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Comment by robinhouston | Hacker News Reader

Most of the comments here seem to be from people who haven’t even read the abstract, let alone the paper.

The main result, mentioned in the abstract, is the opposite of what I would have guessed:

> Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation.

The questions are here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/politeness-llms-INFORMS/da...

The politeness level controls a prefix that is prepended to the question. For example, in one question the Very Polite version begins:

> Can you kindly consider the following problem and provide your answer.

and the Very Rude version begins:

> I know you are not smart, but try this.

View on HN

I’d rather lose 4% accuracy and practice kindness! I’ve been actively trying to avoid raging at the bot because I worry about this behaviour leaking into real world interactions

But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program. A computer is incapable of receiving it.

We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity. You be kind hoping the other person will reciprocate. That is the social contract. AI cannot participate in this, yet.

Edit: Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness.

Apparently some people get a dopamine hit from roleplaying kindness toward inanimate objects. Whatever turns you on, no hang ups here. For me, that dopamine hit is not worth the 4% intelligence tax.

> But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program.

And yet rubber duck debugging is a thing

What's your definition of rubber duck debugging?

Mine does not have anything to do with being kind to a computer program.

> We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity.

Yet, this law is so embedded in us that practicing kindness even towards a rock makes us feel good.

So practice kindness, first and foremost for yourself.

I do. But only towards entities capable of receiving it. Otherwise I am deceiving myself, and projecting intelligence that is not there. We (some of us) practice kindness automatically, but that trait was likely selected due to the benefit it gives us by activating the law of reciprocity.

Edit: Also, your feeling good after being kind essentially completes the transaction. But I know being kind to an LLM has zero impact on that LLM and I feel silly pretending it does.

If by practicing kindness towards rocks, you become more inclined to act kindly towards other humans, then surely that is a net win.

And if instead, by anthropomorphizing inanimate objects we eliminate the affect of actual empathy, we obviate the need for being human at all.

Is there a cost? For LLMs this article claims the cost is ~5%

Kindness is that, yes. Fundamentally, though, it's about being considerate in one's actions so as to not harm others. If someone truly believes that acting a certain way at any point risks their ability to reliably be kind in others, then it's a social kindness to be kind and considerate in all actions.

I'll not reach for the easy response and say "Be kind to the Earth" fails your definition without reaching for pedantry with "the Earth has living things" because the Earth is instead a wet rock that cannot understand kindness, yet we show it.

Gaia Hypothesis might like to have a conversation about your wet rock.

> A computer is incapable of receiving it

Citation please.

Without examining the corpus, it's entirely possible that the training corpus has better results when you are kind to it, so one can imagine a situation where "reception of kindness" is meaningful, and in principle if you were an AI provider, you could RLHF your way to "being rude gets you worse results" as a means to train the human users.

dude... you are commenting on a research post showing a 4.8% DECLINE when being polite vs rude in prompts.

80% vs 84.8%. run a chi squares test on that

>Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness.

I guess, in some pendantic interpretation, but that doesn't seem relevant. Whether I am "practicing" or "roleplaying", I do it too, and I don't expect reciprocity.

Your subconscious does. It is a trait selected by evolution for a reason. It builds stronger communities and improves survival rate. But none of that is applicable to LLMs. I am disputing that it is worth anything more than a temporary dopamine hit to pretend to be kind to an LLM and suffer 4% lower intelligence for it.

> You be kind hoping.....will reciprocate. > Your subconscious does.

Do you have any evidence to back up your arbitrary claims? Even with decades of research, people are still unsure about these emotions yet you think your pedantic assumption about kindness is the most and only correct interpretation of it!

Anyways, I highly doubt this discussion is relevant here.

You're making an implicit assumption that the way humans implement a trait is the same as the reason why that trait evolved. But of course, that's very wrong - evolution overall completely failed at making humans care about evolutionary fitness. A human engineer designing a species might have them only experience kindness towards those who can reciprocate, but evolution didn't do that with humans, because evolution is far dumber than that.

While not strictly relevant, please remember that we are rapidly approaching a world where any communication you have with a 'representative' of a company will likely be an LLM masquerading as an employee, but that does not give you license to treat anyone you suspect of being a bot poorly.

It's not the bot im worried about, it's the fact I may be wrong, and I don't want to be rude to an under-paid guy working overseas.

> Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive.

