There is a related issue: Someone gives a research presentation that is quite mathematical, but the presenter is time limited and goes quite fast, or simply isn’t good at explaining the mathematics to people who (unlike himself) didn’t already spend months getting familiar with it. The math is easy for himself, so, by the typical mind fallacy, it seems to be easy in general.
In such situations often nobody in the audience likes to admit that they “zoned out” after the first few slides. After all, that would mean they aren’t very bright compared to the others, especially when nobody or hardly anybody else complained about not being able to follow. Moreover, maybe it would have been fine to ask that naive basic question a few minutes ago, on slide 3, but now the talk is already into way more advanced territory on slide 10, so it is definitely too late now to say anything.
Which makes it likely that if you zoned out yourself, and you don’t have a prior reason that most other listeners are significantly smarter than you, that actually most or many people “zoned out” as well, they just all don’t want to admit it, like you.
What’s a solution to this problem? Still ask your naive question at the end of the talk, indirectly admitting that you didn’t understand most of it? But that would be too embarrassing for most people, so it’s not a practical solution.
Abolish the conference talk, turn everything into a giant poster session, possibly with scheduled explanations. Or use the unconference format, and everyone only talks with a table’s worth of people at a time, possibly doing multiple rounds if there’s interest.
Academic conferences as they work now are baaaad. No wonder people complained about them going remote for COVID, everything of value happens chatting over coffee and/or in front of posters, no one gives a shit or gains anything from the average talk, given by some tired and inexperienced PhD student who doesn’t know how to communication well, thinks they have to jam their talk with overly technical language to be more impressive, and possibly has bad English to make things even harder to follow to boot. Absolute snoozefest, almost no reach outside of the very narrow group of hyper specialists already studying the same topic.
I think the main purpose of classes, presentations and talks is as a vehicle for specific forms of academic signaling, relationship and prestige-building projects, but let’s set that aside and focus on learning.
You can likely get access to the speaker’s slides and references via a post-talk email, and you can probably also get a response to a few questions if need be. So the only pieces of information you’re truly missing out on when you zone out during a talk and can’t recover the thread are:
Anything the speakers says that goes beyond the contents of the slides
Any pedagogical value the speaker provides, such as calling your attention to specific parts of the slides or receiving questions before or after
Somewhere between 20 and 90 minutes of your life (and you can often either leave early or work on your laptop—possibly googling some of the background literature on the topic if you’re really interested—as a fallback)
If slides, poster or abstract are available in advance, you can pre-study for a talk you really want to follow. The extra benefit is that you’re less likely to zone out if you’re familiar with the contents of the talk, since confusion leads to checking out.
In a class context, of course, you can often just ask lots of naive questions because that’s the point of a class. If your teacher isn’t receptive to questions, then you just treat the class like a talk, which is easy mode since the syllabus and reading will generally be provided in advance.
Of course, it’s an extra burden to do all this pre- and post-study, but I think it is an unrealistic expectation that you’d be able to follow the details of cutting-edge research in a technical field that is not your own without an additional time investment beyond the talk itself.
Those are good points. Still, it would be great if listeners somehow could coordinate to interrupt the speaker as soon as the majority can’t follow anymore.
I’ll answer for both sides, as the presenter and as the audience member.
As the presenter, you want to structure your talk with repetition around central points in mind, as well as rely on heuristic anchors. It’s unlikely that people are going to remember the nuances in what you are talking about in context. If you are talking about math for 60 minutes, continued references about math compete for people’s memory. So when you want to anchor the audience to a concept, tie it to something very much unrelated to the topic you are primarily presenting on. For example, if talking about matrix multiplication, you might title the section “tic tac toe speed dating.” It’s a nonsense statement that you can weave into discussion about sequential translations of two dimensional grids that is just weird enough people will hear it through the noise of “math, math, math.”
Then, you want to repeat the key point for that section again as you finish the section, and again at the conclusion of the talk summarizing your main points from each section, anchoring each summary around the heuristic you used. This technique is so successful I’ve had people I presented to talk to me 15 years later remembering some of the more outlandish heuristic anchors I used—and more importantly, the points I was tying to them.
As the audience member, the best way to save face on zoning out is to just structure your question as “When you talked about ____, it wasn’t clear to me what my takeaway should be. What should I walk away knowing about that?” This way you don’t need to say something like “I kind of got bored and was thinking about what I’m going to have for lunch—did I miss anything important?” Just “what should I know from that section?”
