“He Got Rich from Defrauding People. Do I Have to Be Polite?” | Hacker News Reader

“He Got Rich from Defrauding People. Do I Have to Be Polite?”

nytimes.com

19 pointshaasted15 comments

The NYT got rich telling fibs about Ukraine and you can see it on the big screen in the movie "Mr. Jones." Do I have to be polite to them? Anthony Appiah got rich at universities that dumped many millions of dollars of student loans on the backs of his students. Do I have to be polite to him?

The whole reason society created politeness is from experience. We learn that life is not filled with absolutes. We learn that people and circumstances change. We learn that doing the right thing is often impossible because of imperfect information. Social censure like he endorses makes the world a very unpleasant place to live.

Exactly this. Politeness is a way to allow social functioning in spite of bad behaviors. Different individual with different cultures and families will have different ideas about what is right and wrong. Politeness creates a field of communication that can allow those discussions to happen without physical in person violence.

Physically violent people will physically attack you regardless of whether you are polite. They may even interpret your politeness as weakness. They may attack you because they are getting something out of it, or because it is fun to them.

And people who are not violent wont attack you even if you are rude.

There’s no clear black and white categories of “violent” and “nonviolent” humans. Human on human violence has been a part of Homo sapiens as far back as there are archaeological records. Anyone can become violent given the right circumstances, both male and female. Socializing ie domestication is necessary to reduce violence but it can still re-emerge at any time.

Don’t blame yourself for being misinformed: there was a period where anthropological and archaeological evidence was believed to indicate humans are naturally non violent. Recent evidence and analysis has proven otherwise. Humans are capable of both incredible kindness as well as violence.

See: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-brutal...

There is actually clear difference between violent and non violent people in our society. Or any society. Some people won't beat you up, be ause they have self control and values.

Other people will beat you, because they have opposite.

Do not blame yourself for thinking archeological evidence has anything relevant to do with the actual topic at hand. It does not. And plus, it does not prove or disprove what I said. You just misunderstends what archeology can or can not prove.

i see your point but where do you draw the line? would you still be polite to this person if he had committed rape?

This question makes me think that politeness is more an aspect of yourself than of the person you're interacting with. More "I am a polite person, in control of my behavior" than "this person is good and so deserves politeness."

My first impulse would be, yes, be polite at first, even while you are telling him or her that they should be thrown in jail. You can be polite even as you are strapping someone to an electric chair. Rudeness would be used only in reaction to their rude behavior, in a repeated-game-theory way.

But I'm not sure that 'politeness' and 'rudeness' is clearly defined. Some people might think 'because you raped that woman, I'm going to advocate that you be prosecuted' is rude; I don't. It would be rude if you added 'you bastard' to it, or gloated, etc. Understandable, but rude.

>The whole reason society created politeness is from experience.

This thing here is not politeness, but rather a political correctness. And indeed it does have its advantages, but also disadvantages - like the overwhelming tolerance towards white collar crime, or turning a blind eye to crimes by institutions like Catholic Church.

Life is not filled with absolutes, but people who are scum usually remain scum, and we should have no problem with publicly naming them when it’s an effective way of reducing the harm they pose.

Does his name happen to be Sam Trabucco?

Read this comment before the article and indeed it sounds like him. Except, isn’t he in hiding?

It's been estimated that the average person commits three felonies a day.

Logically this exempts everyone from being polite to everyone else, as per various state and federal laws, everyone is guilty.

tldr: ethicist says give him the Marquise de Merteuil treatment.

As always, the value in these columns is the question, because GPT-4 gave me a pretty good answer.

This is entertaining, though. Will people go around asking /r/amitheasshole questions to AI or is the social interaction the fun part?

r/aita has always been about telling interesting stories and arguing about ethics, revenge porn, and comforting the reader with “i must be a good person, since i’m not as terrible as the people in this story”.

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