Try to remember the last conference that you attended. How many talks did you want to follow? How many talks could you follow? In how many talks did the speaker made any effort to help you follow?
The answers that I give to the last two questions convinced me early in my career that the meager amount of time that I spend away of my family should be spent with co-authors rather than in conferences. But sometimes there are conferences in which the answer to the first question convinces me that I should join my colleagues in an attempt to follow speakers.
I was sitting in the conference hall in Toulouse, looking around, observing the people in the audience yawn, surf the web, read papers, talk to each other, sometimes even take a nap. True, there were clear and interesting talks, but many speakers lost their audience within a minute. And these speakers were sitting in the audience before their talk and could not follow the talks of others (I noticed them surfing the web…).
When preparing a presentation, my rule is to spend 5 minutes on each slide, to use a large font and to refrain from having equations on the slide as much as possible. Thus, a 30-minute talk translates to 6 slides. Knowing that 5 minutes per slide may be a little too much, to my talk at Toulouse I prepared 8 slides (lo and behold, I did not reach the last one!) In contrast, some speakers had 30 slides with small fonts and many equations for a 30-minute talk. Did they really think that people can follow one slide per minute? Can they do it? And some people simply jump over slides saying they are not important. If they are not, why are they there? Why didn’t they prepare the talk in advance? Some people provide the formal definition of the model, with all measurability conditions and exact sets of strategies. Is it important for the talk? Wouldn’t a verbal description suffice, something like “players choose strategies in continuous time that ensure that the play path is well defined”, and mention the term that people use for this type of strategies? People who are not in the field do not care anyway about measurability conditions and the formal definition of strategies in continuous time. Some speakers provide the full list of notations; can they remember notations that were defined two slides ago and were hardly shown on the screen?
So why do people give bad presentations? Why do they not invest more time and energy at home? I thought that people talk at conferences to spread their work: after all, who reads papers these days? But then to give a bad presentation is a waste of time: you lose your audience and nobody will remember what you did. I would understand if the conference were at Paris, Rome or Beijing. Then there are other reasons to attend it. But even though Toulouse has a rich history I think that it is not sufficiently interesting to attract the average tourist.
Anyone can help in figuring out this puzzle: What is the utility of the average game theorist that explains why he/she gives a bad presentation in a non-touristic city?
9 comments
September 28, 2011 at 4:56 am
michael webster
People give bad presentations because the audience is full of people who give bad presentations.
September 28, 2011 at 7:48 am
Lance Fortnow (@fortnow)
A big issues in computer science as well
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/9/122805-are-you-talking-to-me/fulltext
September 28, 2011 at 8:58 am
Jacob
I think it is the result of poor training. How many PhD programs across disciplines spend significant time teaching their students how to give an effective presentation at a conference? The academy generally assumes that if you are smart and doing good research, a good presentation necessarily follows. Clearly, that is a bad assumption, but not as bad as the assumption that if you are smart and a good scholar you will necessarily be effective in the classroom.
September 28, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Paul Goldberg
We’re economists are we not, the obvious answer is incentives… how about “best talk” prizes at conferences, decided by popular vote. “worst talk” awards might also be worth trying.
September 28, 2011 at 8:58 pm
Robyn Hatcher (@SpeakETC)
I love this post! I’m a presentation and public speaking coach in the US and I ask myself this question ALL the time. I agree with the first comment. People give bad presentations because the audience has been trained to expect and accept and deliver Bad Presentations. The more people can be educated about the difference and the importance of good presentations this will continue. People think that the information is all that matters but they don’t understand that the information will not be received, understood or remembered as well if delivered poorly compared to if it the speaker tries to make it engaging. More people need to speak up and refuse to reward or sit through bad presentations. Many colleges in the US do offer Public Speaking courses (I teach at one)
September 28, 2011 at 9:13 pm
michael webster
Ok, I have to jump in again. I attended a talk given by old colleague, last week. I haven’t kept up with his research for over 20 years. But, during the talk I could piece together some interesting connections between his work and the work in ecological decision theory, Vernon Smith’s term.
The questions frankly were very poor – and this was a high level invitation. The questioners were not motivated by trying to understand, but rather motivated to show off.
Nobody cares or ought to care how clever you can appear to be at a talk – what they care about is how you can make the speaker’s points germane to a number of different concerns or interests in the audience.
October 1, 2011 at 11:41 am
Eran
my take: giving a good presentation is a big cost for most of us. it’s much easier to divide the paper into 80 slides, or not to prepare slides at all and just write whatever comes to mind on the whiteboard. (You are an exception — you give excellent talks with relatively small preparation time.)
The benefit on the other hand is dubious, since reputation for delivering good presentations is worthless for promotion, publications, or even for receiving invitations to present in conference. Also, even if people talk in conferences in order to spread their work as you suggest, I don’t think good presentation=good advertisement. In fact, from my own experience I know that there is not much correlation between my understanding of a presentation and my curiosity to look into the paper.
Btw, look at the website for some cool drawings from Tolouse
http://sites.google.com/site/gametoulouse2011/drawings
October 5, 2011 at 10:48 pm
Jim S
Nice post, Eilon. I am equally confused by others’ objective functions. Given the other comments on incentives, it also seems that not everyone shares common beliefs on the potential payoffs! (With potential referees, editors, and future letter writers sitting in the audience, I would not think there is no incentive.) I agree with the comment that phd students are poorly prepared. I ran a small presentation group specifically working on presentation style last Spring, modeled on the meetings that my phd advisor (Thomson) has run for decades, so there are exceptions.
October 19, 2011 at 2:16 pm
Todd
Before I give a presentation, I run it by a few colleagues or friends who are known to offer honest opinions. Sometimes I record the presentation to see if I find it interesting. A bad presentation is a terrible waste of time and opportunity. Often doing it for someone else and seeing it myself helps me revamp the presentation to get rid of boring or irrelevant elements.