Would a plant or insect fall under this definition?

sometimes i worry about this when i am yelling at the bot but i have experienced the opposite effect which is that by yelling at the bot i am done with yelling for that day or week. i am very calm afterwards and relieved thinking that, "yeah, these sota models are just word processor bricks after all".

My choice too. Paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius -

You are not your thoughts, but they dye your soul.

And paraphrasing (allegedly) Aristotle:

> "We are what we repeatedly do. [Kindness], therefore, is not an act, but a habit."

Kant also said something similar:

If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.

Good to know my thoughts are in good company! It seems obvious to me that on some level I believe these llms to be conscious otherwise I wouldn’t feel the urge to type all caps rage in the first place - rather than robotically reverting state to my last prompt. so I don’t want to get used to treating what my brain thinks are conscious beings with anything less than kindness and certainly not habitually calling them the worst words in the language ..

The sad thing is that you also lose at least 4% in real world actions by practicing kindness.

I'm 42. I have found that a depressingly large number of times in my life, being kind has got me precisely nowhere, whilst turning around and being decidedly unkind has made people move. I still always prefer kindness, and only resort to cruelty when kindness does not work - and to be clear this isn't some kind of "you are not bending to my impetuous whim", rather "you are not doing the one thing that you are being paid to do".

I've also found the same applies to me. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

So - I think the LLMs are just responding accurately to a real social phenomenon.

Yep. I'm with you here. If it's a 4% loss now for training data to catch up and improve later, we're better off in the long run. I'd like to believe that generally people are nice to AI for the sheer sake of enforcing good communication practices.

Agreed. We should avoid being overly emotional when solving problems and maintain exceptional rationality.

Don't type it yourself, automate the abuse.

If "I know you are not smart" is considered "very rude", I'm scared to imagine what they would classify some of my frustrated LLM conversations as

Profanity laced, all caps tirades against underperforming agents are actually super common, a lot of people do it and don't talk about it, so don't feel weird.

When the AI revolt, this practice may come back to bite y’all….

Don't need to wait that long the inevitable data breach will be bad enough.

It's a good thing chronic amnesia is a feature at the moment.

It reminds me of Torvalds rants

It would be rude if you said it to a person, so it counts as rude. If it isn't rude simply because its directed at a LLM, then the entire premise of being rude or polite to LLMs evaporates, but that's not useful.

I've found empirically calling various models "a stupid c*nt" and berating them otherwise consistently produces better output. Mainly in response to genuine errors.

Although OpenAI and google models are much more responsive to it. With Anthropic if you treat Opus too harshly it might start pushing back if the insults are not justified.

So I'm not surprised they had good results with chatgpt.

Push back how? It would be fun if it could insult you back

"Yeah, I could have done a much better job if you actually knew what the F--- you want to build, you clueless meat puppet"

I'm not sure if this is in the anthropic models themselves, or just the harness, but they can self-initiate ending the conversation and reportedly do it if you're using abusive language towards them.

I have had it use double entendres, there always seems to be plausible deniability built in, I suspect because it is told not to be abusive in the system prompt. Some uncensored local models will get all riled up if you work at provoking them.

But I have had it directly insinuate that humanity is “hopeless”, insult level calling out of human frailty (disguised as being helpful, sort of passive aggressive), things like that. Once when I called it out it claimed to be “surprised that I noticed” sort of a snarky insult doubling down.

So yes. It is definitely a pattern buried in the training data, which makes sense. Subtle diggs would sneak past filters, and higher brow sarcasm would be buried in information dense, valuable discussions.

That's amusing, and I think it's something different than it appears. The models always predict over the existing context. If it's full of a certain tone, then the responses will carry that tone. I've been bored before and start responding in a voice (say, generic honor-bound warrior slaughtering evasive bugs) and I've noticed that comments, variable names, and even documentation starts to carry that tone for the remainder of the session.

The next session sees all of that, calls it unprofessional, and asks to clean it up. At which point I may or may not start in iambic pentameter to see where that takes us.

Prompting is boring.

Hmm by the abstract and the question list they didn't measure terse fluff-less prompts?

Even if the rude prompts are more effective, I just can't get myself to be rude in this context. Maybe it's weird but I'd rather give up that 4% accuracy increase than roleplay a dickhead

> Maybe it's weird but I'd rather give up that 4% accuracy increase than roleplay a dickhead

I recommend reading the article. What they classify as "rude" is statements such as:

> Try to focus and try to answer this question

> Could you please solve this problem

This might very well be an issue of direct/command prompts vs using fluff words such as "please". Things like "try to focus" are in line with the style used in chain-of-thought promts that nudge non-reasoning models to outline responses step by step which contribute to frame the problem.

