| ▲ | koliber 7 hours ago |
| I've seen an interesting behavior in India. If I ask someone on the street for directions, they will always give me an answer, even if they don't know. If they don't know, they'll make something up. This was strange. I asked a lot of Indian people about it and they said that it has to do with "saving face". Saying "I don't know" is a disgraceful thing. So if someone does not know the answer, they make something up instead. Have you seen this? This behavior appears in software projects as well. It's difficult to work like this. |
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| ▲ | wolvoleo 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| No, but I have noticed that somehow it's hard for them to say "no". This is impolite apparently. So you ask: "Can you do this before friday" and they say yes and then don't do it at all. Which of course is a lot less polite and causes a lot of friction. However this was a thing 10-15 years ago. Lately I've not seen that. |
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| ▲ | overfeed 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Which of course is a lot less polite and causes a lot of friction. Most cultures have this, but it goes mostly unnoticed from the inside because one can read between the lines. "How are you?" can be asked just to be polite, and can cause friction when answered truthfully (rather than just politely, as the cultural dance requires). An Eastern European may not appreciate the insincerity of such a question. | | |
| ▲ | lostlogin 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Great example. I work in a radiology practice and greet patients regularly. 99% of them say the are good/great etc. It’s quite a striking response when they are limping, bandaged and on crutches. | | |
| ▲ | lokar 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I sometimes answer “each day better then the next”, no one seems to notice. | | |
| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I use "about the same", thanks to a friend. I love the reactions (from Americans, where everyone is expected is to say "Great" or "Good" or something similarly positive). |
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| ▲ | aendruk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’ve always interpreted that question to mean emotionally. Yes, clearly I’m physically injured, but I still have a positive outlook. When I do hear people respond in the negative it tends to be an opening up about stress. | |
| ▲ | 0cf8612b2e1e 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is that just a reflex response though? I would expect people to be more deliberate in their interactions with medical professionals, but I can easily imagine hearing “How are you?” and my brain goes on autopilot. | | |
| ▲ | saghm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah, this is something I had to learn over my teenage/early 20s years. "How are you?" Is often not a question but just a generic greeting like "Hello" or "Nice to meet you". Sometimes it is though, but that's just one of the many examples of unwritten rules about how to tell whether someone literally means what they're saying or if there's a better way to interpret it. Having only lived in the US, I don't have nearly enough firsthand experience with other cultures for me to be the one to comment on them, but I suspect that every culture has some things like this where the actual intent of the communication isn't direct. I suspect that if people in tech were asked to identify which cultures they considered to be the most direct in their communication, American culture probably wouldn't be ranked first. Generally the stereotypes of other cultures that are perceived as more direct get described in more pejorative terms like "blunt" though. | |
| ▲ | lostlogin 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The greeting is generally in the waiting room. I’d do exactly the same if I was them. |
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| ▲ | anonzzzies 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | At the yearly colonoscopy I say "you can tell me after how I am". | |
| ▲ | theSuda 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | These days I do a 'eh' and shrug when someone asks a random 'how are you'? | |
| ▲ | unsupp0rted 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That’s not really an example of cultural lying- that’s an example of a fixed answer to a fixed question. When somebody sneezes and you say “bless you” you’re not expressing your belief in god, and you’re not lying about one either. | | |
| ▲ | overfeed 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > that’s an example of a fixed answer to a fixed question. That's my whole point! The expected answer seems pretty obvious to you, given the context, doesn't it? Why then are you surprised that a different culture has an equally obvious (to them) fixed answer ("Yes") to any question asked by someone with power/authority to their lesser? Both depend on mutual learned cultural awareness, and can fail spectacularly in cross-cultural contexts. Edit: my regional favorite is "We should meet for lunch some time" which just means "I'm heading out now", but you have to decode the meaning from the nature of the relationship, passive voice usage, and the lack of temporal specificity. | |
| ▲ | sowbug 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They're called phatic expressions. |
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| ▲ | exe34 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | similarly, in the west, when your boss takes you to HR for an honest and open discussion, it's not really an honest and open discussion. normies know this instinctively. I didn't. | |
| ▲ | nout 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A fairly common conversation starter for eastern europeans is "how are you doing?", "it sucks", "yeah it does, doesn't it?". The American style of being all flowers and butterflies can indeed be perceived as lying. | | |
| ▲ | anonzzzies 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It is fine if it is not lying but so often you ask how are you and get the flowers and butterflies response but when you sit 10 min more they start explaining how miserable they are: as a Dutchman, I do tend to ask why they said how great and excellent they were just minutes ago. And no, it is not just something you do out of politeness: if you just canned response to one thing, how do I know you don't have canned responses to many more things which are in fact lies at this point in time? I don't want to talk with Zendesk, I want to chat with someone I just met in the pub. |
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| ▲ | unsupp0rted 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, most cultures don’t have this, unless you measure by biomass. Some cultures are better than others, where “better” might mean better at doing stuff (no comment on morally/socially) |
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| ▲ | mikkupikku 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | My experience is the same, to put it charitable a lot of people from that culture are often eager to please. I think about this a lot when I hear about billionaires like Elon Musk wanting more immigration from India specifically. I think this cultural trait often serves them well in western corporate contexts, despite the frustration it causes their coworkers. |
