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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

#111

Post by itopaloglu83 »

ambicapter wrote: post #62
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, here’s what I’m wondering: How do you urge people to do discoveries or try things out when you’re reviewing something? e.g. Do you think it would be better if we used a queue system here? Oh, no, I can try it but I had issues with blah blah etc.

Why is it hard to directly ask them to try something? Is it because you subconsciously realize you're actually just piling extra work on top of them for variable benefit?

They’re just accepting the proposed solution without any elaboration or participation, because they take the question as a hidden request to do it in a particular way.

Let me give you an example. Working on developing a particular business process, we’re evaluating alternatives, and I introduce something else that wasn’t there before because we’re still in the brainstorming phase. The team tends to just jump on it immediately as if they’re told to do it that way. While trying to be polite, they’re accidentally removing the value adding step, and this persists even when they’re asked directly, we’re in mid-west.

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

#112

Post by itopaloglu83 »

vidarh wrote: post #29
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, here’s what I’m wondering: How do you urge people to do discoveries or try things out when you’re reviewing something? e.g. Do you think it would be better if we used a queue system here? Oh, no, I can try it but I had issues with blah blah etc.

One way would be to ask for an update before we make a decision. By making an explicit statement that a decision will be taken in the future you're making it clear that this wasn't the decision. Another would be to be explicit about asking for them to conduct an experiment or test , as those would unambiguously not be intended to be a final solution. But you might then well find that the request to carry out an exper…

Practically change the scope of work to make an experiment to find which way is better. Though, come to think of it, then they’re likely to get mad at me for requesting extra work. Well, we just need to communicate more.

Extra politeness of mid-west sometimes before a hurdle in business process development, because it really slows down the brainstorming phase. And then companies end up with software that doesn’t serve their needs because someone didn’t feel like talking and we didn’t have the whole month to design a single screen.

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

#113

Post by sublinear »

michalpleban wrote: post #92
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…

From what you are describing, it seems to me that Iran is practically hell on earth for autistic people.

I know you meant this tongue-in-cheek, but thanks for saying it anyway for the replies it would eventually accumulate.

I think we have too many people self-diagnosing autism when what they're really experiencing is ignorance of irrational social norms that are more about fashion than emotional intelligence.

Of course an LLM would be bad at such a topic since these are largely unspoken rules designed to be a form of discrimination.

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

#114

Post by kaz-inc »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #67

> We focus on Persian taarof, a social norm in Iranian interactions, which is a sophisticated system of ritual politeness that emphasizes deference, modesty, and indirectness As an Asker, this sounds like an absolute nightmare for me. ( https://www.theatlantic.com/national/2010/05/askers-vs-guess... )

Persians might actually be a unique dual culture. Whereas others might guess or ask about things, Persians offer absolutely everything and the actual problem then shifts from "what can I ask for" vs "what should I refuse?".

An asker asks for things, absolutely everything, and the giver must choose what they can give.

A guesser must choose what they can ask for, and only ask when they're quite sure it can be given, so the giver has less responsibility for the transfer or service, and most asks can be assumed to be reasonable.

A Persian cannot ask for anything. They must wait for it to be offered, and even then, they must insist that they are quite alright, and that they would rather do without, and only through reciprocal insistence from the giver can they consider whether it would be rude to take them up on the offer.

Presumably, one can judge the giver's underlying intent by the quality of their reciprocal insistence (does it seem like they're just doing the bare minimum of insistence upon their offering, or do they truly wish for me to take them up on it?)

In the Taarof system, an offeree actually has more data, rather than a simpler Asker-scenarion "no", and even more data than the shared values in a Guesser household, this allows for a quick negotiation of values by the immediate and well-practiced cultural norms around the quality of insistence, even for people across different households.

