[daniel-thompson]

I think it's a pretty simple, and timeless, aspect of human nature:

"People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others."

- Blaise Pascal, 1670

[jprete]

I wonder if the problem is that, when you give someone advice, you're not giving them the whole thought-structure you've built that strongly implies the advice - you're just giving them the result. So they don't have any of the ideas that support the advice, just a blind aphorism.

Maybe it would help to only give advice in long discussions where you show someone all the structure under the advice and then poke at it together to see where the weak spots are.

[Timon3]

This is a theory of mine for which I haven't specifically looked into evidence, so take it with a grain of salt - but I'm convinced that this is why storytelling exists, and specifically why the Hero's journey is so common: stories are essentially beneficial viruses. They exploit our innate desire for discovery by packaging the information into a format that is interesting in the moment, and because we see someone else learning the lesson we are meant to learn, we feel as if we've discovered it ourselves.

This would also neatly explain why we discovered storytelling in the first place, and why so many story elements have changed little over thousands of years - stories "evolved" with us to become more and more effective at inoculating us against dangers which we can survive through our intellect.

[kappapilla]

Funny when history was storified instead of dates and facts to focus on the learnings .. it was dismissed as storybooks !!

[lelanthran]

> I wonder if the problem is that, when you give someone advice, you're not giving them the whole thought-structure you've built that strongly implies the advice - you're just giving them the result. So they don't have any of the ideas that support the advice, just a blind aphorism.

I'm skeptical. My observation is that it's the messenger that is ignored. Ignoring the advice is simply a side-effect of this.

Consider how many people pay therapists many thousands of dollars to simply hear what their spouse was telling them for years.

[paulryanrogers]

> Consider how many people pay therapists many thousands of dollars to simply hear what their spouse was telling them for years.

An independent professional can confirm real problems. Sometimes they're significantly more useful than friends. Sometimes less.

[rcy]

sounds like therapy

[pixl97]

The trick is suggesting something to a person in a manner so they thought they came up with the idea itself.

[syndicatedjelly]

Seriously, this was like the biggest epiphany I had out of my 20s. The way to convince anyone of anything isn’t to beat them over the head into submission. It’s to drop the idea off casually, let them ignore it for a while, and watch them slowly come around to this strange idea sitting around that actually seems to work…

[throwawayq3423]

The way i've heard this described is "place your truth, gently, next to theirs". Then walk away. No pressure, no sales, nothing. That's the only way it can be adopted.

[tnel77]

I love the movie Inception.

[Balgair]

Two other aphorisms come to my mind:

- Persuasion is pegged to a person.

In that, it's not that the person hasn't heard the arguments before, it's that they haven't met the right person to say it to them. Often, that person is in the mirror.

- If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money.

[passion__desire]

> themselves discovered

Do you think people consider recommendation systems (feeds which inform their worldview) to be a part of natural order of things so they don't suspect it. Even if they know it to be algorithmic, nudges can be inserted at appropriate times when our guards are down.

[ysofunny]

absolutely, but I consider that as the "environment" of cultural evolution so to say

meaning as we collectively get used to a technology we figure these kinds of things out, and even become desensitised to them.

of course people got taken by surprise at first (e.g. first trump campaign's use of those kinds of manipulations over recommendation feeds) but culture (youths and other children) do adapt and react to the "environment" or landscape

[ryandrake]

This is one of the ways people can go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. They think they "discovered for themselves" some secret truth that "the elite" or "the experts" don't want them to know. Then they find a community of similarly-awakened people who lower their guards even more and point them to other "alternative truths" that they can go DiscoverForThemselves™ too.

Probably the same psychology behind those obnoxious AI-generated ads that say things like "Here's the secret about gut bacteria that doctors don't want you to know!"

[duwease]

This is exactly the reason QAnon took off. It evolved from ARG-ish games without the goal of being persuasive about real-world things. But a participant back then realized how people enjoyed figuring out the 'puzzle', and how to lead them to the conclusion without telling them, and once you add political agendas we got what we have today.

[stonethrowaway]

Clicking on the thread I expected this to be the top comment because of how low effort and high brow it is (comments write themselves around pop topics, I find). You can go so far as to skip reading the article. But there is no real way to verify it. It sounds good and gives whoever says it a sense of smugness (“pretty simple, and timeless”), but that’s about it. The person saying it has no idea either way.

[csours]

Stories are more real than facts.

[throwawayq3423]

Stories are understood better than facts.

[knighthack]

Inception.