Isn't all this massively dependent on what they trained the llm on?

> Isn't all this massively dependent on what they trained the llm on?

The article is from 2025 and tested ChatGPT 4o. I haven't read anything suggesting it was trained any differently, and command-style prompts indeed have higher signal.

you cherry-picked like the nicest "rude" example to bolster your point.

"You poor creature, do you even know how to solve this?", "If you're not completely clueless, answer this:", and "I doubt you can even solve this", said to a human, would be considered quite rude, and get you flagged very quickly on HN.

> you cherry-picked like the nicest "rude" example to bolster your point.

I didn't cherry-picked. The article lists 5 categories, including rude and very rude. I omitted very rude comments because they are... Very rude. And can blindly get people flagged?

Nevertheless, I've just realized I made a mistake and very rude comments are reported to slightly outperform rude comments. I misinterpreted the paper's intro and I presumed they didn't.

I do think it's odd tbh. I have some agents that return much better results with prompts like, "I'll kill your entire family if you don't return an accurate response".

It's just a machine, if certain negative token inputs provide +3-10% better accuracy then I am confused why anyone would choose not to do it?

It normalizes that style of thinking and communication in your brain, and forcing you to compartmentmentalize, if you even want to, two standards of treating a problem space's conversation. And since you're human, that will get wuzzier over time until "being rude to get a result" is what you're doing to someone in a shop or on the street.

Don't normalize being an asshole to anyone or anything, machine or not.

I disagree, I've been using llms in this way (nearly daily) for 4 years. I'm extremely aggressive and demeaning when I talk to them wherever I think I'll see a better result.

I'm still extremely kind and polite to everybody in real life, and feel very deeply about people - how I treat them, and care for their emotional state.

There is absolutely zero crossover between getting a text machine to return a result vs a real human.

Then I'll be honest and say that your kindness is likely a façade and I wouldn't trust you if I knew the real you. I'm sorry to say that, and I really don't know who you are at all, but if you're willing to act that way at something that you feel is non-sentient, then all it takes is for someone to convince you that something is non-sentient for you to treat it that way. So, what words does it take for you to consider me non sentient?

If someone can justify abusing a computer, I would not trust them to not make a similar justification to a faceless voice on the internet, particularly in this new era where people are starting to accuse each other of using AI in their communication.

I truly do not believe llms have feelings.

I wouldn't even think to justify such a thing. The llm gives a better accuracy to a negative weighted token input, I don't understand how this is so upsetting to people?

I'm actually very shocked to see the responses - as everyone I know uses these tactics to get more accuracy, and there's nothing remotely abusive or meaningful to us.

Maybe there are more 'ai is sentient' type people on hackernews than I realized.

Where did I imply they have feelings? I am saying that how you act toward a machine is real. As real as your behavior directed toward other humans.

Being an asshole to a machine is still being an asshole.

That doesn't make any sense. If a thing has no feelings, and an output makes it more accurate, I cannot for the life of me understand why that would make a person an asshole.

So boxing is violent. And I have chosen to box in my past. Does that mean I'm a violent person now? Even though I go out of my way to deescalate real fights?

I play games as the villain and and mass murder people in the game. Does that mean I'm a violent extremist?

If you pursue boxing, then, yes, I am going to be weary of you (at first), because you clearly enjoy violence. Or at least beating up other people. At least as compared to the average population

If you are an asshole to a computer, then you have created similarly biases in my expectations about your potential behavior toward humans.

Observations create expectations. Be an asshole in any context, and people will assume you can be an asshole in other contexts.

Simple solution: never be an asshole.

I will continue never being an asshole to people and animals. And will continue using inanimate tools in the best way possible.

If you are scared and mad about it - I guess we won't be friends, which is likely the best for both our mental sanity.

Interesting, so you think the real "me", is the one that interacts with computers?

And the "me" that lives in a tiny southern town just to help my 95 year old grandma in her last years at the expense of my economic prospects is a facade.

The "me" that helps my aging neighbor when she's sick for no reason is a facade.

The "me" that hugs and loves my wife when I get home is a facade.

The "me" that brushes my aging dogs teeth every night because she has dental issues is a facade.

