#persuasion — Public Fediverse posts

One false argument can collapse an LLM's accuracy to near zero, new study shows

Share if you found this interesting.

https://1ban.news/llm-adversarial-persuasion-beliefs-2026/

#1ban #llm #adversarial #persuasion #beliefs #tech

Review: Persuasion – One of Jane Austen’s Most Underrated Books. (Spoilers)

Last Christmas, one of the books I received was Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which, as the title says, is possibly one of her most underrated books. While we have all heard of Pride and Prejudice, and maybe some of her other stories such as Sense and Sensibility or Emma, most of us probably aren’t familiar with Persuasion, despite it being one of the most heart-wrenchingly written romances Jane Austen ever put to paper.

Set in Regency-era England, Persuasion follows Anne Elliot, the daughter of a wealthy aristocrat whose poor spending habits have landed the family deep in debt. In an attempt to get out of debt, the Elliot family is forced to rent out their estate to some wealthy tenants and move to their new home in Bath. However, the guy renting their estate isn’t just a random guy, but is actually Admiral Croft, who is married to the sister of Anne’s former suitor Captain Fredrick Wentworth, the man whom she was persuaded to break up with 8 years prior to the events of the book. Thus, Anne and Wentworth are forced to reconnect and confront their lingering feelings for each other through a series of misunderstandings.

With that description alone, it is understandable why Persuasion holds such a special place in the hearts of Jane Austen fans everywhere. Whereas most of Austen’s books center around young women falling in love for the first time, Persuasion focuses on an older heroine (Anne is 27) who has despaired of ever finding a husband and believes that Wentworth would never again want her after she rejected him. Thus, instead of the story necessarily focusing on finding a husband (though that’s a big part of it), it focuses more on forgiveness and the rekindling of the relationship between the two, and Anne’s rediscovery of hope and joy after being mired in despair for so long.

Besides that, Persuasion also feels different compared to some of Jane Austen’s other novels in the sense that Austen was in a similar situation to Anne. While her family wasn’t deep in debt and weren’t high-up aristocrats, Austen never married, despite having an attraction to a young man named Tom Lefroy (though the jury is out on whether this was a fling or if she actually liked him), being engaged to a guy named Harris Bigg-Wither (which she ended the morning after he proposed), and supposedly having a romance with a young clergyman in Bath who tragically died shortly after their infatuation began. Whether she actually loved any of these men is a topic of debate, but within Persuasion, it feels as though she wrote from personal experience. The pain that Anne feels at being single and losing her shot feels as though it came from Jane’s own sadness. Though heartbreak appears in several of Austen’s books (i.e. Sense and Sensibility), here, it feels deeper and more cutting, like Jane was writing about something closer to home.

Because of that, the end of the book feels so much more deserved. Yes, the heroines of other works like Sense and Sensibility who go through heartbreak also get endings that feel consistent with their journeys and are well-earned, but because Persuasion is largely about overcoming heartbreak and rediscovering love, the end is that much better. It’s more satisfying to know that Anne has become the person she used to be – hopeful, in love, and beautiful again – instead of despairing.

For the hopeless romantics, Persuasion is a book that expresses romantic longing better than many of Jane Austen’s other works.

Until next time,

M.J.

AI Systems Out-Persuade Expert Humans, Including Professional Canvassers And World Championship Debaters

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.techdirt.com/2026/07/27/ai-systems-out-persuade-expert-humans-including-professional-canvassers-and-world-championship-debaters/

PsyPost: Are AI chatbots a threat to democracy? New study explores their persuasive power. “Two survey experiments comparing the cost-effectiveness of using LLM chatbots to persuade voters estimated that LLM-based persuasion costs $48 to $75 per voter, versus $100 for traditional methods, while being equally persuasive. However, they also found that traditional methods currently scale more […]

‘Never disagree with anyone’: Behavioral scientist shares conflict-free trick to changing minds

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/never-disagree-with-anyone-behavioral-scientist-shares-conflict-free-trick-to-changing-minds-ex1/

Enthymemes: The Argument You Finish Yourself

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/06/enthymemes-the-argument-you-finish-yourself/

Arguments can be made more persuasive if they are rephrased and intensified. Intensifying adverbs is most effective, followed by intensifying verbs, followed by repetition.

https://informallogic.ca/index.php/informal_logic/article/view/10250

#Argument #Persuasion #Communication

Just because solutions are available doesn't automatically mean they'll be used—that's old news in sociology. But how do organizations—translation agencies—try to persuade of something as a problem or a solution, and what kind of society do they picture in doing so? That's not so old—it's actually quite fresh:
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/joso-2025-0053/html
#sociology #persuasion #organization #climate #solution

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #LudwigWittgenstein #Persuasion

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Protest #MarchForOurLives #Florida

A quotation from Horace

For ridicule shall frequently prevail,
And cut the knot, when graver reasons fail.
 
