Alex Karp, the CEO of controversial tech company Palantir, raised eyebrows during a recent live interview with the New York Times. In a viral video of the discussion, Karp defended his company to the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, gesturing dramatically with his arms, bouncing up and down on his chair, and struggling to make his point.
Palantir’s X account shared the video on Sunday morning and announced Karp is launching The Neurodivergent Fellowship: “If you find yourself relating to [Karp] in this video — unable to sit still, or thinking faster than you can speak — we encourage you to apply.”
Palantir announced Karp himself would conduct final interviews for the fellowship. In a reply to the first message on X, the company included an application link to the fellowship, which is available in Palantir’s New York City and Washington, D.C. offices.
“The current LLM tech landscape positions [neurodivergent people] to dominate,” according to the application. “Pattern recognition. Non-linear thinking. Hyperfocus. The cognitive traits that make the neurodivergent different are precisely what make them exceptional in an AI-driven world.”
Palantir, a data and analytics company co-founded by conservative “kingmaker” Peter Thiel, was quick to argue that the fellowship is not a DEI initiative.
“Palantir is launching the Neurodivergent Fellowship as a recruitment pathway for exceptional neurodivergent talent,” according to the application, “This is not a diversity initiative. We believe neurodivergent individuals will have a competitive advantage as elite builders of the next technological era, and we’re hiring accordingly for all roles.”
Dunno man, even the Wammy’s House looks like a more trustworthy “neurodivergent fellowship” than Palantir’s.
Despite being neurodivergent, I also happen not to be profoundly evil ! So I don’t see myself joining anytime soon…
All the old Aspies are watching alone from the corner of the room saying to themselves, “wtf is wrong with this guy?”
“I’m not a POS, I’m neurodivergent…”
Riiiiiiiiight… 🤔
Not mutually exclusive.
Edit: I say this as someone who’s neurospicy.
yeah. i’m fully willing to believe a bunch of these tech ceos are neurodivergent as they claim. HOWEVER. we all know neurodivergent people who don’t weaponize their neurodivergence to justify eugenics, mass surveillance, or just plain being shitty to people. we don’t have to respect your autism excuse when you do something shitty and then ask you why you did that.
1000% agree
So the dude was tweaking on whatever legalized version of cocaine is available this week and then passes it off as neurodivergent. This makes those of us that actually have issues look like hyperactive children. Also fuck Palantir. I’d rather drag my nuts through broken glass than ever be associated with their human rights violation machine. Fucking sickening.
Why the fuck are all the rich assholes tweaked out of their gourds? It speakes volumes that even those at the top of this bullshit society hate it and resort to drugs to cope.
For them it’s probably truly recreational and for fun as opposed to us slaves of society doing it just to fucking cope or blow off some steam.
That was my first thought, dude looked coked up…
The way I read this is that they’re trying to weaponize autism. They see people who are neurodivergent as a resource they can tap into.
The cognitive traits that make the neurodivergent different are precisely what make them exceptional in an AI-driven world.” Palantir, a data and analytics company co-founded by conservative “kingmaker” Peter Thiel, was quick to argue that the fellowship is not a DEI initiative. “This is not a diversity initiative. We believe neurodivergent individuals will have a competitive advantage as elite builders of the next technological era, and we’re hiring accordingly for all roles.”
Wow, that’s super deep and profound. Maybe I had these people all wrong.
So, essentially, you believe there are likely very talented people who don’t fit within the neat little box of what success is “supposed to typically look like.” They might even be looked over or excluded simply because they don’t fit into that box, but you are wise enough to see past that. You understand that the very traits that lead to their exclusion, may also provide them with a unique perspective that is often lacking in everyone who does fit neatly into that homogeneous box. And that carving out a place on the team that allows for the unique perspective of those divergent people, can actually be an advantage to everyone…
Maybe it’s a coded way of saying “the cognitive traits of sociopaths are what will make you do exceptionally well at Palentir, apply now”.
As if that wasn’t already obvious.
Or just an elaborate cover for a guy who overdid the pre-interview coke dosage.
Humanity is still better off without this company
What an interesting, novel idea that has never been tried before and surely hasn’t been bashed by those exact people for the last 10 years. You see, this is different from DEI because it excludes brown and queer people. Who would’ve thought that it was always about just pushing down brown and queer people? WHO?
No, you see, this is about how some people are just born with special powers that intrinsically make them better at work related to the one and only future of the coming AGI god.
DEI is about trying to ensure people have an equal chance. This is about establishing a new class of elites based on unchangable genetic traits. A class of “super” or “uber” men, if you will.
Or you just gave them your name and contact information as one of the first people to round up when Trump needs another out group to blame shit on and Palantir is fully onboard with exterminating undesirables.
No thanks I’m good on violating everyone’s 4th amendment rights and identifying targets for a genocide like an absolute criminal traitor asshole
Is the fellowship forming to kick the shit out of this guy for giving a bad name to neurodivergents everywhere?
You have my axe.
And my fidget sword
And my prowbar
Can’t wait until all these Tech wastes of human garbage finally reach critical mass, self consume, and crawl back under historical rocks.
For the record, using the real issue of nuerodivergence as an excuse for a lack of consciousness or mortality is new low.
