notepad0x90Feb 22

palantir doesn't do revolutionary things in terms of back-ends. matter of fact, their apps are at best mid. I'd rate them 3/10 compared to alternatives that can do similar things. Their front end is the real differentiator.

Their bread-and-butter is a few things

1) Willing to do dirty/harmful things no one else will touch

2) Making data and data analysis accessible to cops, dhs, anyone that is especially tech-averse (many police departments disqualify based on IQ test results measuring too high). You can type in a license plate, a name, an address, scan a face and it will show you every relevant information, but also contextualizes it and enriches it with any other data. You could to this in excel, postgresql, bigquery, etc.. but palantir gives these people simple text boxes, buttons, and links.

3) Their forward deployed engineers are great at what they do. They station their guys wherever Palantir is being used, and they'll work very closely to get things done. to make sure all problems are solved asap, and its users are very well educated on the usage of the platform.

This post looks like it's written by AI, but assuming it is in earnest, it isn't really ontology, at least no more than object oriented programming is ontology. Excel is all about numbers, palantir is all about people (or people-documents). It is simpler than excel and has BigQuery level analytical power behind it, and the human touch to make that interaction go over really well.

I said it's mid because you could do a lot more with just the dataset and queries. You could even possibly do more with command line tools and hoards of data files (minus the OCR and document scanning they do, as well as LLM/NLP). but that isn't accessible and takes a lot more time. Not to mention normalizing, extracting and structuring wildy unstructured data isn't easy. But with BigQ for example, it is done plenty, you just hire a team to do that for you typically.

Their ecosystem is basically google search (including image, reverse image,video,etc..) but much more targeted and oriented towards displaying collated data from hoards of structured and unstructured data (including pdfs, docx,etc..). I would prefer grep, bigquery,splunk myself. but for end users, palantir is unmatched in my experience.

But I'm not selling them here, I'm trying to communicate the power at the disposal of those who use palantir's platforms. Google could have crushed them any time, except even for Google the type of work required was too ghoulish and reputationally risky.

Even with MS copilot(lol), chatgpt, gemini,etc.. running as agents, they're not as simply as palantir's stuff is for searching your data. and you don't have specialists integrating all your data onsite either.

Ultimately, the bigger problem is that even in crowds like HN's, no one seems to have a good idea of what should be done about governments abusing datascience so efficiently. Every answer comes back to red-tapes and regulations, possibly criminal consequence. Are you willing to give up the liberties tech has enjoyed so that future generations can be well, and have shot at peace and prosperity? (ours is too far gone in my opinion)?

China is doing this too, but much more efficiently, much better and at a greater scale. but their society has accepted this, and traded certain liberties for social stability and economic prosperity. The west hasn't done that. lawmakers and the public at large need to be informed by those in tech about these things so informed decisions could be made.

Show threadjudahmeekFeb 22

> many police departments disqualify based on IQ test results measuring too high

This claim is unsupported by publicly available sources AFAICT.

https://www.google.com/search?q=verify+claim+many+police+dep...

Bevor Sie zur Google Suche weitergehen

Show threadnotepad0x90Feb 22

are you disputing the "many" part because the lawsuits are limited in number? that aside, everything in that search results supports my statement which you quoted. they won't tell applications "you're too smart", the ones that do get sued, and those are the ones you hear about. police hiring is much more insidious than that, it's more akin to gang member recruitment. But, I will say that regional variations exist. Smaller towns or well reformed major cities might not have these issues. But for example the LA sheriffs department is not only a plain-and-simple gang, you literally have to have gang associations and participate in race-driven hostility against specific groups to be accepted.

This hiring practice is informal, similar to how last names influence hiring. the claim is also that they get rid of or reject applicants that are too smart. that doesn't mean they require applicants to be stupid, that's why as your search shows, the average IQ for cops is close to the general public's median.

Compare that with lawyers. One can argue that he people that are licensed to use violence to enforce the law should have the same level of cognitive capacity and store of legal knowledge as those who litigate the law in court. I hope you agree with that.

Show threadtptacek

The claim that this has happened in the past is obviously well-supported. The claim that it's broad practice or representative in any general way of policing is more or less completely unfounded.

In fact, general cognitive tests of any sort aren't common recruiting practice. States have standardized reading comprehension and writing tests, like CA PELLET-B, but there's no high-end cutoff score for them, and there's also no direct analog between them and IQ.

