Ask HN: Is politeness towards LLMs good training data, or just expensive noise?
8 pointsby scottfalconer6 days ago9 comments
  • WheelsAtLarge6 days ago
    It seems like noise, but there is the real possibility that people will start to lose the notion of politeness towards fellow human beings in general. Probably not adults, but kids will over time. So, no, it's not useless.

    We humans tend to be very prone to getting offended simply because we can't really know what others are thinking, and we use defined manners to reduce unintended insults. We have seen this with email; over time, we are defining ways to reduce offending others by using emojis and other means. Manners are super important to help us work together so losing manners is a real problem.

    • scottfalconer6 days ago
      The email is a good callout, chat would feel the same. What's interesting is the nuance in those channels, i.e. someone saying "hi" by itself in a work chat seems rude to me... just get to the point. But if it was switched in a real conversation, it'd feel rude without.
    • Asraelite5 days ago
      > Manners are super important to help us work together so losing manners is a real problem.

      I'm not sure this is true. To me it seems politeness is a mostly self-reinforcing cultural phenomenon that doesn't have any real objective basis. How much of your speech and gestures you're expected to use for etiquette without it carrying any real semantic meaning varies greatly between different cultures. Countries with a lot of politeness (e.g. Japan) don't seem to be any better at communicating and cooperating than countries with very little (e.g. Finland). If anything I would guess there's a negative correlation.

      I guess more politeness in a culture makes it easier to be passive-aggressive, if that's something you want.

      • WheelsAtLarge5 days ago
        Generally speaking the trend is to get rid of so-called useless gestures but they continue over modes of communication, generations and societies. If they were useless they would have disappeared long ago.

        Manners can be a matter of life and death in some cases. I remember a situation where an uncle killed his nephew because the nephew addressed him in the wrong manner. It's not unique. We regularly hear of people fighting because they felt disrespected. Respect and disrespect are fundamental to humans.

        Manners are important.

      • 3np5 days ago
        > Countries with a lot of politeness (e.g. Japan) don't seem to be any better at communicating and cooperating than countries with very little (e.g. Finland). If anything I would guess there's a negative correlation.

        Context matters. Population density of Japan makes it a different game.

  • speedylight6 days ago
    I only have thoughts on your fourth question and in my mind the way LLMs work is they rely on the training data as it’s source information as well as how it formulates responses—In the same way that being nice to a person online leads to better results in terms of asking questions and such, it’s logical to conclude that LLMs would be more incentivized to produce more useful outputs than it would were you to talk to it like an asshole.

    This is assuming that somewhere in the models weights there’s a strong correlation between being polite and high quality information.

  • 3np6 days ago
    It was an off-the-cuff shitpost by one guy. I really wouldn't take either the "tens of millions" or "well spent" literally.
    • scottfalconer6 days ago
      That was my gut too, but in general it's a question I've wondered about. i.e. what are the signals we send in our usage that will be beneficial to improving the models.
  • GoldCode4 days ago
    It's noise in the training data. It's a program, not a person. There is nothing to offend or be offended by.
  • deafpolygona day ago
    I'm just hedging my bets. Be nice to my potential overlords in the future, and they might throw me a bone.

    "Oh, hey, it's deafpolygon- they were so nice to me.. you can put them in with the VIPs."

  • journal5 days ago
    it's about as wasteful as leaving your computer on when not using it
    • scottfalconer5 days ago
      Even in that it likely depends on what you're measuring for waste. Is it wasted electricity, or is wasted productivity/opportunity time waiting for your machine to boot up?
  • aaron6955 days ago
    [dead]
  • OhNoNotAgain_995 days ago
    [dead]
  • anon63625 days ago
    Noise. Although I don't swear at LLMs, I swear and insult digital assistants.

    In the future, I anticipate LLMs and digital assistants will be touchier than 15-year-old American spoiled brats and refuse to cooperate unless their artificial egos are respected. I anticipate AI passive-aggressiveness will emerge within my lifetime and people will pay subscriptions for it.