I always wonder how people believe politicians - they are indeed good speakers, but when you listen closely, it's nothing but filler most of the time...
Writing and Speaking
211–220 of 240 posts
Re: Writing and Speaking
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how you think that passage implies "people who speak [well] cannot think." All I'm saying is that speaking well depends little on having good ideas. That doesn't imply people who speak well can't have good ideas, just that they don't need to. Playing soccer well depends little on having good ideas. Is someone who says that saying "clarity of thought or soccer ability, pick one?"
"Playing soccer well depends little on having good ideas." This statement seems to me to be profoundly wrong. Perhaps some ways of "playing soccer well" depend little on having good ideas. But soccer is a very complex game: the configuration space of the players on the field is ~2*11 dimensional per team (add the z dimension for jumping and the ball in the air and you see that the total coordinate and momentum space…
Wow, it’s great to see someone with an appreciation of soccer tactics on HN!
Re: Writing and Speaking
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I heard PG speak at PyCon last weekend, I hardly even noticed any 'ums' - in fact, it wasn't until I saw it raised on HN that I remembered it. I was thoroughly engaged in his ideas, and my mind likely used those pauses to process what he was saying.
The weird thing is, I've now started to notice the ums myself. I was talking to the founders at the last tuesday dinner and suddenly started catching myself every time I did it. I found that if I made a conscious effort to, I could suppress them. But when I was talking about something interesting, I'd forget and start umming again.
My father grew up in a very rural, very uneducated part of the U.S. and had a deep "southern" accent (though "country" or "rural" is probably more apt). When he was 16 or so he ran away from home and landed in Chicago where his accent immediately marked him as a country bumpkin. This made him tremendously shy in the city and he spent most of his time in isolation.
He spent years retraining his accent, reading Webster's, practicing day in and day out. To this day he can't even successfully fake the accent of his youth. My best guess as to what he sounded like comes from his brothers, all of whom have a rich rural accent to this day.
As part of his effort to get over his shyness and his accent, he joined several public speaking clubs. While they helped with his accent and his shyness, they also taught him a great deal about hesitation noises and he's passed on two things to me (which of course I didn't truly appreciate until years later when I had to get out and start talking in front of groups).
1) Hesitation noises are usually just a way for our brain to catch up with our mouth, interestingly and helpfully, it's also a way for an audience's brain to catch up with their ears.
2) It's funny becoming aware of them, it's like suddenly becoming aware of breathing, it's very automatic, and when you start to think about it, the first thing you do is take a deep breath. The same with ums and ahhs, once you are aware of them, the first thing you should do is take a deep breath instead of saying them.
The audience will be glad for the pause, they'll have time to absorb the complex thought that you are in the process of putting together anyways. And you'll have time to put it together.
If the deep breaths aren't your thing he also recommended I turn my "ums" into "mmms" and then the next step is to turn the voiced "mmms" into a silent outbreath through my nose with my lips in the "mmm" position. It doesn't make a distracting noise and the effect is a thoughtful pause.
Re: Writing and Speaking
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
The weird thing is, I've now started to notice the ums myself. I was talking to the founders at the last tuesday dinner and suddenly started catching myself every time I did it. I found that if I made a conscious effort to, I could suppress them. But when I was talking about something interesting, I'd forget and start umming again.
I believe I've heard of linguistic studies which demonstrate that the use of "filler" words like um is, in part, a form of "code switching". For example, when teenagers talk to their peers, or to people they don't particularly respect, their speech will tend to be peppered with ums and you knows and likes [1], as in: "I'd, um, you know, prefer to watch something, like, interesting.". But when talking to respected eld…
This is a good point. One thing I always get when I've heard pg in an interview is that he seems comfortably informal, and also wonderfully excited about what he's doing. The uhms get kind of infectious and convey that excitement to some extent.
Re: Writing and Speaking
#215I've noticed that audiences laugh a lot and that most of what they laugh at is actually not very funny. Most people wouldn't normally laugh at the same things, unless they were really nervous. No doubt social proof is a big part of this: people laugh because others are laughing, as the essay says. Audiences are their own laugh track. But something has to start the ball rolling. I wonder if it's related to authority.…
Laughter is social lubricant. There is lots of research on this: people laugh more in groups; inferiors laugh more than superiors; nervous people laugh at themselves, and laughing at yourself is also kind of way to efface yourself and show that you are part of a group. If only HNers would read basic Intro to Psychology books, there would not be so many chimes of "I noticed this too" and, hopefully, more discussion of…
What's wrong with noticing things?
Re: Writing and Speaking
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you have a point that "I don't want to be a good speaker" implies something negative about being a good speaker. In context it can be understood as being a good speaker is in opposition to the goal of having better ideas. Perhaps a less controversial phrasing would be "I don't want to put forth the effort towards becoming a good speaker". However, a more in depth reading is that being a good speaker is in opp…
You're right; if I wanted to be sure I couldn't be misinterpreted, I could have put it in something like the way you suggest. But I felt like a reasonably intelligent person with no axe to grind would understand what I meant. You always face this tradeoff in writing. If you hedge every statement so carefully that it couldn't be used by someone determined to misrepresent you, you end up with something that resembles a…
As a reasonably intelligent reader with no axe to grind (and who, on the contrary, really enjoys reading your essays), I too was under the impression (and had no reason to question it until seeing your comment) that you were arguing that writing is an objectively better medium for conveying what I'll call ponderable information (as opposed to information that would obviously be best transmitted through spoken word, such as "get me a decaf latte with two sugars" or "there's a bear behind you") than speaking is, and that being a good writer is more important (or superior in other ways besides importance) than being a good speaker. If the latter was not your intent, please don't kill these four messengers and assume we're just bad at reading. We're simply telling you that that's how your essay comes across, at least to some readers.
