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?<p>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.
It's been estimated that the average person commits three felonies a day.<p>Logically this exempts everyone from being polite to everyone else, as per various state and federal laws, everyone is guilty.
As always, the value in these columns is the question, because GPT-4 gave me a pretty good answer.<p>This is entertaining, though. Will people go around asking /r/amitheasshole questions to AI or is the social interaction the fun part?