alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
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> 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.
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.
“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.”
> AI insight porn
put very succinctly. if done without ai, the more impressive!
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