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We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
101–110 of 129 posts
Re: We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
#102As 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…
Maddeningly accurate. Taarof can demonstrate a mastery of social intelligence, like the Japanese tea ceremony writ large in society, and is a good goalpost for AGI.
Not one month ago, as an admission of my own clumsy slight, I had remarked to a senior of higher status, that Chatgpt could just grasp Taarof.
Re: We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
#103Taroof 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"...
Interesting! For anyone else hearing about this for the first time: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/2010/05/askers-vs-guess... (https://archive.is/GBZBf)
Re: We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
#104Earlier 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.
From my perspective, even the US cultural norm is way too taarof. It's normal for Americans to offer things for politeness, with no intention to follow up and the interlocutor is also expected to understand the offer isn't genuine. So a phrase like "we should grab lunch" can be said without being an actual invitation for lunch. And then there's the whole aspect of avoiding criticism or saying no. "I don't think that's a good idea" in the US is more likely to mean "no, we're not doing that" than "I don't think that's a good idea so you need to convince me more if you want to do that".
As someone who also struggles to decode situations where people's actual, implicit meaning runs contrary to the explicit meaning of the words, American norms of indirectness are already a headache. Persian or Arab communication is much more indirect and that sounds like a nightmare to me.
Re: We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 is a common model, but I think "standard model for those times" is unfair, as even de Gobineau's peers thought he was a moron. He is not a good representative for understanding common attitudes of his time.
OK, I admit "common" is a better description than "standard" - I know not everybody did this, just it was a common failure mode.
Re: We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is anyone strictly one or the other? That seems like a huge spectrum and dependent on context.
It's a spectrum, of course, but like most spectrums, people usually find themselves much closer to one end or the other.
Well, that's a tautology for continuous bounded variables.
Re: We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
#107I am surprised it is not tested on newer models - GPT5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus.
Re: We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
#108I'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…
I don't know. If I ask an LLM something, I just want the facts. I don't care about social norms. I want the truth lol. I don't need it to take in my social wellbeing. That said I would never ask an LLM any therapeutic questions. I would ask it "give me a list of therapists who specialize in marriage counseling in the Chicago area" . I think trying to make LLMs socially conscious is a really really bad idea. It's going to really have bad bad effects on young people still figuring out people, and the very elderly who aren't quite aware of how it works or its fallacies, and that is likely to be universal across all cultures. Probably dumb people too, who think the machine is actually an emotional being.
Re: We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
#109I 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…
It boggles my mind why you (and others) think that Westerners are straightforward. Have you ever interviewed for a job, asked someone for a date, or asked for a raise? Let alone fields like commerce or money trading where the whole point is to be as dishonest as possible to reap the most gains.
I think people simply forget their everyday behaviour like fish forget the water they swim in.
Re: We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
#110It 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’…
Sounds like a perfect recipe for the Abilene paradox.