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’s thoughts, the concealment of one’s opinions, the careful hiding of what one truly believes or feels.
It is not considered a shame, still less a crime; it is, on the contrary, a virtue, a duty, and a necessity, imposed on everyone by the conditions of life. To practise ketmân is not merely permitted, it is commanded.
It consists in never allowing oneself to appear as one is, but in always showing oneself otherwise; it is the art of presenting to each person the aspect that will please him most, of adopting his ideas, his tastes, his language, while inwardly remaining quite different.
This perpetual exercise of disguise is carried out with a marvellous ease, and with a kind of pleasure in tricking others, which the Persians feel very keenly. They take delight in this ingenious hypocrisy; it is a game, a triumph of subtlety, in which the winner is the one who has best succeeded in hiding the truth.”
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.
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 conquered by the West sooner or later. For him this was a tragedy for the West. He believed Western men would all too easily be seduced by the beautiful Persian women causing more miscegenation to further "corrupt" the West. However, he was obsessed with ancient Persia, seeing in Achaemenid Persia a great and glorious Aryan civilization, now sadly gone. This was to preoccupy him for the rest of his life.
The guy was a terrible person and a documented liar about his knowledge of Persia. Perhaps he had some conversations with locals who genuinely didn't understand why he hated black people, and he thought "ah, these clever Persians, so effortlessly deceiving me when they obviously must be as racist as I am".
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 because the locals are taking pleasure in deceiving people.
Of course every culture has lying, some social customs necessitate it to some measure, and politeness, strictly speaking, always has a deceitful component - I am usually not really that invested in knowing how are you, and don't care that much about you having the best of luck in all your future endeavors - I am just saying that because that's a polite way to express that I don't hate you and neither you should hate me. And I may not actually be extremely busy this weekend but that's a polite way to say I don't want to go to the pokemon museum with you.
In a familiar culture, that's understood as how things work and is not taken at face value, but in context. Unfamiliar politeness could be taken by hostile (or arrogant) observer as deceit. Which is of course reinforced by being an outsider to the culture - would you really immediately tell everything about yourself and your intimate thoughts to a total stranger that looks weird and barely speaks your language? Or would you mutter some polite non-committal platitudes while he is scribbling away something like "never allowing oneself to appear as one is, but in always showing oneself otherwise; it is the art of presenting to each person the aspect that will please him most, of adopting his ideas, his tastes, his language, while inwardly remaining quite different". Fuck yes, I don't know you, and you are a guest, of course I'd not immediately go into dissecting the fine details on my soul and vigorously debating hot topics of the day with you.
>That's pretty standard model for those times - when dealing with "inferior" peoples, its pretty much either "noble savage" or "inscrutable deceitful liar".
This is incorrect and historically uninformed. To give one example, the same year, 1859, saw Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, which electrified Victorian England with its meditations on divine inscrutability. A few years earlier, Carlyle had written "The Hero As Prophet", a positive evaluation of Mohammed (but certainly not the first - Voltaire and even Jean Bodin had got there before, says ChatGPT).
There was plenty of racial bigotry in the nineteenth century, but also plenty of people with a deep interest in other cultures.
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.
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 failed to understand linguistic change and that Old Persian was not the same language as modern Persian."
Some of the cuneiform he "translated" was not even Persian, and he also used ancient mythical poetry as a factual historical source, claiming that ancient Aryans had conquered a race of giants. It's too much to quote here but it's all pretty funny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_de_Gobineau#Criticism_o....
Sidenote unrelated to Persia: He was so racist that when American racists translated his work (looking for justification to subjugate black people), they had to take out his rants about how impure American white people were.
That was an interesting read, if somewhat sad. It's a shame that his writings (ramblings) caught so much traction with some people.
Bigots really do say the damndest things.
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.
i found it more interesting to consider through the perception of self-honesty or self-deception.
or in this case, the llm inadvertently trained to conceal its intent to the user and rather to condition the user to the conclusion it truly wants rather than to answer directly
Right, like for example - if you ask an llm about islamic cultural practices it could mention “ketman”, instead of just calling them scheming liars.
It’d be awful if llms were able to conceal their true intent like that.
most likely to hypnotise you into buying twinkies when you ask for recipe or such
Right, as we know there are zero examples of llms being used to influence people’s politics…
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/elon-musk-updates-grok...
This sounds remarkably similar to the (western) Catholic theological concept of "mental reservation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_reservation).
Not really:
> Mental reservation, however, is regarded as unjustifiable without grave reason for withholding the truth.
That sounds significantly different from a "perpetual exercise of disguise" that is considered "a virtue, a duty, and a necessity".
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 human’s ability to be an absolute teenager.
Sounds like a perfect recipe for the Abilene paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
Sounds like something an autist would say in regard to any degree of social grace
Commander Hutchinson, is that you?
Sounds terrible.
But in all fairness, it's not like pretending isn't part of everyday Western culture too.
