Palantir is clearly a mind-boggling on-the-nose, but terrible name to those familiar with the book.
The Palantiri consistently provided their users technically accurate intelligence that lead to disastrous strategic decisions.
Denethor committed suicide out of despair, after a palantir showed him the black fleet approaching, but he did not know that it was actually Aragorn who had captured the fleet and was coming with reinforcements.
We don't know specifically how the palantir deceived Saruman, but it's pretty clear it was one of the key factors in his corruption and downfall.
And even Sauron himself was misled in this way! The palantir showed him, correctly, that a hobbit and Aragorn were at Helm's Deep, and he concluded that Aragorn had the ring. So he prematurely moved his armies out of Mordor and left the plains and Mt Doom unguarded, which permitted the destruction of the ring.
I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.
I've pointed this out before, but there's an interview clip of Alex Karp saying that Trump won the election in a landslide[0].
If you look at the actual numbers, no one, with any idea of mathematics or statistics or even just basic analysis skills, would call Trump's election victory a landslide.
It calls into question the fundamental raisin d'etre of Palantir. It makes Palantir look like a pure propaganda tool.
Therefore, also entirely useless for strategic decision making.
Well you could just say ”purpose” rather than ”reason of existence” in French. Some expression of course only exist in French - about 70% of English language - but the purpose of this francoism I never quite understood.
It’s easy to explain once you realize the real ideology of these people is money. Even if they have other internal beliefs they’ll get buried under the desire to make more money.
Money is just a metric. I'd say their real ideology is power. It's the classic authoritarian delusion that has fueled every "web 2.0" startup, now writ large - it's okay if we centralize power, because we will only ever use the power for good. Of course this completely ignores how power agglomerates in the real world, especially in the presence of the strong Moloch attractor accelerator that is state-orchestrated capitalism (why it's tempting to focus critiques on money).
And ironically (or not), this overarching dynamic is exactly the core lesson of the One Ring! It's like their main takeaway from the books was "having that ring would be awesome!!1!".
Maybe the facile fascination with Tolkien comes from having read them too early in life, before they were able to understand adult concepts like burden ? If you think of Frodo as merely having to do some chore that The Adults are making him do, then at least he gets to play with some pretty awesome toys and see some pretty cool stuff. And this would seem to be the level of moral development underpinning the contemporary neofascist movement (or "autocratic authoritarian", for those who are triggered by the F-word).
But Karp, Steinberger told me, needed “to find a reason beyond just opportunism and necessity” to embrace Trumpism. His reasoning, however, is so incoherent it seems pretextual.
Toward the end of the book, Steinberger quotes Karp lambasting the left for failing to adequately address antisemitism, chaos at the border and the threat of Iran. “I’m sick and tired of left-wing people fostering right-wing populist movements because they won’t be adults about these issues,” said Karp. That is perfectly cogent as a centrist critique of progressives. As a justification for aligning with a right-wing populist movement, it’s bizarre.
"Woke" was originally about waking up to the fact that America was built on systemic racism (which is absolutely the case), but was then artfully redefined by the Right as "shrill liberal nonsense" that is designed to be completely vague and amorphous so that it satisfies the desire for "librul tears" and cannot be defended because there's no specific points to defend.
So by stating they are "anti-woke" they just mean "New! Improved! 100% Librul Tears!". It's intellectually fraudulent and just spiteful.
I haven't been able to discern any motive to the grassroots maggot movement that isn't spite, or more charitably, wanting to make themselves heard actual results be damned.
Even when you put on your hat of thinking "what policies are they upset about here, and how can they actually be solved?", the actions of the regime are just performative. There was a political mandate with control of Congress, and yet all of these changes are being made by executive fiat ?
Put aside your personal policy desires for a minute. "Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48454210). This should never have happened with any halfway competent administration that bothered to put the appropriate legislation through Congress, right? It's almost like the goal is for these pushes to eventually fail, so they can go right back to blaming "liberals".
As far as Karp, this is just basic rationalization. You can see the same dynamic play out in many HN comments. They absolve themselves of agency to remain blameless for supporting wanton destruction.
It's mind-blowing, isn't it? I've tracked Presidential politics since Watergate and these times feel like we've entered another universe.
I have two associates who are MAGA, and they are both devout Christians. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think that many or even most Christians are so in name only, and the only part they care about is the authoritarian part. The irony of them literally worshipping a man who fits the description of the AntiChrist to a T would be hilarious if we didn't have to suffer through it.
And one of the biggest pain points of all is that a lot of otherwise intelligent people have been brainwashed into this and are literally incapable of recognizing that or more importantly, to be able to discuss policy in a rational and fact-based matter.
I'll say it again here loudly: I've yet to encounter a Trump supporter who isn't an intellectual coward when it comes to evaluating the policies and actions of this and the prior admins. They cannot face reality. It saddens me -- I take no pleasure in this.
Might be a hint that a lot of tech/SV signalling was just "woke capitalism" the whole time, and they dropped the pretense the moment it became politically advantageous.
