alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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.