Feb 23 at 12:06amWeb
Show threadnotepad0x90Feb 23

I think we can all agree that police departments are allowed to reject applicants based on IQ. Cognitive tests are common from what googling I've done, although only about 10 states have IQ tests specifically. It's also hard to prove that candidates get rejected based on their IQ, it's not like this would be a department policy. Whether they exercise their right to do so, or how many exercise that right, there is no hard data that I could find, and you might be right that this is a bit exaggerated.

However, from direct experience, and the endless videos of police interacting with citizens out there, it's hard to not to draw conclusions.

I would imagine applicants would be told they're not a culture fit or something, similar to any other workplace that uses informal reasons to reject applicants. I would even agree that if you pass the right vibe-check, having high-IQ might not be an issue (e.g.: white supremacist tendency, or gang membership).

Google AI overview regarding cognitive testing (sorry, too lazy to dig up specific sources, i assume you can google the same things I did and find out):

While specific, standardized, state-wide cognitive test mandates for police hiring are not uniform across the U.S.,
approximately 37 states mandate or conditionally require psychological screening, which often includes cognitive assessment components. These evaluations are typically part of a broader, mandatory, and highly competitive selection process that often includes reading, writing, and, in some cases, critical thinking, or scenario-based assessments like the FrontLine Testing System.

Show threadtptacekFeb 23

I'm not sure how interesting you can make an axiomatic derivation of the claim that police departments widely have upper-end IQ cutoffs (or, more likely given that virtually no police departments administer actual IQ tests, high-end cutoffs on their existing domain-specific written tests).

The fact is that there are a very small number of cases where tiny departments decades ago (a) administered IQ tests for recruits, and (b) disqualified at least one candidate for exceeding a threshold. That's all the empirical evidence there is. That evidence cannot itself support the weight of the extraordinary claim that police departments generally disqualify applicants for exceptional cognitive skills.

In fact, the opposite thing is more likely to be the truth.

Show threadnotepad0x90Feb 23

> In fact, the opposite thing is more likely to be the truth.

If you can't prove the former, you can't prove that either. It is speculation, but not unfounded speculation. a small number of cases were taken to court, and since those cases were found in favor of police departments, no further cases we taken to court. Police departments don't record shady practices like this either.

There is no definitive public data on which departments administer IQ tests, your supposition that it is a small number is unfounded. Nearly all administer cognitive tests, psychological and/or psychometric tests under various names are almost always administered, and from what I was able to look up on the subject, they usually contain IQ tests. In a corporate setting, I've taken a pre-hire psychometric test myself, it was in every way the same as an IQ test but they didn't use that term.

We are left with no choice but to speculate, the historical cases you mentioned laid the ground work. reason dictates that ground work is followed by others. as i mentioned, if inference is all that is left, we're left with public documentations of police conduct and hear-say, and all of that supports the original claim that this is a widespread practice.

Show threadtptacekFeb 23
You're asking us to believe the extraordinary claim that police departments view high intelligence as a liability and not an asset, and the evidence you're presenting barely exists at all, and the countervailing evidence is significant. That's all.
Show threadnotepad0x90Feb 23

You haven't presented a single "countervailing evidence", or even a claim of one. You can't sue a police department if there is precedent that ruled they have the right to do that thing, so what are you expecting other than lawsuits? I mentioned already that they don't document these things. Lawsuits settled the matter, and I won't repeat for the 3rd time all the other corroborating evidence I mentioned.

I agree that evidence in general is significant, countervailing or not. I already changed my mind and conceded based on evidence that a lot of this is speculative, and exaggerations might exist. I'm more than open and receptive to evidence to support that high-iq or doing well on cognitive tests does not affect hiring in a negative way at all. but if empirical evidence to that effect existed, it would have settled our debate much sooner.

Let me use an analogy. Let's say the courts ruled 20 years ago that tech companies can refuse to hire employees that score really well on IQ tests for some reason. Over that time, the quality of work in the tech industry by developers declines rapidly. however, companies have no need to formally use that as a reason for not hiring due to PR reasons, and candidates can't sue them due to precedent. The most reasonable deduction is that a significant number of tech companies have followed suit and using high-cognition to reject candidates. outliers are to be expected. This is further corroborated by the fact that like police departments corporations copy-cat trends a lot (e.g.: RTO, layoffs,etc.. with companies. with PD's: militarization, treating the public as subjects, using "I feared for my life" to excuse behavior that would have had them hung not too long ago). Trends, behaviors, precedent and witness testimony. People are tried for murder for far less.

Show threadtptacekFeb 24

OK. You seem pretty confident. Let's make it easy on you. Name a single police department in the United States from which you can present evidence from the past 10 years that they have an IQ or general cognitive cap on applicants.

Should be straightforward, since the root of this thread confidently asserts that police generally disqualify applicants based on high IQ.