A good presenter will have padded the section a bit so summarizing what they think the main point was shouldn’t take much time. It’s also useful feedback for them as if you zoned out there, it’s likely others did too so they might revisit or rework it if they plant to present it again.
And finally, most presenters should treat a question like that as their failure, not yours. If I’m presenting, it’s my job to confer the information, not your job to absorb it. If I’m not engaging enough or clear enough in that conveyance, you bet I’d want to know about it. The worst thing to have happen as a presenter is zero questions at the end. By all means ask a question like “wait, wtf were you talking about in the middle there?” over just silently walking out to lunch bewildered, confused, and apathetic.
I struggle with this frequently. Of course, in many cases I waltz into a talk where (I think that) the rest of the audience knows more than me, and in those cases I don’t say anything. The best solution I’ve seen is to first build up a ton of social credit and then ask tons of questions. I’ve seen a few cases of fancy professors asking very basic questions that I was too afraid to ask, and knowing that nobody thought they were stupid afterwards.
If you feel like you’re in danger of giving this talk at the beginning, it might be best to explicitly say at the beginning that you encourage all questions, even if they’re naive. I recall going to a talk where the speaker did this twice, lots of people asked questions, and I learned that the axes of a graph meant something different than I first assumed.
On the weirder side of solutions, you could try classically conditioning yourself not to take embarrassment so poorly. If you’re a sugar fiend, bring some candies to a talk and eat one for each question you ask.
I also struggle with the fact that sometimes during a talk, I zone out and don’t know whether the speaker already answered the question I have, precisely because I was zoned out when they might have answered the question. In this case, I tend not to ask the question, since I don’t want to take the time away from other people listening to the talk.
Not an answer to your question, just an extended quote from the late Fields medalist Bill Thurston from his classic essay On proof and progress which seemed relevant:
Mathematicians have developed habits of communication that are often dysfunctional. Organizers of colloquium talks everywhere exhort speakers to explain things in elementary terms. Nonetheless, most of the audience at an average colloquium talk gets little of value from it. Perhaps they are lost within the first 5 minutes, yet sit silently through the remaining 55 minutes. Or perhaps they quickly lose interest because the speaker plunges into technical details without presenting any reason to investigate them. At the end of the talk, the few mathematicians who are close to the field of the speaker ask a question or two to avoid embarrassment.
… Outsiders are amazed at this phenomenon, but within the mathematical community, we dismiss it with shrugs. …
Mathematical knowledge can be transmitted amazingly fast within a subfield. When a significant theorem is proved, it often (but not always) happens that the solution can be communicated in a matter of minutes from one person to another within the subfield. The same proof would be communicated and generally understood in an hour talk to members of the subfield. It would be the subject of a 15- or 20-page paper, which could be read and understood in a few hours or perhaps days by members of the subfield.
Why is there such a big expansion from the informal discussion to the talk to the paper? One-on-one, people use wide channels of communication that go far beyond formal mathematical language. They use gestures, they draw pictures and diagrams, they make sound effects and use body language. Communication is more likely to be two-way, so that people can concentrate on what needs the most attention. With these channels of communication, they are in a much better position to convey what’s going on, not just in their logical and linguistic facilities, but in their other mental facilities as well.
In talks, people are more inhibited and more formal. Mathematical audiences are often not very good at asking the questions that are on most people’s minds, and speakers often have an unrealistic preset outline that inhibits them from addressing questions even when they are asked. In papers, people are still more formal. Writers translate their ideas into symbols and logic, and readers try to translate back.
Why is there such a discrepancy between communication within a subfield and communication outside of subfields, not to mention communication outside mathematics?
Mathematics in some sense has a common language: a language of symbols, technical definitions, computations, and logic. This language efficiently conveys some, but not all, modes of mathematical thinking. Mathematicians learn to translate certain things almost unconsciously from one mental mode to the other, so that some statements quickly become clear. Different mathematicians study papers in different ways, but when I read a mathematical paper in a field in which I’m conversant, I concentrate on the thoughts that are between the lines. I might look over several paragraphs or strings of equations and think to myself “Oh yeah, they’re putting in enough rigamarole to carry such-and-such idea.” When the idea is clear, the formal setup is usually unnecessary and redundant—I often feel that I could write it out myself more easily than figuring out what the authors actually wrote. It’s like a new toaster that comes with a 16-page manual. If you already understand toasters and if the toaster looks like previous toasters you’ve encountered, you might just plug it in and see if it works, rather than first reading all the details in the manual.