                              [Ridiculum acri
Fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res.]

Horace (65–8 BC) Roman poet, satirist, soldier, politician [Quintus Horatius Flaccus]
Satires [Saturae, Sermones], Book 1, # 10 “Nempe incomposito,” l. 14ff (1.10.14-15) (35 BC) [tr. Francis (1747)]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/horace/1955/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #horace #argument #comedy #debate #derision #humor #impact #jest #jibe #jokes #laughter #mockery #rhetoric #ridicule #satire #scorn #wit #witticism #writing #persuasion #influence

📖 Storytelling: 6 claves:
1️⃣ Conoce a tu audiencia → Habla para ellos, no para ti.
2️⃣ Define el mensaje central → Una sola idea, clara y potente.
3️⃣ Estructura narrativa → Inicio, nudo y desenlace. Siempre.
4️⃣ Usa datos con propósito → Son evidencia, no protagonistas.
5️⃣ Apela a la emoción → Los números convencen, las emociones conectan.
6️⃣ Simplifica sin perder profundidad → Menos es más, pero no vacío.
#Storytelling #ComunicaciónEfectiva #Persuasión #HablarEnPúblico #DataStorytelling

Very good read on the intersection of the current lack of AI regulation and the rapid advances brought about by Anthropic's Mythos.

"This is what passes for AI governance in 2026: a single company accidentally builds an entity powerful enough to pose an existential threat to the digital systems that power modern life, unilaterally decides how to deal with it, and then loops in everyone else."

"once the threat was identified, Anthropic decided—alone—what to do about it." https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-case-for-ai-regulation #AI #Regulation #Mythos #LLMs #Zero_Day_Threats #Code #Software #Security #Anthropic #Risk #Transparency #Policy #AIRegulation #Persuasion

It’s bad enough that our culture doesn’t know how to sell; it’s criminal that people in advertising don’t. We review #TheArtofSellingYourself (sort of): http://the-agency-review.com/art-selling-yourself #selling #persuasion #advertising #marketing #business #culture @TarcherPerigee

The Biology of Narratives

Persuasion is hard. You can’t just walk up to someone and drop your request on them. You have to set the stage. You have to build context. You have to be patient enough for the other person to normalize the idea, and only then, slowly, bring them to a point where the decision feels like their own.

Kids do this with their parents all the time. Politicians do it with citizens. Brands do it with customers. The mechanics are the same. Build the narrative, water it, and wait.

Now, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to shift someone’s stance on a topic, even when the facts seem obvious to you? Resistance to change isn’t really the person’s fault. It’s natural. It’s biological.

We are physiological beings. Our brains are wired by neurons, and those neurons govern our perceptions, our beliefs, our values, our identity, and the emotions wrapped around them. We don’t actually think critically about a situation as a first move. The very first reaction the brain produces is emotional. A piece of news, a sentence, a visual, an audio clip, whatever the trigger, our brain, depending on how it has been wired by childhood and past experiences, releases a cocktail of hormones. Happy. Sad. Angry. Hopeless. Excited. Whatever fits the pattern it has already learnt.

The second step is where reasoning enters, and this is the part most people miss. The brain doesn’t reason first and then feel. It feels first, and then it goes hunting for reasons that justify the feeling. It pulls from our belief system, our values, our self perception, our identity, basically the bundle that adds up to what we call personality, and constructs an argument. If you win that argument with the other person, you feel great and satisfied. If you lose, something more interesting happens. And that brings me to a pattern I keep noticing.

There seem to be roughly three kinds of people when it comes to handling counter opinions.

One, the stubborn type. They are rigid. They protect their world view at all costs and resist changing it even when shown evidence. This is the kind of person for whom hearing something bad about themselves is painful, almost physically so, because you’re not just challenging an opinion, you’re challenging an identity. That’s actually why criticism stings the way it does. The brain interprets it as an attack on the self, not on the idea.

Two, the easily influenced. They flip with the wind. Whoever spoke to them last shapes their view. They fall for lies and clever framing because they haven’t anchored their thinking in anything strong enough to push back.

And three, somewhere in the middle, basically the most of us.