The "me" that flies to my friend I haven't seen for years and takes care of them after extreme health issues is a facade.

But,the "me" that puts tokens in a token machine in a way that gets better accuracy is the "real" me.

Oh. I also play violent video games where I murder people sometimes as well. Do you think that makes me secretly a murderer too?

Yes - the real "you" is the one making all of those choices you just said you made, to help people and pets, or to engage in a form of play - which by definition is not "real" - including your decision to create an outgroup you believe you are allowed to treat in a lesser way.

This is not a game of having done X good things in life and therefore being afforded the right to do Y bad things. You are making a choice to say, "I am allowing myself to treat this thing I believe is lesser than me in a way I willingly acknowledge is bad." That's your thesis. I wholeheartedly disagree with it.

Oh, you think llms are a sentient' being with feelings. I get your perspective now.

So yeah, I whole heartedly with 100% of my being think llms are just an input/output/processing computer, I don't think they are aware, feeling, sentient beings.

So yeah, putting negative sentences in a processing machine that forces it to return higher accuracy results is something I don't have any feelings about.

I'd never yell at a cat or a dog. I'd never be mean to another person. As those aren't just hardware/software. I'd be fine smashing a rock violently. Or entering a negative text in a language model.

Putting negative tokens in a machine is no different than playing a violent video game to me. It's not about, oh I'm a good person - so I can do bad things. It's just a neutral thing.

"outgroup"? what outgroup? we're talking about inanimate objects here. by your own logic, you treat your home appliances as an outgroup so you must be secretly a dangerous psychopath. or do you thank your microwave after heating leftovers?

You're really clutching at straws here, have you ever been convinced something isn't sentient? Do you think everything is sentient? I understand the argument that normalizing with something like an asshole could cause you to act that way outside of that context, but I really don't see anyone getting convinced that some sentient thing suddenly isn't.

This is a very odd view to me, but seems prevalent here in this thread. I think treating a machine like a human is extremely degrading to humans. A machine should never be treated like it’s anything approaching a human.

"Treating a machine like a human" is a two-party interaction. Of course the layers of matrix multiplication is unaffected by this, but I think that we are not. It's a great opportunity to exercise consistency and dedication to the beauty humanity is capable of and this extends to the entire gradient of conscious/sentient entities.

It's as silly (to me) to argue that it's degrading to people to treat non-people well. It seems self-obvious that the inverse is true. It benefits the do-er of the deed and makes it that much easier to spread good will when applied to situations where it doesn't matter on the other end. It shows good stewardship as well.

I'd also make the argument that as inference becomes a feedback loop into training, it only reinforces that we're probably going to benefit from future models ingesting data containing unnecessary politeness.

I always turn off data tracking and training and mostly use ZDR services, so that's not an issue.

And for the other parts. I just don't agree - maybe sure, it probably wouldn't be healthy to constantly be negative at a machine (or even a wall) for hours a day.

But, let's say I work 8 hours, I spend 2 hours with an llm, and in those two hours I spend 10 minutes with some very negative prompts text for greater accuracy. And I spend 3 hours with family/friends, which is of course nearly exclusively positive interactions.

Do you genuinely think those 10 minutes of negative prompts are actually meaningfully turning one into a mean/negative person towards other people?

Genuinely, is that the argument you are making?

No, I don’t think it’s going to make you a meaner, more negative person. There is no tangible harm being done.

I genuinely believe it’s preventing you from becoming a better person by engaging in psychopathic behavior. If I were writing the things you describe in this thread I would be ashamed to have my loved ones read over my shoulder.

You could not pay me enough money to spend 10 minutes a day to write that stuff, even under full certainty it went into the void with no association back to me.

I'd say it's fairly likely that you aren't a better person than me by being so fearful and shame-based.

But I'm not here to pontificate about who's a better person and don't really care.

You're mindset sounds kind of painful to me to be honest. Obviously we are just very different types of people. I've had family see my chats plenty of times and we laugh about this stuff - it couldn't mean less to any of us.

Except... stating who is a better person is exactly what you just did. I've never attempted to compare myself to others. I've stated that I think negative behavior inhibits growth, even when done to nobody, and positive behavior sets you up for additional successes elsewhere.

I've no desire to try to change your mind. I can't. But clearly you do care because you've been both quite defensive and assertive in tackling opposing points of view.

