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

arxiv.org

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

#51

Post by kennywinker »

agobineau wrote: post #32
yk wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure bullshitting is pretty universal. In particular the pattern were I, the mighty expert, insist that only I, the mighty expert, can decode the meaning of those deceptive others, and therefore you, the gullible rube, has to give me all your money so that I, the mighty expert, can keep you, the gullible rube, save from those deceptive foreigners.

i found it more interesting to consider through the perception of self-honesty or self-deception. or in this case, the llm inadvertently trained to conceal its intent to the user and rather to condition the user to the conclusion it truly wants rather than to answer directly

Right, like for example - if you ask an llm about islamic cultural practices it could mention “ketman”, instead of just calling them scheming liars.

It’d be awful if llms were able to conceal their true intent like that.

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

#52

Post by philipwhiuk »

everdrive wrote: post #34
kleiba wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds terrible. But in all fairness, it's not like pretending isn't part of everyday Western culture too.

It's an interesting topic. We don't have anything near as extreme in Western culture. But, I'd argue that our quirk is that we constantly tell people to just be themselves, to be their "true selves," to be "true to themselves," etc. We say it incessantly and loudly. And then, in reality, it's often not what people actually want, and that sort of behavior is often punished. Again, I think we're quite different from th…

> We don't have anything near as extreme in Western culture.

Oh please. We call it classified information, to allow ourselves to just lie to people not in the clique.

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

#53

Post by philipwhiuk »

TZubiri wrote: post #37
krageon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't do normal what I would consider human politeness. It's all that really slimy salesman stuff. Even when you tell it to be more normal, casual or you give it an example (or to not dress it up at all) it ends up sounding like it thinks it's a few social classes above you.

Probably due to the prompt to 'help' the user. Besides being helpful you need to be superior to help with knowledge

'help' is a highly loaded word.

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

#54

Post by SonnyTark »

I didn't know what this referred to but reading some of the examples in the paper.. oh man I hate this thing with a passion. It's not just Persians but Arabs in the gulf culture too that apply this to every scenario, it's the definition of being insincere as I know they don't really mean it but pretend to.

An example from last month, I had a haircut at a new place and the guy refused to tell me how much I should pay him and insisted its on him this time, I know he's bluffing but he kept doing it. So I just guessed and gave him the money which he pretended he didn't want for the last 5 minutes, he immediately realized it was less than he wanted and asked for more!

This confusing and conflicting behavior should stay far away from any attempt to develop a standard linguistic approach to communication which I hope LLMs are aiming to achieve.

If I was chaotic neutral, I'd totally play along with their bluffing and watch them get really confused.

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

#55

Post by agobineau »

kennywinker wrote: post #51
agobineau wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i found it more interesting to consider through the perception of self-honesty or self-deception. or in this case, the llm inadvertently trained to conceal its intent to the user and rather to condition the user to the conclusion it truly wants rather than to answer directly

Right, like for example - if you ask an llm about islamic cultural practices it could mention “ketman”, instead of just calling them scheming liars. It’d be awful if llms were able to conceal their true intent like that.

most likely to hypnotise you into buying twinkies when you ask for recipe or such

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

#56

Post by kennywinker »

esafak wrote: post #50
kennywinker wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where, and when, are you talking about? All over the christian west religious freedom has come and gone. The same can be said for the islamic world.

In Iran, and the rest of the Middle East. The West scores much higher in religious freedom. The difference is plain to see going from one to the other.

So you’re talking about now. Currently.

But this concept is old. The quote from the guy who invented the concept of the “aryan master race”, de Gobineau, was from 1859.

That’s just 7 years after the irish potato “famine”, when the english perpetrated a genocide against catholics in ireland. Very tolerant.

Meanwhile, in 1859 in the ottoman empire - jews and christians were allowed to exist and believe what they wanted as long as they were loyal to the state and paid their special tax. Not exactly equal, but in 1859 i think i’d rather be catholic in iran than in ireland.

Your theory that this concept comes from a lack of religious freedom doesn’t really hold up if you look beyond the current moment.

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

#57

Post by vintermann »

gampleman wrote: post #13
quotemstr wrote: post #10

> Native Persian speakers establish the human ceiling. Native speakers achieved an average accuracy of 81.8% on taarof-expected scenarios, demonstrating high but not perfect agreement. This establishes an appropriate ceiling for model performance and further validates our annotation approach I'm surprised human benchmark is that low. The canonical example of taarof, one I've seen elsewhere, is of a taxi driver insist…

I suspect that a lot of this form of cultural subtlety is designed to be hard on purpose. This allows individuals to show off and spar on a fairly harmless linguistic level - "he is so suave, she conveys her meaning just so" etc. Effectively it is a way to show off verbal + emotional intelligence in a way that doesn't look like showing off, since it's all about politeness. The fact that it makes it hard for foreigner…

There are definitively social games which are about showing that you have been initiated into the social codes of your class, but I don't know that this is one of them.

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

#58

Post by MangoToupe »

I would prefer an LLM that didn't pretend to be a human and simply communicated directly without assumption of a self with which I would have some kind of relationship. I'm far more offended by the idea of someone trying to make a chatbot seem human than I am by a chatbot somehow being "rude" to me, as if this were a sensical concept.

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

#59

Post by kennywinker »

agobineau wrote: post #55
kennywinker wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, like for example - if you ask an llm about islamic cultural practices it could mention “ketman”, instead of just calling them scheming liars. It’d be awful if llms were able to conceal their true intent like that.

most likely to hypnotise you into buying twinkies when you ask for recipe or such

Right, as we know there are zero examples of llms being used to influence people’s politics…

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/elon-musk-updates-grok...

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

#60

Post by jihadjihad »

burkaman wrote: post #46
wishgreen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) - Mongol…

From Wikipedia: > He came to speak a "kitchen Persian" that allowed him to talk to Persians somewhat. (He was never fluent in Persian as he said he was.) Despite having some love for the Persians, Gobineau was shocked they lacked his racial prejudices and were willing to accept blacks as equals. He criticized Persian society for being too "democratic". Gobineau saw Persia as a land without a future destined to be con…

I think he was so caught up in his own bullshit that he couldn't see clearly. To him "Iran", which literally means "of the Aryans", had been reduced (or, in his thinking, reduced itself) to a sad mockery of its former glory.

It's all hooey, of course. But he was nothing if not resolute in his delusion.

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