[ { "num_chapter": 0, "title": "Introduction to Communication Skills", "start_paragraph_number": 0, "end_paragraph_number": 6, "start_time": 17, "end_time": 249, "paragraphs": [ "PATRICK WINSTON: The Uniform Code of Military Justice specifies court martial for any officer who sends a soldier into battle without a weapon. There ought to be a similar protection for students because students shouldn't go out into life without the ability to communicate. Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas, in that order. ", "I know that I can be successful in this because the quality of communication\u2014your speaking and your writing\u2014is largely determined by a specific formula. It's a matter of how much knowledge you have, how much you practice with that knowledge, and your inherent talent. Notice that the talent component is very small. What really matters is what you know. ", "This point came to me suddenly a few decades ago when I was skiing at Sun Valley. I had heard that it was Celebrity Weekend, and one of the celebrities was Mary Lou Retton, the famous Olympic gymnast known for her perfect 10s in the vault. I heard that she was a novice at skiing, so when the opportune moment arrived, I looked over on the novice slope and saw a young woman who, when she became unbalanced, went like that. I said to myself, \"That's got to be her. That must be the gymnast.\" ", "However, it occurred to me that I was a much better skier than she was, and she's an Olympic athlete\u2014not just an ordinary Olympic athlete, but an outstanding one. I was a better skier because I had the knowledge and the practice, while all she had was the talent. You can get a lot better than people who may have inherent talents if you have the right amount of knowledge. ", "So that's what my objective is today, and here's my promise: Today, you will see some examples of what you can put in your armamentarium of speaking techniques. It will be the case that one of those examples\u2014some heuristic, some technique\u2014maybe only one, will be the one that gets you the job. This is a very non-linear process. You never know when it's going to happen, but that is my promise. By the end of the next 60 minutes, you'll have been exposed to a lot of ideas, some of which you'll incorporate into your own repertoire. They will ensure that you get the maximum opportunity to have your ideas valued and accepted by the people you speak with. ", "Now, in order to do that, we have to have a rule of engagement: no laptops, no cell phones. If you could close those, I'll start up as soon as you're done. Some people ask why that is a rule of engagement, and the answer is that we humans only have one language processor. If your language processor is engaged browsing the web or reading your email, you're distracted. Worse yet, you distract all of the people around you. Studies have shown that. If I see an open laptop somewhere back there or up here, it drives me nuts, and I do a worse job. That ensures that all of your friends who are paying attention don't get the performance that they came to have. " ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 17, 48, 73, 111, 135, 189 ] }, { "num_chapter": 1, "title": "Starting a Talk Effectively", "start_paragraph_number": 6, "end_paragraph_number": 9, "start_time": 249, "end_time": 336, "paragraphs": [ "So that's it for the preamble. Let's get started. The first thing we talk about, of course, is how to start. Some people think the right thing to do is to start a talk with a joke. I don't recommend it. The reason is that, at the beginning of a talk, people are still putting their laptops away. They're becoming adjusted to your speaking parameters and vocal parameters, and they're not ready for a joke. It usually falls flat. ", "What you want to do instead is start with an empowerment promise. You want to tell people what they're going to know at the end of the hour that they didn't know at the beginning of the hour. It's an empowerment promise; it's the reason for being here. ", "What would be an example? At the end of this 60 minutes, you will know things about speaking that you don't know now, and something among those things will make a difference in your life. Yes, that's an empowerment promise, so that's the best way to start. " ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 249, 300, 319 ] }, { "num_chapter": 2, "title": "Heuristics for Effective Speaking", "start_paragraph_number": 9, "end_paragraph_number": 24, "start_time": 336, "end_time": 615, "paragraphs": [ "Now that I've talked a little bit about how to start, I want to give you some samples of heuristics that are always on my mind when I give a talk. The first of these heuristics is that it's a good idea to cycle on the subject. Go around it. Go round it again. Go round it again. Some people say, \"Tell him what you want to tell him. Tell him again, and then tell him a third time,\" as if people weren't intelligent. ", "But the point is, there are many reasons for this. One of which is that, at any given moment, about 20% of you will be fogged out, no matter what the lecture is. If you want to ensure that the probability that everybody gets it is high, you need to say it three times. So cycling is one of the things that I always think about when I give a talk. ", "Another thing I think about is that, in explaining my idea, I want to build a fence around it so that it's not confused with somebody else's idea. ", "So, if you were from Mars and I was teaching you about what an arch is, I might say to you, \"Well, that's an arch.\" And that's not to be confused with some other things that other people might think are arches. This is not an arch; that's not an arch. I'm building a fence around my idea so that it can be distinguished from somebody else's idea. ", "In a more technical sense, I might say, \"Well, my algorithm might seem similar to Jones's algorithm, except his is exponential and mine's linear.