Guaranteed Palantir isn’t accepting neurodivergence as an excuse for Jack shit from their non C-suite employees
Oh I didn’t know Karp was going to get forcibly sterilized by the government if he succeeds at his goals. Sounds like he doesn’t know that either
Like, dude, the party is already moving against the neurodivergent and he’s playing a major part in their capacity to do so. Playing a fundamental role in his own forewarned tragedy, kind of reminds me of another motherfucker I’ve heard of…
Alex Karp’s behavior is much better explained by cocaine. He may be neurodivergent, but he was still high as giraffe pussy.
Don’t give giraffe pussy a bad name, bro.
He did a great job supressing the sniffles.
Hahahahahahahhahahahaah. Dude, I cannot stop laughing!
Woah! That’s pretty high!
“The current LLM tech landscape positions [neurodivergent people] to dominate,” according to the application. “Pattern recognition. Non-linear thinking. Hyperfocus. The cognitive traits that make the neurodivergent different are precisely what make them exceptional in an AI-driven world.”
What a load of bullshit, LLMs will be used in a million ways to sideline neurodivergent people in society whether it be BS AI “help” for a neurodivergent student replacing a human teacher or job applications using AI to illegally screen and filter out neurodivergent people, this is a bad decade for neurodivergent people and it is likely only to get worse as societies collapse into bigotry from the endless stresses and catastrophies of runaway climate change.
Right, there was legal pressure upon inputs of decision-making to make it more egalitarian or whatever. And by other criteria too.
So what happens is full obfuscation of inputs. In the form of LLMs.
Philosophically this is correct in my opinion, trees should be judged by their fruit.
A simplified comparison is British vs Prussian army philosophy, in Prussia, when evaluating officer’s performance, they’d judge his decision-making process and its inputs, even if the result was catastrophic, while in British army and navy they’d only judge the result, no matter how correct the decision-making. That has been often called unjust and not nuanced enough, but one way lost historically and the other won. For a reason. Judgement of inputs has more failure points. It causes degeneracy long-term.
A bit like every metric used as a KPI ceasing to be a useful metric, there’s such a commonly quoted MBA rule, except MBAs are not smart enough to remember that rule, generally.
The alternative to this is responsibility for all that happens downstream. No matter which inputs you get. In exchange for that you are allowed to have any decision-making process at all, just pay for it in full if something wrong happens.
We are being pressed by evolution (including technical progress) to adopt that approach, and it’s good, but it’ll take probably lots of wars and revolutions. People who hide malice behind formally correct inputs do resist. And they do hold power.
Instead of inputs you should treat any social mechanism as a black box, and both limit and judge its outputs. If they are outside limits, discard and punish. If they are inside limits, then evaluate and bill - in prison years or in fines or both. Or reward.
You never know all the inputs anyway and can’t tell if they are correct.
They say it’s not a DEI initiative; they just want to get this talent onboard for their business.
Ironically, that’s exactly what DEI initiatives were all about: recognizing that if we let white bros excluded all others from the workplace, like they have in prior decades, we will shut out the majority of the world’s talent, and we should do whatever it takes to make sure everyone can join, work, and truly focus without watching their back all the time.
Or more cynically: privileged talent knows its worth, marginalized talent is undervalued and will thank you for only lightly screwing it
Exactly, not to mention the entire idea of a “tech” bro violated societies norms (it didn’t really they just wore hoodies). But the fact that you had “nerds” succeeding and winning at life seemed to contradict the Don Draper/Frat Bro prototype of success
That honestly started around 60s and by the time of tech bros even receded.
“Hyperfocus”… just wanna exploit us, those guys
Yeah also hyperfocua is thankfully often one of the earliest symptoms to be dealt with. The name “hyperfocus” sounds great, but when I tell the story of how in college I sat down to write a paper then several hours later was finished, couldn’t tell you anything about it and desperately needed food, water, and to use the restroom but was so exhausted I didn’t know how to prioritize these needs and spent several minutes deciding which to resolve first… Yeah then it sounds like a symptom of a disability rather than some magic power.
I swear I’m sick and tired of people thinking adhd is basically being an attention feruchemist
You forgot to say that the paper in this story can be anything. It can be a short letter you spend hours perfecting just because. Or one paragraph on a subject that somehow seems more magical than the rest of life in this specific moment. It’s not even necessarily something big. You can hyperfocus on drawing and redrawing one icon again and again.
In this case it was just a decent gen ed literature paper but yeah I once literally couldn’t stop reading the Wikipedia article about the evolution of plants when I was unmedicated.
I’m more likely to talk of hyperfocus when it’s things theoretically people would think are good to be unable to stop focusing on like school, work, or learning. This is largely because crashing on the couch doomscrolling instead of eating is something even neurotypicals do these days and because talking about all the nights I spent playing binding of Isaac or civilization with zero capacity to stop and do my damn homework or go to bed make it sound like a failing and like I’m blaming my mental illness.
But yeah, it’s inability to regulate attention and we live in a world in which sophisticated tools for catching and maintaining attention are extremely commonplace and should be more regulated.
attention feruchemist
that’s a cool likeness, never thought of it that way. Would be really cool if it worked like that. Or, well, it would probably get exploited by corporations so you’d just spend all your time off filling your metalmind so maybe it wouldn’t be that cool actually.
Idk I feel like if it actually worked that way we’d get pretty firm negotiations that home and work get separate metalminds at least at decent jobs. And much like how zincminds don’t make you smarter, they just make you equally smart faster, these won’t make you good at your job, just make you solely focused on the stupid thing your boss told you to do.
Also I feel like given how hyperfocus is attention would be more like weight or senses than strength in that filling has benefits too by allowing you to task change and a sudden jolt from tunnel vision