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| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I've seen an interesting behavior in India. If I ask someone on the street for directions, they will always give me an answer, even if they don't know. If they don't know, they'll make something up. Isn’t this the precise failure pattern that everybody shits on LLMs for? |
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| ▲ | chrisjj 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Only on surface. The difference is the LLM doesn't know it doesn't know. An LLM provides the best solition it has regardless of whether that solution is in any way fit for purpose. | | |
| ▲ | DominikPeters 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you inspect the Chain of Thought summaries, the LLM often knows full well what it is doing. | | |
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| ▲ | koliber 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes. | | | |
| ▲ | melvinmelih 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | -- | | |
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Almost like…technology embeds the latent behaviors of the data that produced it! Imagine that Someone should really write a paper on that (hint: it’s the entire basis of information theory) | | |
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| ▲ | metanonsense 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I’ve seen this with some of my Indian colleagues, though definitely not all. In fact, most are more than eager to disagree with me :D (even though I’m their superior) |
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| ▲ | mandeepj 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > In fact, most are more than eager to disagree with me :D (even though I’m their superior) They must have spent a lot of time out of India or they are in senior roles. |
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| ▲ | to11mtm 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > This behavior appears in software projects as well. It's difficult to work like this. I have seen that across just about every culture in the software engineering world. And not just in the 'business' itself. I still remember the argument I had with an Infosec guy where he absolutely insisted that every Jeep had AWD or 4WD from the factory, Even naming ones that didn't did nothing until I more or less passively aggressively sent him wikipedia links to a few vehicles. At which point he proceeded to claim "No I said it was always a standard option" ... To be clear this whole argument started because someone asked why I swore by Subarus and mentioned 'Every US Model but the BRZ has AWD standard' but Heep owners gotta have false pride, idk. People do weird shit with imposter syndrome sometimes, IDK. |
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| ▲ | projektfu 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| According to Hal Roach, the Irish do this too, because they don't want to disappoint you. I haven't asked for a lot of directions in Ireland, but I can imagine this is true, or that they will just keep you chatting and see if you forget about your question. |
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| ▲ | bakugo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > This was strange. I asked a lot of Indian people about it and they said that it has to do with "saving face". Saying "I don't know" is a disgraceful thing. I've recently learned that this particular type of "saving face" has a name: "izzat". Look that up if you want to know more. |
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| ▲ | AlanYx 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A lot of the stuff written on "izzat" is questionable or wrong, but it is true that India has a collective concept of saving face. This can be an adjustment even if you're used to the East Asian concept of saving face. | | | |
| ▲ | bluGill 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | First I've heard of izzat... I'm not sure how to write that better, but the way you worded that made me suspect it was NSFW and I hesitated, but eventually decided I'd risk it. At least everything I found was work safe, and I learned a lot. I encourage everyone else who hasn't heard the word to look it up. | | |
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| ▲ | ilogik 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| sounds like an LLM :) |
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| ▲ | buckle8017 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | AI ~ Actual Indians in more ways than one. Lots of the material the LLMs are trained on is Reddit spam written by indians. It's a weird circle. | | |
| ▲ | ValentineC 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I moderate an airline subreddit, and it's interesting that many of the lazy or entitled-sounding questions (e.g. "can I get compensation for this?") come from people flying to/from Indian cities. | | |
| ▲ | fakedang 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Honestly that's just the massive population talking. There really isn't a "Hindi web" for India unlike for the Chinese, so we all come to roost in the WWW. Hence you'll get bad questions like these but you'll also get YouTube videos on obscure engineering and science topics, which I think is a fair deal. The Chinese web is on similar lines, although there is a lot more country bashing, especially against Indians and Americans. But nevertheless just the same. At least none of these come nowhere near to the brainrot that is the Arabic web. | | |
| ▲ | buckle8017 an hour ago | parent [-] | | India is maybe 10% of the English speakers on earth. It's not the population size that's talking. |
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| ▲ | eklavya 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Every time I hear any Indian trope, I find it interesting that it's only people in online forum who experience it. Somehow none of my non/Indian colleagues over the course of more than a decade have faced these ridiculous situations. They must be unlucky. |
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| ▲ | leephillips 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I got this so often in every part of the United States that some decades ago I just stopped asking anyone for directions. |
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| ▲ | koliber 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Strange. Never had it happen regularly in the US. | |
| ▲ | virgil_disgr4ce 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've never once experienced this nor literally ever heard anyone say someone gave them made-up directions in the US. The only time I've ever experienced made-up directions were trying to get out of the souk in Marrakech. | | |
| ▲ | lostlogin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I've never once experienced this nor literally ever heard anyone say someone gave them made-up directions in the US. Wouldn’t know. After the first two instructions I can never remember what came next. | |
| ▲ | leephillips 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I was unclear. I’m pretty sure the wrong directions I routinely got in the US (I was born and raised in NYC) were not made up, just wrong. |
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| ▲ | grugagag 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This reminds me of the time when I got lost when visiting LA about 20 year ago. Asked some guy on the street for help. He gave me directions as he was smirking at me. Turns out he pointed me in the opposite direction from where I was going to and most likely he was just being a dick. |
