#thoughts #advice #public-speaking

(Skip The) 100 level courses

I've been to a lot of presentations at conferences that are presented as 100-level courses. These are invariably useless.

They generally fall into one of two failure states:

  1. The person giving the presentation is so familiar with the topic, they assume the audience is as well. They fill it with facts and figures that are meaningless to the general public. They blaze through material, leaving no one the wiser for having heard it.
  2. It's truly a 100-level course, filled with overviews and levelsetting, to the point where there is no takeaway. It's a course on the symbolism in Dracula that starts by explaining what the book is about, or worse, what is a novel, and how would one read one.
Takeaways

Audience: Skip the 100, go to the 200s
Presenters: If it's a 100, give the minimum context and the results. Skip the details. Consider giving a 200 instead, and assuming a little from the audience. Run your talk by someone outside your field and see if it's comprehensible and engaging.

See Also

Giving a Speech or Presentation
Don't Learn From Experts (it's Impossible)

Aside:

I can't remember if it was John Carmack or Scott Alexander, but I remember reading someone talking about getting invited to a conference of some kind, and thinking it wasn't worth their time, precisely because they expected to be smarter or more knowledgeable than many of the other attendants. As I recall, the times they did go they felt like it was actually a good use of time networking, but the initial instinct of "I will be providing more value than I receive" is noteworthy. See also (Skip The) 100 level courses.