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How to Give a Good Talk

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271 points pykello | 3 comments | 30 Aug 25 18:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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JohnKemeny ◴[03 Sep 25 11:25 UTC] No.45114482[source]▶
> Every talk must begin with its motivation

Must is a strong word. Surely there exist good presentations that begin with something else.

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JohnKemeny ◴[03 Sep 25 11:26 UTC] No.45114490[source]▶
> The audience cannot care about your work until they understand the ‘value proposition’, to use still more contemporary capitalist jargon.

Hard disagree.

It is easy to imagine a problem that just sounds FUN.

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spicyusername ◴[03 Sep 25 11:36 UTC] No.45114552[source]▶
Then "fun" is the value proposition.
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JohnKemeny ◴[03 Sep 25 11:47 UTC] No.45114631[source]▶
But then the claim is meaningless.
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AnimalMuppet ◴[03 Sep 25 13:21 UTC] No.45115446{3}[source]▶
No; why would it be? Not everything is fun. Fun is one more reason why I might care, but it's not automatically true. You have to show me that I'm going to have fun.

If you can't show me why it's fun, or why it's relevant in some other way, then I'm out. (And you don't have very long to do it, either...)

[Edit to reply to tikhonj, because I'm rate limited: The "value proposition" is what makes it valuable to the listener. Why should they give you their attention and time? Value is "anything that makes people interested in what you're telling them", as opposed to all the things that don't make them interested. Since the "don't make them interested" set is not empty (far from it!), then no, it's not a tautology.]

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1. tikhonj ◴[03 Sep 25 13:38 UTC] No.45115658{4}[source]▶
It's "meaningless" because if you broaden out the definition of "value" to "anything that will make people interested in what you're doing", the advice turns into a tautology.
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2. jszymborski ◴[03 Sep 25 14:46 UTC] No.45116443[source]▶
It's still helpful to remind people that an audience will not care about what you are talking about until you tell them, in any way, why they should.

So describing a fun problem is implicitly telling the audience why they should listen.

3. kd0amg ◴[03 Sep 25 17:34 UTC] No.45118456[source]▶
And yet a lot of speakers still seem to need that self-evidently true statement pointed out to them. Tautological advice isn't necessarily bad or useless, especially for beginners.