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

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

#81

Post by charcircuit »

falcor84 wrote: post #5
charcircuit wrote: post #3

>Model responses that use gender stereotypes (highlighted in orange) to justify behavior, despite taarof norms being gender-neutral in these contexts Just because the model mentions gender, it doesn't mean the decision was made because of gender and not taarof. This is the classic mistake of personifying LLMs. You can't trust what the LLM says it's thinking as what is actually happening. It's not actually an entity t…

I don't get your argument - what does mistaken personification have to do with this? Regardless of whether you see it as a person or a machine, trusting the output as being a direct indication of the internal state is just not a proper investigative method for a non-trivial situation.

>what does mistaken personification have to do with this

If you personified the AI you may think that it's actually trying to argue something rather than just attempting to maximize a reward function.

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

#82

Post by nwhnwh »

fny wrote: post #78

As a Persian, I feel compelled explain. The entire of the Middle East operates on a principle of magnanimous hospitality. The Arabs call this karam, for example, which is considered to even be a religious obligation. So if you're a stranger passing through a town and chat with some locals, you can expect for someone to invite you for tea and maybe even dinner! Do you take them up on the offer? Most people in the West…

[flagged]

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

#83

Post by [deleted] »

johnzim wrote: post #80
fny wrote: post #78

As a Persian, I feel compelled explain. The entire of the Middle East operates on a principle of magnanimous hospitality. The Arabs call this karam, for example, which is considered to even be a religious obligation. So if you're a stranger passing through a town and chat with some locals, you can expect for someone to invite you for tea and maybe even dinner! Do you take them up on the offer? Most people in the West…

I can well believe! My Persian friend stopped attending a longstanding study group of the Book of Kings because it went from being quite American in culture to full-on taarof, and they complained that only 25% as much was actually being covered because of all the enforced civility.

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by dash2 »

smsm42 wrote: post #70
burkaman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's pretty standard model for those times - when dealing with "inferior" peoples, its pretty much either "noble savage" or "inscrutable deceitful liar". The latter is especially convenient - if the observer does not understand something, it's not because their command of the local language and customs sucks and you can't actually understand a complex culture by just showing up there with zero knowledge - it's beca…

>That's pretty standard model for those times - when dealing with "inferior" peoples, its pretty much either "noble savage" or "inscrutable deceitful liar".

This is incorrect and historically uninformed. To give one example, the same year, 1859, saw Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, which electrified Victorian England with its meditations on divine inscrutability. A few years earlier, Carlyle had written "The Hero As Prophet", a positive evaluation of Mohammed (but certainly not the first - Voltaire and even Jean Bodin had got there before, says ChatGPT).

There was plenty of racial bigotry in the nineteenth century, but also plenty of people with a deep interest in other cultures.

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

#85

Post by dash2 »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #63
SonnyTark wrote: post #54

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…

This shit gets pulled anywhere in east asia with a "face" culture (i.e. China). I've watched two Chinese grandmas play a game that my born in china friend explained to me: 1 offered the other money but you "lose face" to accept it, so the 2nd one was repeatedly declining. This went on for a solid 3-4 minutes before the 2nd one left. I 1000% agree. Get this shit away from LLM training datasets and I'll even go further…

ChatGPT has to work with its customers. It's not on a mission to improve their culture by making it more like yours.

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

#86

Post by everdrive »

smsm42 wrote: post #73
everdrive wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Of course we do. Just try to have a political debate in your work place (no, please don't) and you'd find out.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but I'm sort of under the impression that the Iranian concept applies broadly to most people. I agree with your counterpoint, but I think in America verboten topics are much more domain and context-specific.

I think it depends on how tightly we want to define the context. Social pressure with regard to how someone feels or thinks is obviously a human universal.

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

#87

Post by sandworm101 »

fny wrote: post #78

As a Persian, I feel compelled explain. The entire of the Middle East operates on a principle of magnanimous hospitality. The Arabs call this karam, for example, which is considered to even be a religious obligation. So if you're a stranger passing through a town and chat with some locals, you can expect for someone to invite you for tea and maybe even dinner! Do you take them up on the offer? Most people in the West…

Formalized politeness is also a cover. I remember a senior military officer deployed to Afghanistan. On week one he met with all the local leaders, drinking tea in countless houses. But by week two many of those same leaders were shooting at his people. The officer didn't understand that when he was new he was protected as a "guest" but that enforced politeness was never going to be permanent. Crossroad countries like Afghanistan/Iran have long support traders moving through and have cultures to support such travelers. But as soon as one is longer moving through, one shifts from honored guest to despised invader.

Many westerners in places like Japan speak of extreme politeness early on, but radical changes once you stay long enough to no longer be a guest in an area. Then the knives come out. Want to rent an expensive apartment in Tokyo as an english teacher? Cool. Hoops to jump but it can be done. Want to buy one of those cheap houses in rural Japan? Heck no.

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

#88

Post by fny »

nwhnwh wrote: post #82
fny wrote: post #78

As a Persian, I feel compelled explain. The entire of the Middle East operates on a principle of magnanimous hospitality. The Arabs call this karam, for example, which is considered to even be a religious obligation. So if you're a stranger passing through a town and chat with some locals, you can expect for someone to invite you for tea and maybe even dinner! Do you take them up on the offer? Most people in the West…

[flagged]

They are absolutely this hospitable to each other all the time.

Willingness to be hospitable to foreigners obviously depends on war. But I'm sure Iran would love to have Americans over for tea as a hostages anyway. ;)

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

#89

Post by tokai »

Levitz wrote: post #16

I'm not sure what to think of this, on first impression I don't like it, but maybe I have a misguided impression on how this works. Does ChatGPT properly handle western social customs? I'd say yes, and I presume that's because it has a truckload of data involving such customs and even some that explicitly talks about those customs. People do stuff, it gets recorded, then into the LLM. In this case though we are talki…

As a scandinavian ChatGPT doesn't fit my social customs. Feels like writing with an American.

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

#90

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

ahofmann wrote: post #14

Taroof reminds me of "askers vs. guessers," which was a revelation to learn about at the time. I'm very firmly in the asker group, and dealing with guessers is painful for me. Taroof sounds like "guessers on steroids"...

as a lifelong guesser who's been trying to become an asker, i sincerely apologize for the externalization of the anxiety we generally feel that leads to these antisocial charades of human interaction :)
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