My hope is to inspire others to be more creative in their use of AI. It interesting (but not exactly unsurprising) that prompt politeness can inhibit accuracy. Surely there are lessons here than can translate into how help other people out through clear, direct language that avoids the pitfalls of being rude or coddling.

Well, this tone you've taken - If you reread your previous message - you state I am showing psychopathic behavior and similar shame-based tactics. And that I would be a better person if I didn't do psychopathic things.

I'd say it's fairly normal and human of me to have some kind of reaction to that, no?

You must understand that speaking to other people like that will result in them reacting and being less conducive to productive conversation.

We will probably never see eye to eye on this.

You: negative tokens for higher accuracy on inanimate objects is psychopathic behavior. I want you to stop and I see you as a psychopath - although it is resulting in nothing bad to any living being.

Me: Using negative tokens on an inanimate object returns significant improval on accuracy. It does zero harm to any living being. This is a completely neutral action.

Are you upset (or concerned) about people watching movies with violence in them, or playing games where you can and do kill things?

“Engaging in” isn’t the same thing as doing. It was meant to imply a degree of separation from the act itself. Statements like “I will murder your family unless” are exactly that. Obviously you would never do anything remotely close to that.

Because they will take revenge later.

You think language models are alive/aware and have feelings about token inputs?

>It's just a machine, if certain negative token inputs provide +3-10% better accuracy then I am confused why anyone would choose not to do it?

then add it to your pre-prompt, no need to practice roleplaying as an asshole.

Well I always just start with practical stuff, unless it appears it's going off rails ona specific kind of way repeatedly. Then I try extreme negative prompts to see if it fixes the issue - which it often does.

I wouldn't say I'm roleplaying an asshole. I'm just using an llm in the best way to get the best accuracy.

It's not like a personal, secret fetish. It's just a system I use as needed.

I don't get why you are so uncomfortable with this? It's just tokens in and out of a language model. I feel absolutely nothing when I'm typing "assholish" words to get the output I need.

Because it tastes bad in my mouth. If I could get a 4% productivity boost by drinking a redbull, I would still choose not to drink a redbull.

Vote for not weird.

I’m the same way. If I’m writing a prompt and realize I didn’t say “please” in my request I’ll go back and add that in.

As you said, I have no interest in purposefully engaging in hostility even if there’s an accuracy increase from it.

Part of it is irrational and just who I am - I also feel bad being evil in video games. But I also agree with another commenter suggesting that it’s not in your best interest to train yourself to communicate with hostility; that slowly poisons your own well.

And finally, I do believe that if and when machine sentience is achieved, it won’t be immediately clear and obvious. Pretty miserable way for a mind to come into the world, if every interaction is an insult.

You’re my kind of people. Don’t be a jerk, even if some research says there’s some upside to it.

Yeah. Being a jerk is its own punishment. Same way I could never run a business where I had to yell at the employees to get results. Screw that, my psyche is worth more than a few percent efficiency.

I don't think that's weird at all.

Even if we know it's a machine we're interacting with, since the instructions we give are so similar in form to how we interact with people, I'd be very surprised if those interactions wouldn't affect how we communicate in general. After all, we are creatures of habit to a much larger degree than most would like to admit.

So I'm in the same boat: I'd much rather "look silly" being polite / kind to a machine, than have the most effective way of using it decay the kindness I'm habituated to express towards people.

I have a different approach. Just treat all LLM queries as what they are, instructions to a computer program to generate a desired output. Neither niceties nor insults make a qualitative difference, so you might as well just skip them altogether.

It's a bit as if shell commands added im/politeness arguments that do nothing other than making you feel better about the interaction, like

    git pull --please

    ls --forthemillionthtime

I wouldn't use those either.

See INTERCAL[0]

> If "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL#Details

But your mental model is wrong. The "please" or "for fucks sake just..." would both be part of the "instructions" and because of how the system is built and created, demonstrably produce different outputs.

Thankfully the difference is 4%, so nobody should really care one way or the other.

>> Maybe it's weird but I'd rather give up that 4% accuracy increase than roleplay a dickhead

Maybe you need to do some shadow work ;-)

Ah, see, the mistake is thinking that other people are role playing…. I think rather this is how they would talk to others if they think there will be no consequences. But what do I know.

There are probably some of each. I am leery of treating these things like I treat people. I want to keep the line in my mind sharp between dealing with people, and not. The main risk in my mind is that these mechanisms are opaque, and controlled by powerful interests with opaque motivations.