People familiar with ways of doing things in a subfield recognize various patterns of statements or formulas as idioms or circumlocution for certain concepts or mental images. But to people not already familiar with what’s going on the same patterns are not very illuminating; they are often even misleading. The language is not alive except to those who use it.
Okay, I liked that passage but maybe it wasn’t very useful. Ravi Vakil’s advice to potential PhD students attending talks seems more useful, especially the last bullet:
At the end of the talk, you should try to answer the questions: What question(s) is the speaker trying to answer? Why should we care about them? What flavor of results has the speaker proved? Do I have a small example of the phenonenon under discussion? You can even scribble down these questions at the start of the talk, and jot down answers to them during the talk.
Try to extract three words from the talk (no matter how tangentially related to the subject at hand) that you want to know the definition of. Then after the talk, ask me what they mean. …
New version of the previous jot: try the “three things” exercise.
See if you can get one lesson from the talk (broadly interpreted).
Try to ask one question at as many seminars as possible, either during the talk, or privately afterwards. The act of trying to formulating an interesting question (for you, not the speaker!) is a worthwhile exercise, and can focus the mind.
In research presentation, I’m always impressed when some of the brightest in the room have humbly asked the researcher to back up and explain something that others might find very basic but that’s just a bit outside the questioner’s domain. A speaker can tell when he’s being asked something out of sincere curiosity. And rather than make me doubt the questioner’s ability, it confirms it for me. It shouts confidence.
In groups that know each other well, I’ve also sometimes used humor to help ask the embarrassing question. Referencing the most-respected person in the room, I’ve sometimes said, “To help John here better understand (pausing and giving a wink to John), can you go back to slide 2 and explain how you got to step XYZ”. It always gets a chuckle. And I get my answer.
There is a related issue: Someone gives a research presentation that is quite mathematical, but the presenter is time limited and goes quite fast, or simply isn’t good at explaining the mathematics to people who (unlike himself) didn’t already spend months getting familiar with it. The math is easy for himself, so, by the typical mind fallacy, it seems to be easy in general.
In such situations often nobody in the audience likes to admit that they “zoned out” after the first few slides. After all, that would mean they aren’t very bright compared to the others, especially when nobody or hardly anybody else complained about not being able to follow. Moreover, maybe it would have been fine to ask that naive basic question a few minutes ago, on slide 3, but now the talk is already into way more advanced territory on slide 10, so it is definitely too late now to say anything.
Which makes it likely that if you zoned out yourself, and you don’t have a prior reason that most other listeners are significantly smarter than you, that actually most or many people “zoned out” as well, they just all don’t want to admit it, like you.
What’s a solution to this problem? Still ask your naive question at the end of the talk, indirectly admitting that you didn’t understand most of it? But that would be too embarrassing for most people, so it’s not a practical solution.
Abolish the conference talk, turn everything into a giant poster session, possibly with scheduled explanations. Or use the unconference format, and everyone only talks with a table’s worth of people at a time, possibly doing multiple rounds if there’s interest.
Academic conferences as they work now are baaaad. No wonder people complained about them going remote for COVID, everything of value happens chatting over coffee and/or in front of posters, no one gives a shit or gains anything from the average talk, given by some tired and inexperienced PhD student who doesn’t know how to communication well, thinks they have to jam their talk with overly technical language to be more impressive, and possibly has bad English to make things even harder to follow to boot. Absolute snoozefest, almost no reach outside of the very narrow group of hyper specialists already studying the same topic.
I think the main purpose of classes, presentations and talks is as a vehicle for specific forms of academic signaling, relationship and prestige-building projects, but let’s set that aside and focus on learning.
You can likely get access to the speaker’s slides and references via a post-talk email, and you can probably also get a response to a few questions if need be. So the only pieces of information you’re truly missing out on when you zone out during a talk and can’t recover the thread are:
Anything the speakers says that goes beyond the contents of the slides
Any pedagogical value the speaker provides, such as calling your attention to specific parts of the slides or receiving questions before or after
Somewhere between 20 and 90 minutes of your life (and you can often either leave early or work on your laptop—possibly googling some of the background literature on the topic if you’re really interested—as a fallback)
If slides, poster or abstract are available in advance, you can pre-study for a talk you really want to follow. The extra benefit is that you’re less likely to zone out if you’re familiar with the contents of the talk, since confusion leads to checking out.
