Convincing Is Not Persuading | Hacker News Reader

Convincing Is Not Persuading

blog.alaindichiappari.dev

34 pointsalainrk26 comments

This AI-written post is part of an insight porn genre that attempts to draw a sharp distinction between two words that mean basically the same thing in real life. We read it, we politely agree that sure, you could use those two words to represent those two different concepts, then we go back to everyday life and continue to use them interchangeably.

If you read the post and actually believed what it said, you would tell people "your presentation convinced but did not persuade, that's why leadership isn't doing what you said." This doesn't make sense to a typical English speaker.

I guess the only takeaway was: we should aware the other dimension (other than reasoning) when we try to convince/persuade somebody.

This article can be re-written into something < 300 words.

Yeah. You convince with logic, you persuade with emotions. Done!

That's why LLM exist, you can go there, paste the link and specify the number of words you want the synthesis. Or just take a few minutes and read it entirely. Nobody forces you.

And the people who repeat such statements uncritically to their reports will also get mildly annoyed when they have no Earthly clue what that actually means.

I looked up persuade and convince in the thesaurus and dictionary, based on the title, and then came to say the same thing. But then I got a little curious about the source of the title’s claim, and looked up Chaim Perelman. He really did try to make a distinction between convince and persuade in his influential book from sixty years ago, so the body of the blog post is accurate in a sense - this is a concept that came from an historically important philosopher. Perelman was dissecting argumentation and cataloguing the techniques for strong and persuasive arguments. The problem with this blog post is taking Perelman’s argument out of context and stating Perelman’s rhetorical distinction as though it’s a fact and then arguing logically for it. That leaves out all the ethos and pathos that Perelman was trying to convey is necessary for a good argument, and it also misses slightly on the logos as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha%C3%AFm_Perelman

Interesting. The post would have benefitted a lot from talking about this background instead of just name-dropping Perelman once and by last name only(!!).

That's the sort of sloppiness you get when you have a conversation with an AI, ask the AI to make a blog post based on the conversation, and then copy-paste that straight into your Substack without reading to see if a fresh reader would understand what you are talking about.

If the author insists on posting more unedited AI text, asking a fresh AI session to critique the post from scratch would probably catch this kind of mistake and lead to a much better result.

It is not name dropping, the last name is literally mentioned along with the name of the book.

> AI insight porn

put very succinctly. if done without ai, the more impressive!

> This doesn't make sense to a typical English speaker

You read the words like they were generated by an AI - ie, empty words which did not make sense to you. ie, you did not derive meaning from it.

But for me, I derived meaning from this essay. Regardless of how the text was generated, I was able to relate it to some of my own insights.

For instance..

>Pascal used to distinguish between geometric and subtle minds (sensibilities). >The geometric mind works through axioms and deductions, step by step, like a >compiler. The subtle mind grasps a situation holistically, reading context, >feeling the weight of unspoken constraints, sensing what a room will and won’t >tolerate.

I read this as saying that as humans we have a "subtle" sense that can perceive the chaos out there and then derive patterns from that chaos and be able to symbolize them to derive theories of that chaos via the geometric mind. For example, the sense or feeling of space is symbolized into euclidean geometry. To me, this is a deep insight, and I did not know Pascal called it out. So, I learned something from this essay.

Thank you for explaining that

“Insight porn” is a new term for me but it seems to fit so well.

I think a key part of it is not just the simplification of complicated issues, but the willingness to oversimplify them in a way even if it perverts the message. It’s a cousin to “just blame immigrants” or “all cops are bastards” or “____ considered harmful.”

How fun to see that the most common insult in 2026 is that something is AI-generated. Is this comment too? Can you provide the prompt you use and the automation you have to increase your karma points?

There's something fishy with having a link at the bottom to share directly to HN..

It feels inorganic. Like this person has sat down and thought "how can I become an influencer on HN" it's disturbing.

Yeah, it does have a share button, but I do not think it is anything new, there is BlueSky, X, lord knows what else, and then HN.

Fishy or not, it worked. I found it on the front page here

Sean Goedecke and many others do the same, is it ok in their case just because more famous?

Dear author, can you post the prompt? I'm not sure which parts are what you actually meant to write and which are LLM fillings.

It's AI for sure.

Great analysis, you should open a blog with your great abilities

It's a bummer but I click almost no blog or Show HNs any more due to the content engagement hacking with LLMs (and 99% are not sincere "well see English is not my native language", etc.)

Man it doesn't post automatically

Most people treat these as the same thing and wonder why their arguments land logically but change nothing. The gap between the two is where most communication actually fails.

I fall into this trap a lot. The platonic ideal argument is a fun mental exercise but doesn't get anything done

Simply put, they don't get it.

Heath Brothers' treatise, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, describes three legs to facilitating a change: clear vision, sufficient motivation, and concrete first steps.

The title of this blog post hints at an important topic. However, I think even a single page summary or graphic from Switch may be more actionable. I don't love Switch's elephant analogy but it's good enough. It helped me with blind spots in my proposals.

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