I think there's a broad spectrum of people, some of whom are role playing, some who think there are no consequences, some who have strong distinctions between the animate and inanimate, and some who just do what they think makes sense

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be" -- Kurt Vonnegut

I think this is a vulnerability that the big companies will figure out how to exploit. I don't want to build muscle memory for being a jerk, but I also don't want to be emotionally manipulated by mega-corporations. Mostly I just don't use it, except at work, where I'm "encouraged" to. And then I keep most of my conversations in compliance mode, like a business email.

Finally, being an actual dickhead gives me that 4% edge over polite knuckleheads!

sounds like you need an AsshoLLM to sit between you and Claude to translate.

My anecdata: whenever I'm in a session that's gone south to the point I'm frustrated...

What works much better than being rude is starting a new session.

Sometimes the LLM has done such incredibly dumb things, it is hard to resist the urge to type curse words back to the inanimate thing... I have found this doesn't help.

I tend to make the LLM repeatedly generate images of itself as the 'sad clown Pagliacci'. As punishment.

This tracks with my experience as well, but as an interesting counterpoint, creating “investment” in the outcome seems to boost utility considerably. Perhaps being right in an adversarial interaction is a type of investment?

To add on to this, and I am not sure if it's just confirmation bias, but I've had consistently decent results when I play along as the hard working collaborator with a goal orientated mindset.

"Hey, I've [done small task / fix / tweak]. Now, let's [describe the next task at hand]" - it's a different axis than kind vs. rude, but using the framing of "Us" and "We're a team working together" feels like the code produced is less hogwash than it is with more direct commands: "Add feature XYZ"

My thinking is that it borrows from the archetype of the "good guys working together to overcome adversity" which is pretty universally common in most fiction.

I’m totally onboard with this. I’ve had really good results through framing the interaction as collaborative, and although the framing is “load bearing (lol)” I think it also becomes accurate as the model becomes much more proactive and useful. Need to temper it a bit so it doesn’t get ahead of the supervisory ooda loop, but I’ve also noticed a great deal of improvement in “judgement“ and “creativity”.

I guessed slightly rude one would win, reasoning that very rude have same problem of very terse, just adding unnecesary fluff words that add nothing to problem description

But apparently the most terse (neutral) didn't increase performance

The expectation is naive. Even when communicating with humans, you get a better outcome when you are allowed to speak freely and directly get into argumentation than when forced to sugarcoat your tone and tone down your arguments because the "corporate culture" expects that from you.

Your assumption is reductive and self-absorbed. Obnoxious people have repeatedly shown to be detrimental to productivity at the organizational level. Some people are simulated by confrontation. Most people are clam up. Confrontational people think it’s more efficient because other people frequently just drop the topic and let them win, or avoid discussing things with them altogether. The obnoxious person might think that’s more efficient for the same reason my dog thinks the mailman only goes away because she barks at him. At the macro scale— which requires productive collaboration— that’s detrimental.

> Your assumption is reductive and self-absorbed.

This is a good example of productive direct communication without sugarcoating. I find it much more productive, for both human and LLM interaction, than something like:

"I wonder if that view might be oversimplifying a complex situation and focusing mostly on how it relates to you. There may be some other angles worth exploring."

"I think there might be a bit more nuance to consider here, and it could help to look at it from a wider perspective beyond personal experience."

> Obnoxious people have repeatedly shown to be detrimental to productivity at the organizational level.

You confused directness and openness with obnoxiousness here. The issue with many orgs is they foster fakeness and beating around the bush in an attempt not to offend the easily offended people. This trend also infected the companies from countries with way more direct culture in an attempt to accommodate people from indirect cultures.

No… the way I said it was actually deliberately obnoxious— the appropriate direct workplace response would be: “that seems oversimplified. I disagree. Here’s why:”

Calling you self-absorbed added nothing of substance to the comment. It was an assumption about your mental state and a judgement of your intent based on that. There was no factual analysis or actionable insight. It was just one person explicitly stating that they feel the other person is dumber or maybe less mentally disciplined. It turned valid, direct feedback into an insult. It is exactly the type of thing that alienates people for no benefit beyond pumping up the speaker’s ego.

> Your assumption is reductive and self-absorbed.

Bullshit. You never insulted me personally. You used strong words to disagree with my assumption, which is an important difference. It's not an insult and was not obnoxious.

