Three Talks

I’ve given three public talks in the last six months. What really strikes me is how different these talks were, in content, structure, and intent.

The first talk was at Sprout, during one of their spaghetti dinners, which are festive occasions thrown monthly and organized around a particular theme. This month’s theme was brains: my talk on the history of psychology came after a puppet show about zombies and a staged reading of transcripts from the Loebner Turing Test competition. The history of psychology is such a rich topic that I wasn’t really sure where to begin. In the end I decided just to cherry pick what I thought were the coolest and most interesting pieces of history, and work from there, and so my talk was a semi-coherent smörgåsbord of lobotomies, amnesias, sleepy sicknesses and neuroprosthetics. What made the talk - the experience - so brilliant was the audience. They had so many questions, and were constantly bringing the discussion around to points that I had cut from my talk for being too pedantic. People asked about the pressures that psychiatrists were under to give people lobotomies and wondered whether that was similar to the pressures that the pharmaceutical industry exerts today. People talked about what it means to call something a mental illness, how we decide as a society that one behavior needs changing but not another. People even brought up evolutionary psychology just to shoot it down. It was pretty much my dream audience. I spent about fifteen minutes lecturing and over half an hour just answering questions and giving people space to talk.

The second was at Software Freedom Day. Despite being only five minutes long and on a very constrained topic, this was much, much harder to prepare for, because the organizers asked that it be Ignite style, i.e. twenty slides with exactly fifteen seconds per slide. I slaved over this presentation — and then only one other presenter followed the rules! The talk was on the new Sunlight Foundation meetup group that I’ve been organizing, and was successful in that it got a couple new people coming to our meetings. That said, it was very subdued and businesslike compared to the Sprout presentation - although I did get a laugh with this clip from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I think makes a beautiful case for government transparency!

The last talk I gave was just a week ago, at the Boston Python Meetup. I was a little shy about giving this one, as I’ve only been programming in Python for a month or two and while everyone else was presenting on these extensive projects, all I had was this dinky little program to my name. But Ned, one of the Boston Python organizers, pointed out to me that newbie Pythonistas could use a little role modeling and encouragement, and also said there would be free pizza. While I’m pretty sure 95% of the fifty or so attendees at the meetup were way more experienced than me, one woman did raise her hand and say, “I’m just starting to program in Python and I’m really excited by your project!” Which made the evening worth it.

Here are the conclusions I’ve drawn from these experiences:

1) Audiences are full of nice people who can add just as much to your talk as you can. 2) Never give Ignite-style talks unless you absolutely have to. 3) Nerds like tasteless puns about lobotomies.

Also: figure out what your goal is in giving a talk ahead of time. My goal for the first talk was to entertain and educate, for the second was to recruit, and for the third to provide encouragement to a specific group of people. I feel like each of these talks was successful by those individual standards, so I feel good about them. If I was applying a more ephemeral idea of success, like “Did I seem nervous?” or “Did people say lots of nice things to me about it?” or “Could I have somehow done it better?” I think I not only would be less happy with the results, but I would have given inferior talks.

The more talks I give, the less nervous I get about them. Before the Sprout talk I was quaking in my stylish yet affordable old sneakers*, but by the time I gave the (admittedly lower stakes) talk at the Boston Python meetup, I was all, “Oh, what, fifty people to speak in front of? Whatever.”

* ~ So when I googled that Buffy quote to make sure I got it right, I came across this brief blog post by writer Jane Espenson on the cognitive science of comedy. I think I love her even more now. Just thought I’d pass it along.