I agree with the sentiment, and many talks do this really badly ("Here is our outline, we start with an introduction, and end with a summary"), but it is worth mentioning that the alternative isn't no structure at all, but trying to convey a bigger picture to your audience for them to anchor each section in once you actually start your talk. This could be done like the OP suggests ("Just tell people the key idea upfront"), but there are other ways: instead of telling people the end result, tell them the question you set out to answer, and present your talk as this journey. look at the same thing/topic through different lenses/perspectives. Present a rough outline of a proof you are going to go through, or a case study you are about to present before going through the details sequentially.
> How does one become a good collaborator? The golden rule: Do not block.
Not only is this great advice for effective collaboration, it is also a very nice habit to have in any place where people's impression of your ability determines your future (career) trajectory
2. Tell them
3. Tell them what you told them
The key is that 1 and 3 shall have a suitable proportion of length to 2. Bad presentations just rattle down the index point by point. That sucks. The introduction is there to tell them what they will hear, some of the context needed to understand it and why it matters. It is best to see this as a way to make the crowd perceptible for the actual content, a bit like everything that happens at a good restaurant before the main dish is served.
This doesn't mean you need to give away the most interesting bits (results) in the beginning. But it would be good to tease them a little by focusing on the question, or surprising factoids that emerged through the research. Ask yourself the question whether the introduction serves the middle part and if it does not, adjust it or remove it.
In the end there are infinite ways to structure a presentation, the most important bit is to know the purpose of each part and then ensure the part fullfills it.
* His points about collaboration are excellent. So many research students think that their brains are their best asset. There are many smart people. There are much fewer smart people who can communicate and collaborate well. Be one of those people.
* His points about papers are completely on spot. There are simply too many papers, and many actually aren't that good. The light bulb moment for me was realizing that this author didn't write this paper to help me solve my problem, they wrote it to describe how they solved their problem. Finding the right way to measure whether "their problem ≅ your problem" is key.
* Do a lot of learning on your own. If you don't you're only hurting yourself.
> Slides should have maybe a sentence of text at most
Proceeds to have slides with many bullet points and more than several sentences of text per.
I don't find issue with the slides as they are but if you're going to make arbitrary rules why not follow them yourself?
While I think there's some validity to your point that the author's presentation suffers excess verbosity, I'm not too worried about it because the linked slides seem more meant to act as a reference document than an example of a good presentation, and the level of text is just fine for that purpose.
But lots of presentations, including this one I think, are merely used as a means of conveying information (yeah, not my favorite way of doing so, but being a contrarian doesn't do anybody's career any good), and those are indeed intended to be read and need to have explicitly all the information that you otherwise would be speaking and addressing.
I've taken an approach where I treat the act of deep writing (or shallow writing, or any writing) as means in it of themselves. Not sure how absolutely effective this is but I can definitely say that my thinking changed.
#1 step to writing is to stop giving a f and I didn't not learn that until I was 21. Too easy to get caught up in schoolwork and the "proper" way to do things I feel.
“Virality based social media is inherently homogenizing.”
Some nice nuggets in here!
proceeds to present slides which are walls of text lolol
