Since 2016, I've been thinking about how clear, informative, non-academic talks don't seem very popular.
In 2016, @garybernhardt gave a talk on reproducibility at StrangeLoop which I thought was quite good. It clearly explained a non-obvious idea and came in well under time.
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This also happens at work! A friend of mine went up for "senior staff" promo (and succeeded), but someone on the promo committee objected b/c "that could've been done by a SWE-2", as if figuring out a simple way to do something valuable makes it less valuable.
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I think there are a lot of factors here, most reflect poorly on the audience. But to try and understand them for a moment: humans like stories. Some kind of narritive structure, a complication and a resolution.
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It's possible you already had a story going in your head when you saw the talk. "Reproducibility is a problem, e.g..., I'm stumped, what's the solution?" then talk you saw resolved the story you were working on.
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This same cognitive toxin poisons the world of academia-- If your discovery is too clearly stated, it seems obvious. If it seems obvious, it doesn't seem novel. This the incentive to inflate the intellectual lifting with obfuscation.
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People do not naturally intuit the difference between "obvious" and "obvious in hindsight". Getting you to the conclusion in the most direct way is immensely valuable and difficult work which is invisible because its very nature is to obliterate the difficulty.
End of conversation
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We as an industry are head-over-heels in love with complexity.
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People dramatically and consistently underestimate the amount of effort and skill it takes to make the complicated comprehensible
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Could the issue be that the talk was less successful at grabbing the audience’s attention and therefore forgettable? If the point is to bring awareness of something, putting up a “show” may be effective. Of course, this still shouldn’t be done at the expense of clarity.
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