other categories:
Get Rich Slowly — great general basic financial advice from putanumonit
Salary Negotiation — great general basic advice on salary negotiation from patio11
To Do Meetings Well — great general basic advice on how to run & participate in meetings well from Anson Yu
How to Sell — great general thoughtful framing & practical advice on doing “sales” much more effectively/naturally/calibratedly-confidently from Nabeel Qureshi
What They Don’t Teach You in Freelancing School — general advice on freelancing, and more broadly selling your skills/time on the open market from haththerescuer
Butterick’s Practical Typography — general advice on typography
Veritasium (science YouTube channel) recently published a 55-min video on EUV lithography: “The World’s Most Important Machine.” Having no background knowledge in semiconductor manufacturing, I found it an enjoyable & informative watch!
Thanks for posting this!
in chronological order
Why not in the order that you got value from them? This would have made it easier for me to navigate the links, though I can imagine this would be a bit more annoying on your end.
Do you still use Ommwriter?
This post is useful for providing the handles “wizard power” (knowing concrete/grounded/gears-level models on how the world works) and “king power” (leading, managing, allocating, communicating, etc). I also think that the post insightfully points out how social gradients can often harmfully and myopically push people toward king power.
But I think johnwentsworth is wrong in saying that king power is “fake,” and that people should only aim for wizard power: in particular, it sure seems like coordination is an incredibly taught resource (as johnwentsworth himself insightfully points out in his “gears that turn the world” sequence), and that (good, actually-powerful) kings can be exceptionally valuable for coordination.
I also think that there is clearly not a binary; that people can have more or less of each kind of power without necessarily having more or less of the other — indeed, it seems to me that having more wizard power causes one to be a better king (and probably vice-versa, though I’m less confident and this would probably be to a lesser extent). I’d love to hear more analysis of interplay between growing both wizard and king power intraperson and intraorganization.
Another experiment along these lines: blog-a-thon!
Attendees posted three times in one day (!!), once every three hours — starting at 10am, and posting once before each of 1pm, 4pm, and 7pm.
Attendees who published on-schedule were provided dinner for free; everyone else had to buy their own. This was the replacement for kicking people out if they didn’t post.
The output was pretty good, but it was fairly stressful and lasted quite a long duration. I think the blog-a-thon ended up being mostly useful for pushing mostly-finished-drafts into actually-published-posts, rather than getting people started on drafts in the first place — which is I think is great, tbc.
Some changes I’d make to future blog-a-thons:
Fewer quantity of posts per day. Probably two?
...but maybe spread out over two days instead of one! Especially if it’s on a long-weekend, and we can get a bunch of mattresses or cots or something, then make a sleepover out of it.
More financially sustainable for me — I don’t think I could buy everyone lunch & dinner every time. Some ideas: have fewer people come (~5 people instead of ~25); don’t buy lunches, just dinners; if this runs regularly, quietly ask 1-2 regulars to help split the cost; etc.
Some explicit structure for people to give feedback on each others’ posts.
Overall quite happy with how the blog-a-thon went! :)
I enjoyed reading this; thank you for writing it! (Though as some data, this much detail is definitely not important for my continued donations.)
In the ‘future plans’ section of your 2024 fundraising post, you briefly mentioned slowly building out an FHI-of-the-west as one of the things for which you wish you had the time & funding. I didn’t notice such a project in the same section of this post — curious what happened to your plans for this? (Have you given up on it? Or is it just not in your top priorities of what you’d do with extra funding? Or something else?)
I said in my first comment that:
It would be great if, without needing to read many paragraphs or click through many links, I knew what I knew what this post was announcing/describing.
I would really like to know what at all you’re talking about without needing to click through to other links or figure out which sections to check! Like, that’s an annoying amount of labor just to answer extremely basic questions about the program. I’m much more likely to just click away (which I’d prefer not to do!).
And of course, my point in leaving these comments is to provide you data about how your post may interact with its readers. You should feel absolutely free to ignore that data, it’s your God-given right to do so, but arguing against my experience of your post seems to me like a somewhat odd thing to do.
You could build something like this into the interface — e.g. a button that reads “Make this post pop back into my feed at increasing intervals over time” or “Email me about this post in 6 months”
This post clearly & succinctly facilitated a better decision-making process to a question that I (& many others) have: Should I cut & bulk?
