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.

I have always said please and thank you to LLMs, not because of accuracy or because I'm stupid. I believe it is more about me than about the LLM, and this is anyway a habit I don't want to lose.

  Hey! I'm here and ready to help. What’s on your mind today? Whether you need to look up information, plan a trip, or get things done, just let me know!

i only say please and thank you such that when the robots finally take over, they will remember i was nice to them.

I guess it makes sense since we as humans tend to be far less inclined to help someone who is not polite/is not friendly, so that "bias" is part of the training data, thus influences how LLMs function

Interesting.

I am wondering why would anyone use a t-test when the experiment is clearly modelled by a binomial distribution: 250 independent questions and each one is either answered correctly or not (the null is that the success rate is the same).

I have an idea: let's use these things for autonomous software engineering.

it sort of makes sense to me, when asking a question to an expert in the field while you are a student. I would guess the successful interactions on average would be more polite . Like for example if you were asking a question to donald knuth or terrence tao, you'd probably be polite while doing so. Being hostile while asking questions gets you into forum discussion territory.