In a class context, of course, you can often just ask lots of naive questions because that’s the point of a class. If your teacher isn’t receptive to questions, then you just treat the class like a talk, which is easy mode since the syllabus and reading will generally be provided in advance.
Of course, it’s an extra burden to do all this pre- and post-study, but I think it is an unrealistic expectation that you’d be able to follow the details of cutting-edge research in a technical field that is not your own without an additional time investment beyond the talk itself.
Those are good points. Still, it would be great if listeners somehow could coordinate to interrupt the speaker as soon as the majority can’t follow anymore.
I’ll answer for both sides, as the presenter and as the audience member.
As the presenter, you want to structure your talk with repetition around central points in mind, as well as rely on heuristic anchors. It’s unlikely that people are going to remember the nuances in what you are talking about in context. If you are talking about math for 60 minutes, continued references about math compete for people’s memory. So when you want to anchor the audience to a concept, tie it to something very much unrelated to the topic you are primarily presenting on. For example, if talking about matrix multiplication, you might title the section “tic tac toe speed dating.” It’s a nonsense statement that you can weave into discussion about sequential translations of two dimensional grids that is just weird enough people will hear it through the noise of “math, math, math.”
Then, you want to repeat the key point for that section again as you finish the section, and again at the conclusion of the talk summarizing your main points from each section, anchoring each summary around the heuristic you used. This technique is so successful I’ve had people I presented to talk to me 15 years later remembering some of the more outlandish heuristic anchors I used—and more importantly, the points I was tying to them.
As the audience member, the best way to save face on zoning out is to just structure your question as “When you talked about ____, it wasn’t clear to me what my takeaway should be. What should I walk away knowing about that?” This way you don’t need to say something like “I kind of got bored and was thinking about what I’m going to have for lunch—did I miss anything important?” Just “what should I know from that section?”
A good presenter will have padded the section a bit so summarizing what they think the main point was shouldn’t take much time. It’s also useful feedback for them as if you zoned out there, it’s likely others did too so they might revisit or rework it if they plant to present it again.
And finally, most presenters should treat a question like that as their failure, not yours. If I’m presenting, it’s my job to confer the information, not your job to absorb it. If I’m not engaging enough or clear enough in that conveyance, you bet I’d want to know about it. The worst thing to have happen as a presenter is zero questions at the end. By all means ask a question like “wait, wtf were you talking about in the middle there?” over just silently walking out to lunch bewildered, confused, and apathetic.
I struggle with this frequently. Of course, in many cases I waltz into a talk where (I think that) the rest of the audience knows more than me, and in those cases I don’t say anything. The best solution I’ve seen is to first build up a ton of social credit and then ask tons of questions. I’ve seen a few cases of fancy professors asking very basic questions that I was too afraid to ask, and knowing that nobody thought they were stupid afterwards.
If you feel like you’re in danger of giving this talk at the beginning, it might be best to explicitly say at the beginning that you encourage all questions, even if they’re naive. I recall going to a talk where the speaker did this twice, lots of people asked questions, and I learned that the axes of a graph meant something different than I first assumed.
On the weirder side of solutions, you could try classically conditioning yourself not to take embarrassment so poorly. If you’re a sugar fiend, bring some candies to a talk and eat one for each question you ask.
I also struggle with the fact that sometimes during a talk, I zone out and don’t know whether the speaker already answered the question I have, precisely because I was zoned out when they might have answered the question. In this case, I tend not to ask the question, since I don’t want to take the time away from other people listening to the talk.
Not an answer to your question, just an extended quote from the late Fields medalist Bill Thurston from his classic essay On proof and progress which seemed relevant:
Okay, I liked that passage but maybe it wasn’t very useful. Ravi Vakil’s advice to potential PhD students attending talks seems more useful, especially the last bullet:
In research presentation, I’m always impressed when some of the brightest in the room have humbly asked the researcher to back up and explain something that others might find very basic but that’s just a bit outside the questioner’s domain. A speaker can tell when he’s being asked something out of sincere curiosity. And rather than make me doubt the questioner’s ability, it confirms it for me. It shouts confidence.
In groups that know each other well, I’ve also sometimes used humor to help ask the embarrassing question. Referencing the most-respected person in the room, I’ve sometimes said, “To help John here better understand (pausing and giving a wink to John), can you go back to slide 2 and explain how you got to step XYZ”. It always gets a chuckle. And I get my answer.