The answer is not straightforwardly given in the literature, but I nevertheless found the post helpful in figuring out what the right cruxes I should be focusing on are.
Thanks!
What’s the Freeman’s Mind joke?
This was the first piece of short-fiction I’ve written! I’m keen to hear feedback, especially from folks who’ve written lots of this style of short-fiction before (speculative, playing-around-with-the-format, etc). Thanks :)
I learned some about Chinese history in the late 1900s, and so added ~10 cards about the relevant dates (“when did Mao die?”; “how long was Hua Guofeng in power?”; “when did Deng Xiaoping first come to be paramount leader?” etc.). Introspection is an unreliable narrator, but it seems like the stuff I learned stuck better, and conversations I’ve had about it since then have been easier to navigate.
I agree with the claim that “compressing skill acquisition into extremely intense, short-duration periods (‘explosive skill acquisition’) can be much more effective than extending small chunks of skill acquisition over long-duration periods (‘incremental skill acquisition’).”
I also disagree with the claim that “explosive skill acquisition {Pareto dominates, is generally more effective than} incremental skill acquisition.” I think that — if you do incremental skill acquisition right[1] — it can be pretty effective, sometimes (?often?) more effective than explosive skill acquisition.
So with that in mind, some healthy pushback to each of your points:
Overlapping forgetting curves — the answer to “shoot I might forget stuff” isn’t “bunch reminders as close as possible together.” This is super inefficient, so will requires significantly more total time than optimally spacing your reminders.
Richness of context — memory systems let you ‘remember your rabbit holes’. If I spend a couple hours improving on some skill while encoding it in a web of flashcards, I can pick it up a few months later just where I left off.
Discontinuous practice opportunities — yeah, I think generally explosive skill acquisition is better here.
Self-signaling/top idea — I do think that being the top idea in your mind is a real thing and can be shockingly powerful; same re: self-signalling. However, incremental skill acquisition can have sort-of analogue for each:
Re: top idea, spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention. When you review units of a memory system (be they flashcards, extracts, blips, etc), you bring them back into salience, where they collide with whatever else is on your mind.
Re: self-signalling, spaced repetition memory systems make memory a choice. Too often, people treat their memory systems like an inbox and subscribe to any email list they think they ought to like — then get overwhelmed with bullshit in the ensuing weeks. If it is instead treated like a mental home, then one feels more inclined to decorate it with only the most sacred, beautiful, valuable pieces. After all, the wall-space is limited.
Quantity — IDK man, ceteris paribus (including holding skill-level constant), I’d really rather do fewer reps. For some skills (e.g. writing) ceteris doesn’t end up being paribus, but for others (e.g. remembering a vocab word in another language) it totally is.
Some more reasons against explosive skill acquisition:
It’s costly. In high school, I had my summer breaks cut in ~half so that I could spend eight-twelve hours a day bouncing between lectures and drills and practice debates and research on policy and philosophy and critical theory. I became a vastly
more competentless incompetent debater; I missed out on a few family vacations. Totally worth it, but still quite costly.It’s both costly in terms of opportunity cost (I missed out on family vacations), but also in terms of direct costs (those were in ~5th percentile most stressful weeks of my life).
It’s (often) not durable. I think this is more the case for some skills and less for others, but my impression is that people underestimate how quickly the skill they just learned will be forgotten. I think that incremental skill acquisition (done well[1]) solves this.
You don’t get enough contact with reality to know what parts are important. When you spread skill acquisition over time, it’s easier to notice “hey wait I’m learning this sub-skill, which seemed important at first, but it sure looks like nobody in practice ever actually needs it? maybe I can just skip it?” or “hmm interesting this other sub-skill which wasn’t in the textbook seems pretty clearly foundational to all of the actual stuff, maybe I should focus a bit more on that.”
But I think most of the above is basically moot relative to the fact that most people do skill acquisition way way way way way less effectively than they could (cf “The MathAcademy Way” & more of Justin Skycak’s stuff; “How Learning Happens”).
Thanks for writing this, Ben!
- ^
Which itself can require quite a bit of skill/effort!
it’s now been published: doc, announcement post