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Comment by Asraelite

8 hours ago

You are conflating obnoxiousness with directness.

Rudeness is completely arbitrary and you have to figure it what exactly is rude by, basically, upsetting humans and avoiding whatever caused the upset in the future.

People who either can't or don't want to do that say they're "direct" or "honest" or "logical" but there's another word for it, begins with A

I haven't read the paper but it seems like it's saying rude prompts are better, so isn't it reasonable to assume that's what they meant? If we want to talk about directness, that's kind of a tangent right? I see directness as an entirely different dimension, you can be very direct and polite, you can be very rude and indirect (e.g. passive aggressive). Maybe they should do a follow-up study on how well AI responds based on level of directness.

  • Many people, especially from non-direct societies, just can't distinguish and see directness as rude.

    That's why you constantly see people from India or the USA complaining about Dutch or German people being rude, where in fact they are just direct in their way of communications.

    I remember having a call from a manager in the USA who wanted to know what's wrong because I wrote "it was ok" in the feedback form for one of their subordinates. It was difficult to explain to him that nothing was wrong, it really was okay, and the bar for awesome and superb is much higher here where we live.