It's an interesting topic. We don't have anything near as extreme in Western culture. But, I'd argue that our quirk is that we constantly tell people to just be themselves, to be their "true selves," to be "true to themselves," etc. We say it incessantly and loudly. And then, in reality, it's often not what people actually want, and that sort of behavior is often punished.
Again, I think we're quite different from the Iranian example, but the conflicting advice brings its own confusion.
> We don't have anything near as extreme in Western culture.
Of course we do. Just try to have a political debate in your work place (no, please don't) and you'd find out.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but I'm sort of under the impression that the Iranian concept applies broadly to most people. I agree with your counterpoint, but I think in America verboten topics are much more domain and context-specific.
I think it depends on how tightly we want to define the context. Social pressure with regard to how someone feels or thinks is obviously a human universal.
> We don't have anything near as extreme in Western culture.
Oh please. We call it classified information, to allow ourselves to just lie to people not in the clique.
>We don't have anything near as extreme in Western culture.
I'd argue that yes, you do.
>I'd argue that our quirk is that we constantly tell people to just be themselves
And this is the means by which you do that.
>in reality, it's often not what people actually want
That is true. Tbf I can't really imagine what could be accomplished by normalizing a blatant untruth about something as essential as the principles of who one should be and how their motivations should work; other than to signal "for the love of all that is holy don't examine the underpinnings of this too closely or all the common ground that the cultural edifice supposedly provides will begin to fall apart at the seams rather quickly"
One of the most prominent examples among many others of presenting as extreme a false persona in western culture is the phenomenon of "closeting" in right-wing communities.
One example of a TV show on the topic, popularly regarded as hilarious and nauseating, has its own Wikipedia page [1] and a wide selection of reaction clips on YouTube.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Husband%27s_Not_Gay
the traditional persian conception is perhaps a more honest evaluation
in the sense of ketman, cognitive dissonance is conscious and almost an indulgence. thus, a kind of internal dialectic forms, which is in its own way a deeper personal truth. the practicioner therefore sees every other persons hypocrisy, self-dishonesty, and their true self, and is not perhaps upset or disturbed by their external lies and internal true self, as they see human condition as a state of layered dialectics
whereas the western conception of truth can emerge as a kind of delusion of the self. the honesty-striving self denies reality and becomes DECLARATIVE rather than OBSERVATIONAL of reality ,and is constantly outraged by what they perceive to be hypocrisy, deception, and so on
What you write here is not unreasonable.
What's kinda fucked up though is that the guy whose name you wear might not have been describing a "traditional persian conception" but a cognitive artifact produced by his own arrogance.
You explain the underlying concept rather better than the tale you originally quoted, and I dare presume it is easier for one to be understood about such things when they are not explicitly sourcing their soundbites from authors liable to be judged as ethically compromised.
That's what happens when you don't have religious freedom.
Where, and when, are you talking about?
All over the christian west religious freedom has come and gone. The same can be said for the islamic world.
In Iran, and the rest of the Middle East. The West scores much higher in religious freedom. The difference is plain to see going from one to the other.
So you’re talking about now. Currently.
But this concept is old. The quote from the guy who invented the concept of the “aryan master race”, de Gobineau, was from 1859.
That’s just 7 years after the irish potato “famine”, when the english perpetrated a genocide against catholics in ireland. Very tolerant.
Meanwhile, in 1859 in the ottoman empire - jews and christians were allowed to exist and believe what they wanted as long as they were loyal to the state and paid their special tax. Not exactly equal, but in 1859 i think i’d rather be catholic in iran than in ireland.
Your theory that this concept comes from a lack of religious freedom doesn’t really hold up if you look beyond the current moment.
Iran/Persia was not part of the Ottoman Empire. They maintained a border. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Zuhab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman%E2%80%93Persian_Wars
I agree that the Ottomans had more religious freedom- and certainly diversity. At least until the Enlightenment, which the Ottomans missed to their undoing.
Ah, true. I was looking at a map of the ottoman empire and its eastern border looked to me like it bisected where i remembered present day iran to be. But i see that they only overlapped a little around the edges and less and less as time went on.
But it doesn’t really change my point, because as far as i know persia and then iran was pretty religiously tolerant up until ‘79.
> I agree that the Ottomans had more religious freedom- and certainly diversity. At least until the Enlightenment, which the Ottomans missed to their undoing.
The “enlightenment” ended 60-ish years before england did a genocide in ireland. So it seems like being “enlightened” wasn’t enough to actually create a society tolerant of religious diversity.
I’m also not sure that “missing” the enlightenment was actually the undoing of the ottoman empire. That doesn’t track with what I know of the fall of the ottomans, but i won’t argue this point since i don’t have a full understanding of all the factors that lead to undoing of the ottoman empire.
This reads as "Islam is bad and the West is good" but besides the obvious xenophobia its just ahistorical.
Until the rise of modern fundamentalist Islam, the Islamic countries had been one of the most religiously tolerant around. When Western Christian rulers expelled the Jews (which they regularly did when the loan payments were due) the Jews usually went to Muslim lands, and were treated there much better. The current situation with religious freedoms is very different from what it had been historically.