This set of posts actually serves as an interesting counterargument to what I interpreted your thesis to be. As I understood it, you feel that writing gives you more time to organize your thoughts, facilitating accuracy and depth more than speaking does. Good speaking, on the other hand, or at least the kind of "good speaking" that refers to being good at captivating an audience, necessarily involves ad-libbing a lot of the details, which means you can't expect to come up with sentences that are as well worded (which usually means as precise or concise) as those you would have delivered in writing. Therefore, writing is the superior medium for delivering information. Period. Speaking is better for things like letting people see you in person (if you're famous) or sometimes better for inspiring people to take action, which you suggest are themselves important, but that speaking is inherently worse than writing for the purpose of conveying information. Am I correct so far? I apparently incorrectly extrapolated that you felt that it's intellectually superior to be a good writer than a good speaker.
Now what was I talking about this discussion serving as a counterexample to your argument? Well, first of all, I agree with everything I think you said up until the conclusion that writing is always more effective than speaking for communicating information. As we saw from this misunderstanding, the written word doesn't provide the author with the live audience feedback that the spoken word does. If multiple readers are confused, the author has no recourse because he does not know that they are confused. Thankfully they can now post comments on the Internet. :) A good speaker, on the other hand, is so in tune with his audience that he knows when they are confused or when his tone seemed misinterpreted, and he can adapt on the spot, providing more examples or changing the inflection of his voice to clarify his tone. George Carlin, one of my favorite comics, was excellent at crafting his routines, but from what I've heard from people who saw him live, was atrocious at interacting with the audience because his written style didn't allow him to deviate from his script. Nevertheless, this afforded him the planning and precision of the written word, and it worked great for him. In fields besides comedy, the written word's advantages naturally win out over the spoken word more frequently, but don't discount good speaking as an effective way to deliver information. Great speakers sometimes get an audience to understand actual content (I've seen multiple speeches were Bill Clinton did that, as well as several TED talks that did) as or more effectively than great writers do.
Re: Writing and Speaking
#217Speaking and writing are more different than they seem. It's actually a different medium, and so a transcript of a great speech will often seem weak, just as a reading of a great essay may seem flat. Too much is lost in translation, which I think may the problem PG is encountering -- he first writes an essay and then translates it into a speech. Imagine a painter who creates a great painting and then tries to transla…
I like to think of it in terms of communication bandwidth. The written word is low bandwidth, but if executed well, theoretically the ideas can be consumed more succinctly. Radio would be the next step up the spectrum, adding implied emotion into each word. Video is next, and it's what I actually care about. I think if done correctly, like a really thorough, honest, well reported 60 minutes piece for instance, you ge…
"I like to think of it in terms of communication bandwidth. The written
word is low bandwidth, but if executed well, theoretically the ideas can
be consumed more succinctly."
I don't think there's a difference in bandwidth, but that an essay can use the whole bandwidth for words (ideas) and in a speech the bandwidth has to be shared by words (ideas), acoustics and visuals.
Re: Writing and Speaking
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were driven by a disinterested search for the truth, your comments would not have the tone they do.
I really think there is more to this. My guess - small changes in the way you use words may reduce the chance that you are badly misunderstood by some people. I love your essays, but our personalities are probably similar. My friend Mike, who was always a word man when I was an idea guy, has a reaction to your writing that is so similar to hers that at first I was sure he was the author of her post. When I read her p…
I'd guess it's largely the nature of the Essay as a literary form. Some of the criticisms here are very reminiscent of those Arnauld and Pascal made regarding Montaigne's method and rigor.
Re: Writing and Speaking
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
The weird thing is, I've now started to notice the ums myself. I was talking to the founders at the last tuesday dinner and suddenly started catching myself every time I did it. I found that if I made a conscious effort to, I could suppress them. But when I was talking about something interesting, I'd forget and start umming again.
I will say this in the spirit of somebody who started competitive public speaking as therapy to overcome a speech disorder which would have been virtually disabling professionally: you can hack your way through hesitation noises. A lot of the HN comments suggesting practical ways to do so would be effective. ("Speak slower" and "Use the air gap for a dramatic pause" are my two favorites.) Practice plus directed effor…
[P.S. This is going to sound a little fluffy but it is absolutely true: one of the first steps is to stop saying "I am not a good public speaker" and start saying "Some of the speeches I have delivered have had a lot of umms in them", because that identifies a specific issue which can be fixed by an identifiable behavioral change, rather than solidifying an identity around features of past speeches you may have made.]
Not fluffy at all: this is a core part of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) & it's very powerful.
Re: Writing and Speaking
#220Richard Feynman, for me, is the clearest counterexample to this essay. In his prime, he was one of the top physicists in the field, having some of the best ideas, and he was still a captivating speaker who could convey complex ideas in an interesting and informative way.