Tech was never woke. It's a boys club and on the "good" side was geeky nerds who just cared about hacking and the "bad" side about financial velociraptors hunting money. Nothing woke about that.
I don’t know why we keep platforming these people. Go interview a normal person with normal thoughts. Karp is one of the most vile, insensitive, and immoral people in charge of anything tech. Just ignore him and his antics.
Well, Aragorn used the information he got from the Palantir of Orthanc to make a correct and very important strategic decision, to take the Paths of the Dead so that he could stop the Corsairs in time to save Minas Tirith.
So the lesson is that you have to use the intel you get wisely, or else very bad things will happen. I'm not sure if that makes the name any better for the tool it's applied to, though.
The actual lesson was that you need to be the trueborn king who can claim the palantiri by birthright if you want to use them for good. Even then, it requires great effort. Bad things will happen if anyone else tries to use the palantiri, no matter how great and powerful they are.
> The actual lesson was that you need to be the trueborn king who can claim the palantiri by birthright if you want to use them for good.
Not really. Denethor was the trueborn steward, whose ancestor had been officially appointed by the King, and though it isn't mentioned in the Lord of the Rings, the essay on the Palantiri in Unfinished Tales says that stewards were often deputized to use the Palantiri. So Denethor had the right to use the Palantir of Minas Tirith. But he didn't have the wisdom to realize that Sauron was manipulating what he saw.
Denethor is described as wise and strong-willed (unlike the caricature seen in the movies). He knows Sauron is trying to manipulate him, but he believes his strength and legitimacy will let him prevail. It's the same belief Aragorn has, and it's mostly correct. Denethor benefits greatly from the information gained using the palantir. But because his claim is weaker than Aragorn's and because he keeps using it repeatedly over the decades, it eventually corrupts him and leads him to his doom.
I agree that the movie portrayal was totally unlike the Denethor in the books.
> He knows Sauron is trying to manipulate him
To some extent, yes. But I'm not sure he fully realizes what's going on. For example, he sees the fleet with black sails coming up Anduin--but he didn't see any of the events that led to that fleet being taken over by Aragorn and his followers? He could have.
> because his claim is weaker than Aragorn's
I don't think this is given as a cause of Denethor's doom in the books.
> because he keeps using it repeatedly over the decades
Of course there isn't one; the notion of the "rightful king" in Middle-Earth does not have a real world counterpart.
Tolkien might have believed it did, since he was a Catholic and might have believed in some version of the divine right of kings that the church supported for many centuries. But even then, the power the "rightful king" has in Middle-Earth is very limited. There is no hint that Aragorn, once he becomes King, micromanages everything in Gondor or makes rules by royal decree about everything, or even any very great number of things. The only actual official acts of his that are described are making peace with the Haradrim and the Easterlings, giving Sauron's freed servants the lands about Lake Nurnen, and pronouncing judgments of particular cases, of which Beregond's is the last. He certainly doesn't seem to be dictating what everyone in Gondor should do in their daily lives. Nor is there any hint that previous Kings did any such thing.
And even Tolkien's real world attitudes weren't necessarily monarchist. In a letter to his son, he wrote:
"The most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity..."
If this espouses any kind of political view, it's libertarianism.
A bullied kid finds refuge in sci-fi and fantasy books. This kid builds a mental fantasy world where they get revenge on their tormentors. In this mental fantasy world, every self-serving thing they do is “righteous”, because it undoes the harm that was done to them. Their manifesto is a mish-mash of ideas from the books, but twisted to make them into the good guy.
Some of these kids eventually grow up and meet people who are kind to them. They find positive lessons in real human social interactions. They leave their protective fantasy bubble behind. They eventually learn to seek justice where there was injustice.
Others never grow up. They end up seeking to fight injustice with a new form of injustice. Only this time, they get to be the tormentor.
Its cellphones ? They show the rulers accurate predictions of human behaviour after the the fall of the towers proofed that the left only had enbarassing cofabulations to explain behaviour at scale. Thats the most valuable thing you can gain out of social network sensor data.
>I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.
Yet the choice is very effective at telling those with eyes to see that the one who chose the name possesses only a surface-level understanding of what appears to be his favorite piece of literature.
Or he's broadcasting his intention to destroy world governments and institute a new global order under technocratic control. He's banking on a US General not understanding the deeper lore behind of the name.
Well if the stories where realistic the shire would overproduce people in 3 generation and then export miserable mercenaries ala afghanistan for the rest of days.
The Palantiri consistently provided their users technically accurate intelligence that lead to disastrous strategic decisions.
Denethor committed suicide out of despair, after a palantir showed him the black fleet approaching, but he did not know that it was actually Aragorn who had captured the fleet and was coming with reinforcements.
We don't know specifically how the palantir deceived Saruman, but it's pretty clear it was one of the key factors in his corruption and downfall.
And even Sauron himself was misled in this way! The palantir showed him, correctly, that a hobbit and Aragorn were at Helm's Deep, and he concluded that Aragorn had the ring. So he prematurely moved his armies out of Mordor and left the plains and Mt Doom unguarded, which permitted the destruction of the ring.
I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.