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

#115

Post by Foreignborn »

sandworm101 wrote: post #87
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 lik…

the cheap house thing has nothing to do with if you’re foreign and everything to do with a bank not wanting to lend money for something there’s no market for.

you can easily buy these homes with cash. i know because i have a ton of friends that have done exactly this.

if you want a cheap house in a good market like tokyo, osaka or fukoaka, then you can do so through a bank via the normal routes

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

#116

Post by numpad0 »

I'm not sure Iran/Persian culture in particular is of importance in this phenomenon. To me, it seems it's just downstream effect of LLMs are only really able to operate internally in en-US. IMO, large language models are implementation of fundamentalist understanding of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - Wikipedia[1] defines linguistic determinism as follows:

  "Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception."
That's basically an orbital level description of a multimodal LLM. No?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism

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

#117

Post by skissane »

michalpleban wrote: post #92
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…

From what you are describing, it seems to me that Iran is practically hell on earth for autistic people.

Not about the Middle East specifically-but I think one advantage more traditional societies can potentially have compared to the secular Western mainstream, is clearer social roles and more explicit social scripts-now, that’s not necessarily true of all of them, but likely is true of some of them.

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

#118

Post by K0balt »

sublinear wrote: post #113
michalpleban wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what you are describing, it seems to me that Iran is practically hell on earth for autistic people.

I know you meant this tongue-in-cheek, but thanks for saying it anyway for the replies it would eventually accumulate. I think we have too many people self-diagnosing autism when what they're really experiencing is ignorance of irrational social norms that are more about fashion than emotional intelligence. Of course an LLM would be bad at such a topic since these are largely unspoken rules designed to be a form of d…

[flagged]

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

#119

Post by cjauvin »

xrd wrote: post #33
cjauvin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using ChatGPT to learn Persian (as a third language) for more than a year now (along with a heavy use of Anki), and it's incredibly useful and surprisingly good, for about everything: romanization, OCR from screenshots, deep explanations of complex and subtle stuff, etc.

Are you writing up how you are doing this. I would be fascinated to learn more about how you use Anki and ChatGPT in concert to learn a language like Persian. Please do share more.

Thanks for suggesting it, here you go: https://cjauvin.github.io/posts/learning-persian/

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

#120

Post by grayhatter »

K0balt wrote: post #118
sublinear wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you meant this tongue-in-cheek, but thanks for saying it anyway for the replies it would eventually accumulate. I think we have too many people self-diagnosing autism when what they're really experiencing is ignorance of irrational social norms that are more about fashion than emotional intelligence. Of course an LLM would be bad at such a topic since these are largely unspoken rules designed to be a form of d…

[flagged]

> To 95 percent of the people that eagerly inform me of their “autism” : you are belittling a debilitating condition that many people suffer from, and no, you are not autistic, you are inconsiderate and socially lazy.

> You may be inconsiderate and socially lazy because it’s difficult to not be, but you could put in the effort to not be if you wanted to.

You're describing masking, most autistic people learn to do this subconsciously as children because otherwise you'd be ostracized from your peer group. Because that means literal death in the pre-modern society, humans have a strong inate aversion to that.

This causes a lot of stress and often leads to a life time of anxiety and depression.

It's kinda disappointing to read someone advocating for this. I had been told my whole childhood life that I'm lazy. Once I became an adult and started treating my ADHD, I stopped being "lazy", I could finally do things that I wanted to do. It's wild how night and day it was. Now I'm the only person in my family who is always doing things, and I get to call everyone else lazy. But I don't, because I'm trying not to be an asshole.

You accuse and condemn people who don't conform to a rigid ruleset for interactions that don't make sense. But everyone else who rolled a 20 on the social lottery get a pass on treating people who don't like fuckwits? Make it make sense.

> Yes, some people have more emotional/social intelligence than others. That doesn’t make you autistic, it just means you are kinda socially stupid and too lazy to do anything about it. Join the club, me too.

Sorry you've been gaslit so completely. I hope eventually you figure out how to dig yourself out of that hole of ignorance. I suspect you've been called lazy because some things are hard for you. Hard things being hard doesn't make you lazy.

> In general, anyone that has to tell you they are autistic isn’t. Autism is a pathology.

Shallow, incorrect, and unhelpful. Many people have asthma, but run and win races. Their asthma might not be pathological, but to pretend like they don't have it, or shouldn't keep a rescue inhaler in case of emergency is kinda messed up.

People treating and taking care their health physical and mental, shouldn't have to perform their rock bottom for you, just for you to believe them. And it's fucked up that you're suggesting they should!

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