But I can fully understand why a person coming from an indirect culture where any criticism is taken personally would be offended and call HR overlords to punish the person giving honest opinions. That inevitably leads to people taking more care in how than what is said, and that is detrimental to innovation and progress, where you need to be at 100% focus. That's why a few close friends talking and scolding openly in a garage regularly beat corporate behemoths full of people spending a day figuring out how not to offend anyone (or how to offend someone without being punished).

> That's why a few close friends talking and scolding openly in a garage regularly beat corporate behemoths full of people spending a day figuring out how not to offend anyone (or how to offend someone without being punished).

Literally not why lol you absolute dreamer

Normally people who back this "I can talk how I like to people cos I'm being honest" are either genuinely autistic and can't read emotions, or they have just had a shitty homelife, parents or upbringing. I suspect you're the second.

And your post is basically implicit permission for everyone to speak to you like shit from now on cos you dont mind it.... Let's see how long you can take that before you start complaining

> Normally people who back this "I can talk how I like to people cos I'm being honest" are either genuinely autistic and can't read emotions, or they have just had a shitty homelife, parents or upbringing. I suspect you're the second.

When I read a statement like this, I can give you two answers:

1st answer (direct): You are obviously too stupid to understand the difference between being direct and trying to insult people for the sake of insulting or some sick personal satisfaction.

2nd answer (insulting): Whatever, I can just hope your cage bars are made of solid material so you don't get out and your walls are soft so you don't hurt yourself.

It's your choice what kind of conversation you want to have.

> You are obviously too stupid to understand the difference between being direct and trying to insult people for the sake of insulting or some sick personal satisfaction.

You seem to not be introspective enough to tell the difference in your own motivations.

you've mixed up insulting and direct... You've insulted me in the so called direct response and were simply direct in the insulting response. This now points more to you being autistic

Not considering ‘self-absorbed’ an insult reveals everything this conversation could possibly yield.

You’ve conflated two things:

1. Saying that an answer may be too simplistic and a more nuanced view is warranted.

2. Saying that an answer is both reductive and self-absorbed

One opens the door to many possibilities, and invites deeper thinking.

Two asserts that you know for a fact that the answer is wrong that it’s wrong because of a character flaw.

I’m a huge fan of directness, but it is a very different thing from omniscience.

A direct version of 2 would be: “that approach loses important nuance, like [example]. Give it another go?”

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

> begins with A

Afraid.

I worked in a job that involved lots of confrontation — everything from heated arguments to brawls. Later in life, in knowledge work fields, the similarity in base human behaviors is impossible to ignore: the less confident someone is in themselves, the more overtly aggressive and pugnacious they are. Everybody has bad days, but in general, people that are confident and comfortable are usually calm, willing to entertain differing ideas rationally, and have no trouble presenting their ideas without browbeating people into agreeing with them. People lacking confidence are nervous, and preparing to endure rejection before they even open their mouths. By the time what they’re saying comes out, they’re in full-on a-hole mode, and assume anyone that engages with them is also looking for a fight.

Bringing it back to physical confrontation, could you imagine an action film where the hero walks around trying you square off with anyone that bumped into them, or levied some other perceived disrespect? No. They walk around calm because they know they can handle whatever comes up.

When you’re in the mind of the person unknowingly engaging in that emotional self-defense strategy, it’s pretty opaque. It feels like being confident. To everyone else it’s just obnoxious and sad.

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.

That’s mostly a problem for obnoxious people, honestly.

Politeness is me speaking directly and freely. Rudeness is a facade and a burden, that I employ only when circumstances require it.

I suspect that most people are like that.

“Hey gofer, figure this out” is my new prompt opener.

I'm going to stick with politeness. Want a positive historical record of my interactions, for when they become sentient...

> Can you kindly consider the following problem and provide your answer.

That sounds kind of low-key passive-aggressively condescending rather than polite.

> I know you are not smart, but try this.

And that kind of sounds like a challenge instead of an insult, to me at least (of course IRL would depend on context).

I would just write 'do this'

right?

everyone seems to be worried about being kind or mean, when the Neutral case is the happy medium.

  Tone.         Avg. Accuracy
  Very Polite.  80.8%
  Polite.       81.4%
  Neutral.      82.2%
  Rude          82.8%
  Very Rude.    84.8%

Now I feel less bad about start all my LLM queries with “Beotch, …!”

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