We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof

Not really:

> Mental reservation, however, is regarded as unjustifiable without grave reason for withholding the truth.

That sounds significantly different from a "perpetual exercise of disguise" that is considered "a virtue, a duty, and a necessity".

Setting aside the obvious reverence for the father of the "Aryan master race" concept (Seriously, just pull up this guys Wikipedia -- first paragraph).

Such a critique of Persian culture without any context is unjust. For nearly a whole millennia, the Persians have endured a never ending parade of invasion, destruction, and conquest. While most are aware of the notable events, i.e. - Rashidun Caliphate (636) - Mongols (1219) - Timurids (1370)

What is less known is the centuries of endemic violence in the border regions, and the relentless assault on the Persian way of life and culture itself (including the centuries long conversion process to Islam). Yes, although there are brief periods of peace, e.g. under the Safavids, at this point Iran is settling in for a long period of population collapse, famine, and economic depression.

In such a setting, I suppose it might make sense for a culture to develop such defense mechanisms for survival.

On the bright side I suppose, these conditions also gives rise to one of the most influential literary and poetic traditions in world history -- i.e. Rumi, Hafez, Ferdowsi, etc. In some ways, this is one of the first instances of art as a form of subversive resistance, and also, indeed a cousin of tarof...

While the Persians may have given it a name, let's not pretend they have the monopoly on deception/self-deception.

Given current severe issues in user interactions with systems I don't think this is desirable at the moments. In linguistics, the descriptive study of this sort of system is "Politeness Theory" where for and "Positive Politeness" is what would be the applicable English version. Although English, being so heterogeneous, lacks a consistent, dominant word for its less ritualized norms.

Given this, the request here sounds similar to asking saying:

"We focus on English Positive Politeness that encourages friendliness, harmony, and avoiding confrontation and contradiction in many polite conversation settings. It often manifests in interactions that prioritize the desires and comfort of others."

And yet, this has had unanticipated and sometimes horrific results.

The study also focuses merely on descriptive output of models but what is lacking in this study is an analysis of the effectiveness of the results that Persian users receiive, their subject perception of the quality of the results. The authors of this may be doing a diservice to typical speakers of their language to assume that they will not systematically be able to code switch their expectations of received language and production of their own just as effectively as they do already in other contexts, especially when current problems with LLMs arise from a similar for of this skeuomorphism in more prevalent English systems.

To be clear, I fully mean this as applied to current production systems, not for all time. For the moment, we simply don't know precisely 1) how best to most effectively, precisely, and consistently align systems, nor 2) The more subtle implications for for the impact they have on users. But what we do know? Getting it wrong, not knowing, has led to some horrific outcomes.

> Something that drives me nuts is someone writing on a code review "you may want to consider using the X data struct here" and meaning "I will not merge this code until you use X"

The former language is appropriate when there is a specific problem to be solved and X seems to be a good solution. This language doesn't rule out other approaches that also solve the problem. (It should probably be accompanied by a good description of the problem.)

Saying the latter would be fairly rude since it implies that you think an ultimatum was required to get compliance. I'd instead phrase it as "X data struct should be used here." It is still clear about the correct way of doing things and carries less baggage.

This reads as "Islam is bad and the West is good" but besides the obvious xenophobia its just ahistorical.