How to give a great scientific talk

Re:How to give a great scientific talk by raister on Monday January 07, 2019 @07:13AM (#18844569)

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.

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Re:How to give a great scientific talk by crispyambulance on Monday January 07, 2019 @09:29AM (#18845336)

    > ...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.

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Re:How to give a great scientific talk by sitkack on Monday January 07, 2019 @10:02AM (#18845643)

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

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Re:How to give a great scientific talk by sitkack on Saturday January 12, 2019 @11:15PM (#18895026)

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

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

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Re:How to give a great scientific talk by SubiculumCode on Monday January 07, 2019 @11:38AM (#18846671)

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

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Re:How to give a great scientific talk by stronglikedan on Monday January 07, 2019 @11:42AM (#18846719)

> Embarrassment will end the human race.

Not before we're all offended to death.

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Re:How to give a great scientific talk by kkylin on Monday January 07, 2019 @11:48AM (#18846799)

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).

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Re:How to give a great scientific talk by thanatropism on Monday January 07, 2019 @07:30AM (#18844650)

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".

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