Convincing Is Not Persuading
alainrk
34 points
21 comments
March 22, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (7 comments)
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.
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.
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.
a1j9o94
I fall into this trap a lot. The platonic ideal argument is a fun mental exercise but doesn't get anything done
clarkevans
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.
ashwinnair99
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.
loup-vaillant
Simply put, they don't get it.