>I feel this is how to give a great talk, not necessarily a great scientific talk.

I come from a Biology background so maybe its different, but I have been to so many talks where 90% of the audience is grad students and looking around the room you can tell none of them are getting anything out of the talk because they got lost in the first five minutes. Sure it would be silly for every Neuroscience talk to waste five minutes explaining what a brain is, but even seasoned scientists seem to take for granted that not everyone studies their same corner of the field. Giving sufficient background info is severely underrated in talks, as is very explicitly stating ideas that will be necessary to appreciate the core thesis of the talk is. I'm sympathetic to the fact that timing is tight and scientists want to save a significant amount of time for their actual research, but if most of the room comes away from the talk with absolutely nothing then it was a wasted effort. You're right that the presenter should know their audience and that would fix things, its just that in my experience, the presenter is almost always overestimating their audience.

From (the mathematician) Gian-Carlo Rota's Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught:

"...I remembered an MIT colloquium that took place in the late fifties; it was one of the first I attended at MIT. The speaker was Eugenio Calabi. Sitting in the front row of the audience were Norbert Wiener, asleep as usual until the time came to applaud, and Dirk Struik who had been one of Calabi's teachers when Calabi was an undergraduate at MIT in the forties. The subject of the lecture was beyond my competence. After the first five minutes I was completely lost. At the end of the lecture, an arcane dialogue took place between the speaker and some members of the audience, Ambrose and Singer if I remember correctly. There followed a period of tense silence. Professor Struik broke the ice. He raised his hand and said: "Give us something to take home!" Calabi obliged, and in the next five minutes he explained in beautiful simple terms the gist of his lecture. Everybody filed out with a feeling of satisfaction.

Dirk Struik was right: a speaker should try to give his audience something they can take home. But what? ..."

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-le...

This is because (deliberately or not) what the speaker often wants to communicate mainly is that they are smart. Getting everyone lost in the first five minutes is not a big problem, quite the opposite. I have seen young people who gave brilliant lucid and comprehensible talks who were criticised by the experts in their narrow sub-field as "popularisers". I think many people know how to give a great talk, but choose not to.

>> I think many people know how to give a great talk, but choose not to.

Not in my graduate school experience. Presenting was often viewed as "display my research while I read from my research".

I can see your point, but, at the same time, most talks, like most research in general, are incremental improvements or variations of X. You could spend first 5 minutes of the talk giving introduction to X, but if the audience does not know about it already, why would they be interested in your minor contribution?

Say, I'm computer vision researcher specializing in (non-deep learning) 3D reconstruction. Why would I be listening to talks where someone goes into some esoteric tweaks they made to the deep learning stuff? I feel like there almost should be separate conferences for people doing feature recognition/tracking, 3d reconstruction, object recognition etc., as all those fields are vast in themselves. And, once you're on such conference, it's just the experts there and you don't need the 5 minute intros any more.

>most talks, like most research in general, are incremental improvements or variations of X

Again, I don't know if this is something that is only true in Biological science and less so in Computer Science, but while I agree most research is a minor incremental improvement, its often on a topic so specialized that most outside of your research group aren't very familiar with the intricacies.

This begs the question, like you said, then why would you care about hearing that talk? Maybe you don't even care about their thesis and are just interested in adapting a technique they used in your own work. Or maybe their thesis bridges a gap between two fields of study that were previously not very closely linked. Besides, when you're trying to communicate your work to other people, isn't it to your advantage to try and cast as wide of a net as possible? Isn't part of the point of talks and conferences to widen people's spheres a bit? There's no need to leave your home lab if you want to converse with people who understand most of what you're researching already.

Contemporary students are too polite. In the middle ages they brought rotten tomatoes.

Until you accidentally offend someone; then it's out with the thumbscrews and branding irons.

>... I have been to so many talks where 90% of the audience is grad students and looking around the room you can tell none of them are getting anything out of the talk ....

Sometimes the students aren't the targets. They're just guests. The speaker is targeting the handful of senior people in the audience.

I guess, as a defence mechanism, people embbed complex (almost impossible to understand during the talk) information in their slides, avoiding hard questioning afterwards. It was not once or twice that I have witnessed that during conferences and workshops. People are afraid to be ridiculized in public, or seem incompetent in front of a large audience. We won't be seeing that to change in the short run, unfortunately.

    > ...as a defence mechanism, people embbed complex (almost impossible to understand during the talk) information in their slides...

Yes, this happens a lot, and it has the effect of alienating those who actually need to hear the talk and coming off as pandering or cloying to those that already know the material.

One thing I suggest to folks, if there is some insecurity about not covering "everything", is to make some slides on detailed sub-topics that aren't included in the main talk but are intended to be used when/if there's a follow-up question.

If the speaker is careful, they can even "bait" their talk to implicitly suggest follow-up questions for which a detailed auxiliary slide has been prepared.

If we are to have healthy discussions, we need to socialize being ok with being wrong. Embarrassment will end the human race.

This article on Vox [0] is exactly what I was talking about.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18892889

I expect that fear of embarrassment leads people to work harder to be right.

> Embarrassment will end the human race.

Not before we're all offended to death.

Perhaps. Presenting overly complex & technical information happens a lot, but I think there are other explanations. Wanting to impress one's peers, for example. After all, the last 10% technical detail is often where one spent 90% of the time, and people have a tendency to want to tell that part of the story, whether or not it matters to the audience (and it may or may not, depending on the context).

Or they have a single slide deck for many occasions and sometimes overestimate the audience. I've seen this a lot (as an overestimated student) in my first year of grad school -- these were all budding researchers, right?

Generally in life I tend to overestimate people's technical level -- maybe not of computers, which change a lot, but basic statistics and finance, general knowledge, etc. This is why: "brains" only get you so far in life, but being an intellectual-type person one wants to believe that those more succesful than you are even brainier than you.

Some people work out their arms so much their legs are comparatively small. These people are not about to become star athletes. I wonder if they look at olympic sprinters or soccer players and think "what great arms this guys must have, I wouldn't want to wrestle with them".

> If you are presenting a breakthrough in compilers in a compilers workshop, maybe you don't want to start your talk explaining what a compiler is. Step 0 of every presentation should be "know your audience", and if your audience is expecting complex information you will have to get into details at some point.

My personal pet peeve of nearly every astronomy documentary/talk/youtube video is that they have to explain what black holes are. By aiming at a way to general audience it wastes the time of the (usually) 99.9% who understand it at least as well as the somewhat brief description they include.