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) - Mongols (1219) - Timurids (1370)

What is less known is the centuries of endemic violence in the border regions, and the relentless assault on the Persian way of life and culture itself (including the centuries long conversion process to Islam). Yes, although there are brief periods of peace, e.g. under the Safavids, at this point Iran is settling in for a long period of population collapse, famine, and economic depression.

In such a setting, I suppose it might make sense for a culture to develop such defense mechanisms for survival.

On the bright side I suppose, these conditions also gives rise to one of the most influential literary and poetic traditions in world history -- i.e. Rumi, Hafez, Ferdowsi, etc. In some ways, this is one of the first instances of art as a form of subversive resistance, and also, indeed a cousin of tarof...

While the Persians may have given it a name, let's not pretend they have the monopoly on deception/self-deception.

That's what happens when you don't have religious freedom.

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.

This sounds remarkably similar to the (western) Catholic theological concept of "mental reservation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_reservation).

Commander Hutchinson, is that you?

Sounds very much like bubbles that indulge on inside jokes. In their universe, no one gets it but them, and they view themselves as connoisseurs of high art, the art itself being their own creation (indulge in one’s self). When you step out to interact with others, you act as if you and your kind are the only ones that have a clue, wink wink.

Are you saying Persians are a bunch of stuck up Goth kids? Never underestimate a humans ability to be an absolute teenager.

Sounds terrible.

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

> ... is a sophisticated system of ritual politeness that emphasizes deference, modesty, and indirectness.

I'm Irish and think we have a similar culture of indirectness and politeness...

In the countryside anyway we're rarely very blunt... everything indirect...

  "You'll have a cup of tea Mary?"
  "Ah no.. sure I'm only after a drop"
  "Ah go on... you will"
  "Not at all, I'm grand"
  "Go on, go on, go on you will" etc (as in Father Ted)

Hilarious, didn't know it had a name! I am maybe 1/4 persian, but get picked out as Persian, and was unknowingly indoctrinated in this form of behavior, though other parts of my ancestry do come out, my mother, scotch/english/irish ,says,useing her star treck metaphore, that I am an unlikely Vulcan/Klingon hybrid. Thinkng about Taarof as it is practiced, makes me think that an LLM doing this could easily become the most dangerous thing ever.....listening to my father give me specific pointers in how to phrase things and conduct myself is enlightening, he's 97 and enjoying the storys I bring of my life and goings on. If you look further into the history of persian culture , philosophy, and scientific background you will find a number of ancient contributors to what has developed today.

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.

> it has a truckload of data

It would be "artificial" only if LLMs performed badly despite having an equal amount of data containing examples of eastern customs in its training set. Even that's arguable since we don't (didn't) have the benchmarks for this particular case before.

Llm models are not just fed data, they are trained and fine tuned well beyond the original data, not only by pruning the data, but by a process we call fine tuning, which can produce as arbitrary a result you want It has been done for western markets (openai is a western company), but clearly not for persian culture. It's quite possible that the persian version is mostly a westerner type of dialogue but with a translator in the middle.

The only weird and entitled part is that they ask that other's llms learn taroof? Why not just train your own and teach it to do whatever you like.

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.

> As an aside, there are elements of this sort of thing in Bay Area tech culture too.

The more general case of misaligned strength of a statement is widespread in other cultures as well.

E.g. I'm Norwegian, and it's not unusuals for Norwegians to use similarly soft language, though it's by no means universal. A statement like "perhaps it would be worth thinking about doing X?" will often mean "do X" or "do X right now!", and where you lie on the range from the literal meaning on one end and a direct order with an implied threat on the other extreme, may hinge on subtleties of intonation, which words are emphasised, and/or the personality and your relationship with the other person.

I live in the UK now, and my impression is that the same is true here but to a much lesser extent, and will then often be phrased in ways that may be easier to recognise by either being overly formal and/or wrapped in a layer of sarcasm.

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 foreigners to productively engage is just a side benefit of the arrangement.

That's kind of the point of politeness rituals in the first place, isn't it? To see who can be bothered to spend some extra effort to fit in and who doesn't care enough about the tribe to make the effort.

It's no different than GPT answering a prompt with "That's a wonderful idea!", except it's in a different language than English. It's a good thing if LLMs can do this in every language and for any culture with no compromise.

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.