Dan Luu

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.

Literally everyone I talked to at the conference gave the talk a lukewarm to negative review. One person even walked out. The reason everyone told me that talk was lame was that it was so obvious there was no point in giving a talk on the idea.

This is interesting because a couple years earlier, I saw a talked that covered the same topic, wildly popular (most YT viewed talked from the conference of all time) but incomprehensible. I didn't even know what the talk was about until I saw Gary's talk 2 years later.

After watching the wildly popular talk, I asked about twenty people at the conference if they could explain what the talk was about and how the 2nd half related to the 1st half. Literally zero people told me they thought they understood the talk.

I kept asking about the popular talk for about a year and eventually found one person who said they understood the talk, but after talking to them at length, they couldn't explain the talk. This talk was widely loved and is still highly cited today.

Gary's talk was so good, so clear, that everyone I talked to thought the talk was bad. If there was more vague ranting or talking around the point instead of actually conveying the point, I suspect people would've liked the talk.