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Reflections on a Talk Gone Wrong
- jbirer 6y agoThere is a surplus of talkers and TED people. It's either bad presentation skills or good presentations skills but they do not have a lot to say. This fad needs to end.
- pjmlp 6y agoBut the value of putting them into the cv!
- neilparikh 6y agoThe author of this article is a professor of statistics at Columbia, so I’m not sure I’d call him a “talker” or “TED person”. The article even starts by mentioning a conference talk about his research, so I doubt the problem is that he doesn’t have a lot to say.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago>I spoke on Constrained maximum entropy methods in an image reconstruction problem. If only there were TED talks on this instead of their trademark humble-bragging "inspiring" bullshit talks.
- mhh__ 6y agoAs the saying goes, 90% of everything is crap
- elboru 6y agoMaybe the title should have been “Reflections on talks going wrong”? Or maybe the article should have told a story of a concrete talk gone wrong? I kept reading because I wanted to know about “the talk that went wrong” but instead there were several examples with not too many details. Anyways great advice!
- PEJOE 6y agoI agree. Perhaps, like sentences, blog posts should be required to express a complete thought. The top level commenter (at this moment) has some insight about British audiences that would have been great in the post.
- magicalhippo 6y agoThe talk that went wrong is in the paragraph above the ending section (named "Reflections on a talk gone wrong").
- wombatmobile 6y ago> What ended up happening was that I spoke for about 15 minutes and then asked for questions and discussion topics. Nobody had anything to say, so that was that! I noticed that happening with me in England when I first went there. It's not something I was familiar with in America, where it is normal for people to ask questions no matter what. Why are English audiences so reserved, I wondered for a long time, without understanding what was going on. Actually, I was wondering what was wrong with me. Was I pissing them off? How? Did I appear clueless? Smug? Wrong? Was I talking over their heads? What was it? Eventually an English colleague told me that English (technical) people default to not asking questions until they are absolutely sure they understand what the speaker is saying. They do that to avoid the possibility of sounding like they are going off half cocked.
- Hitton 6y agoI don't think it's just English audiences. I thought this was normal overall. Where does it not work like that?
- ta988 6y agoIn US many people will have no shame asking unrelated or uneducated questions. What I realized presenting in different communities sharing participants is that it is often the same persons that will do that. The worst in my opinion are the ones that use the questions to try to say that their way of doing is better, and the ones that ask many questions and repeatidly not letting space for others.
- mhh__ 6y agoThe character Mark Corrigan from peep show's psyche explains a lot about British behaviour.