Discussion
Weekend Engineering
nubg: 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.
getnormality: 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.
getnormality: It's AI for sure.
dahart: 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
some_furry: 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.
getnormality: 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.
j16sdiz: 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.
johnisgood: Yeah. You convince with logic, you persuade with emotions. Done!
Avicebron: 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.
johnisgood: 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.
clarkevans: The Heath Brother's book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, is quite excellent in this regard. They describe three legs to a change and it's easy to miss one or more of them.
