91–100 of 129 posts
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…
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…
The hard bit of LLMs is making the LLM, not conforming to every set of politeness rules on the planet. An attempt to make a Persian foundation model, created only from Persian-originated technologies, might make that clear.
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…
From what you are describing, it seems to me that Iran is practically hell on earth for autistic people.
In Iran I would behave as the locals do.
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 know my (first generation American) father and his siblings would do the same, but only ever with each other, and it had the feel of an old joke.
Taarof definitely sounds like this taken several steps further- and sounds utterly exhausting to my emotionally stunted brain.
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…
From what you are describing, it seems to me that Iran is practically hell on earth for autistic people.
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…
It may be quite dangerous if we train LLMs on Taarof and Ketman... especially considering... what may arise. The masterful art of deception, surpassed perhaps only by the russianes Arthur de Gobineau, Trois ans en Asie (3 years in asia) 1859: “There is in Persia a word of which Europeans have no idea, and of which it is difficult even to give them a translation: this word is ketmân. It means the dissimulation of one’…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what you are describing, it seems to me that Iran is practically hell on earth for autistic people.
I married in to such a family. My solution was to just take people up on their offers until they learned not to offer things they did not really want to offer. It’s such a culturally time wasting practice that I did not want to accommodate it in the U.S. In Iran I would behave as the locals do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Delusion is the right word, I would encourage people to read the whole Wikipedia. Despite his complete lack of academic training or ability (he failed the entrance exam to a military academy), he published several anthropological/archaeological books about Persia which were universally torn apart by actual experts. Two of them were focused on translating ancient cuneiform, but again, he didn't speak Persian, and "he…