But here’s the catch. It’s not that you are permanently one type. Depending on the topic, the person you’re talking to, your confidence in the subject, your mood, even how tired you are, you fluctuate. You can be the stubborn one in one conversation and the easily influenced one in another. The three types aren’t fixed identities, they’re positions on a sliding scale we keep moving along.

So why am I going into all of this? Because every bit of it is governed by biology. By how your brain is wired. Whether you are open minded or closed minded, in what corners of life, comes down to the architecture of your neural pathways.

When we come across a counter opinion or something we don’t align with, the brain has two paths. Either it rejects the input outright, which is the cheap and easy option, or, if we are even slightly open to change, it has to do something expensive. It has to build. New neurons have to connect. New synapses have to form. A new neural pathway has to be carved through tissue. That is the actual, physical, biological cost of changing your mind.

This is also why we tend to get more rigid as we age. It isn’t that the brain stops being flexible. People learn new languages, new instruments, and enter entirely new careers well into their later years. But the muscle gets weaker if you don’t use it. The more you practice learning new things, the easier learning becomes. The less you challenge your own views, the harder it gets to challenge them later. Rigidity isn’t really a personality trait. It’s a fitness level.

And these new pathways take time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is, you can’t upgrade a belief the way you upgrade software in an instant. The brain has to physically rebuild itself, and that takes real time.

This explains how the world actually works.

This is why politics is the way it is. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with their entire wiring. The narrative they’ve been living inside isn’t an opinion they hold, it’s the only world they have access to. To change it, the brain has to literally redo itself, and that is exhausting and slow.

This is why public policy is so hard. You can pass a law in a day, but you cannot pass a behavioral change in a day. Behavioral change isn’t a software update. It’s biology rewriting itself, repetition by repetition, across millions of people, in parallel.

This is why brand building takes years. A brand is essentially a stable narrative living rent free inside a customer’s head. Building one means slowly carving a neural pathway across millions of brains. There is no shortcut. You either repeat enough times to become the default association, or you don’t.

This is also why pivoting an audience is brutal. If you’ve been known for one kind of content and you switch to another, your audience doesn’t start from zero. They start from below zero. They first have to erase the old version of you they had built in their head, and only then can they begin building the new one. You’re working against the pathway you yourself helped create.

And this, I suspect, is how social media algorithms work too, and on both sides of the screen. The algorithm itself learns the way a brain does, through sheer repetition. Every click, every pause, every share, every second you linger, is one more rep feeding the loop. The patterns get stronger, the predictions get sharper, the model’s internal wiring goes deeper. In a real sense, the algorithm is building its own version of neural pathways about you.

But here’s the twist. While it’s busy learning you, it’s also shaping you. It keeps serving the same flavor of content over and over, not just because it’s engaging in the moment, but because every repetition carves a groove on your side too. So you end up with two systems quietly training each other in parallel. The algorithm learning what reliably hooks you, and you slowly becoming the kind of person who gets hooked. The algorithm isn’t just predicting what you’ll like. It’s shaping what you’ll become. And you aren’t just consuming content. You’re teaching it, scroll by scroll, who to make you into. Over months and years, those pathways, on both ends, become you.

And this happens at a scale and speed our biology was never built to defend against.

So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, or being convinced too quickly, or wondering why a political conversation went nowhere, remember. You’re not really fighting opinions. You’re fighting biology. You’re asking a brain to spend energy rebuilding itself, and brains, like most things in nature, prefer the path of least resistance.

The good news is that the same biology that traps us also frees us. Pathways are not destiny, they’re patterns. And patterns can be redrawn, slowly, deliberately, with patience. The same way kids work on their parents. The same way politicians work on the public. The same way brands work on us.

One thoughtful repetition at a time.

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Movie TV Tech Geeks #Movie #Persuasion #Dune #TheDarkTower 8 Worst Book-to-Movie Adaptations of All Time, Ranked http://dlvr.it/TSNpcc

“A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”
― Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, 1984

#manipulation #persuasion #validation #influence #conversation #memory #neuroscience #campaigning #narratives #storyTelling #Psychology #socialPsych #socialPsychology #facilitation #Cialdini #book

A quotation from Ambrose Bierce

CONGREGATION, n. The subjects of an experiment in hypnotism.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) American writer and journalist
“Congregation,” “Devil’s Dictionary” column, San Francisco Wasp (1881-08-12)

More about this quote: wist.info/bierce-ambrose/83549…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #ambrosebierce #devilsdictionary #church #congregation #hypnotism #persuasion