\" That's putting a fence around your idea so that people cannot be confused about how it might relate to something else. ", "The third thing on this list of samples is the idea of verbal punctuation. The idea here is that, because people will occasionally fog out and need to get back on the bus, you need to provide some landmark places where you're announcing that it's a good time to get back on. ", "So, I might, in this talk, say something about this being my outline. The first thing we're going to do is talk about how to start. Then we're going to deal with these four samples, and among these four samples, I've talked about the first idea\u2014that's cycling. The second idea is building\u2014and now, the third idea is verbal punctuation. ", "So, I'm enumerating and providing numbers. I'm giving you a sense that there's a seam in the talk, and you can get back on. Now, we're on a roll, and since we're on a roll, can you guess what the fourth idea might be here\u2014an idea that helps people get back on the bus? ", "AUDIENCE: Ask a question. ", "PATRICK WINSTON: Yes? ", "AUDIENCE: Ask a question. ", "PATRICK WINSTON: Ask a question, yes. Thank you. So, ask a question. I will ask a question: How much dead air can there be? How long can I pause? I counted seven seconds. It seemed like an eternity to wait and not say anything for seven seconds, but that's the standard amount of time you can wait for an answer. ", "Of course, the question has to be carefully chosen. It can't be too obvious because then people will be embarrassed to say it, but the answers can't be too hard because then nobody will have anything to say. ", "Here are some sample heuristics you can put in your armamentarium and build up your repertoire of ideas about presentation. If this persuades you that there is something to know, that there is knowledge, then I've already succeeded. ", "What I want to convince you of is that if you watch the speakers you admire and feel are effective, and ask yourselves why they're successful, then you can build up your own personal repertoire and develop your own personal style. That's my fundamental objective, and the rest of this talk is about some of the things that are in my armamentarium that I think are effective. " ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 336, 369, 391, 406, 427, 444, 478, 500, 526, 529, 531, 531, 558, 570, 593 ] }, { "num_chapter": 3, "title": "Time and Place for Lectures", "start_paragraph_number": 24, "end_paragraph_number": 31, "start_time": 615, "end_time": 798, "paragraphs": [ "So, the next thing on our agenda, as we start to discuss these other things, is a discussion of time and place. What do you think is a good time to have a lecture? 11 AM? Yes. The reason is that most people at MIT are awake by then, and hardly anyone has gone back to sleep. It's not right after a meal; people aren't fatigued from this or that. It's a great time to have a lecture. ", "This brings me to the question of what about the place? The most important thing about the place is that it be well lit. This room is well lit. The problem with other kinds of rooms is that we humans, whenever the lights go down or whenever the room is dimly lighted, it signals that we should go to sleep. ", "Whenever I go somewhere to give a talk, even today, the first thing I do when I speak to the audio-visual people is say, \"Keep the lights full up.\" They might reply, \"People will see the slides better if we turn the lights off,\" and then I reply, \"It's extremely hard to see slides through closed eyelids.\" ", "What else can you say about the place? Well, the place should be cased, and I mean that in a colloquial sense. If you're robbing a bank, you would go to the bank on some occasions before to see what it's like, so there are no surprises when you do your robbery. ", "Whenever I go somewhere to speak, the first thing I ask my host to do is to take me to the place where I'll be speaking so that if there are any weirdnesses, I'll be able to deal with them. Sometimes, it might require some intervention; sometimes, it just might require me to understand what the challenges are. ", "When I came here this morning, I did what I typically do. I imagined that all the seats were filled with disinterested farm animals, and that way, I knew that, no matter how bad it was, it wouldn't be as bad as that. ", "Finally, it should be reasonably populated. It should be the case that if there were 10 people in this hall, everyone would be wondering what's going on that's so much more interesting that nobody's here. You want to get a right-sized place that doesn't have to be packed, but it has to be more than half full. " ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 615, 652, 681, 708, 731, 751, 773 ] }, { "num_chapter": 4, "title": "Tools of the Trade: Boards, Props, and Slides", "start_paragraph_number": 31, "end_paragraph_number": 49, "start_time": 798, "end_time": 1425, "paragraphs": [ "So, those are some thoughts about time and place. The next thing I want to talk about is the subject of boards, props, and slides. These are the tools of the trade. I believe that a board is the right tool for speaking when your purpose is informing. Slides are good when your purpose is exposing, but I use the board when I'm informing, teaching, or lecturing, and there are several reasons why I prefer it.", "For one thing, when you use the board, you have a graphic quality. With a board, you can easily exploit the fact that you can use graphics in your presentation. That's the graphic quality that I appreciate. The next thing I like is the speed property. The speed with which you write on the blackboard is approximately the speed at which people can absorb ideas. If you flip through a bunch of slides, nobody can keep up with that pace.", "Finally, one great property of a board is that it can be a target. Many novices at speaking find themselves suddenly aware of their hands. It's as if their hands were private parts that shouldn't be exposed in public, so they instinctively put them in their pockets, which is considered insulting in some parts of the world. Alternatively, they might tuck their hands behind their backs. ", "I was once in a convent in Serbia, and as soon as we entered, a nun came up to us and offered us refreshments. I was about to say, \"No, thank you,\" but my host said, \"Eat that stuff or die.\" It's a question of local custom and politeness. Before anything happened, the nun pulled my hands out because it was extraordinarily insulting in that culture to have your hands behind your back. ", "Why is that? It's usually supposed that it has to do with whether you're concealing a weapon. If your hands are in your pockets or behind your back, it looks like you might have a weapon. This is what I mean by one of the virtues of the board. Now, you have something to do with your hands; you can point out the information. ", "I once watched Seymour Papert give a lecture, and I thought it was terrific. I attended a second time\u2014first to absorb the content, and second to note the style. I discovered that Papert was constantly pointing at the board. After some thought, I noted that none of the things he pointed to had anything to do with what he was saying. Nevertheless, it was an effective technique. ", "So, that's just a little bit about the virtues of blackboards. Now, I want to talk about props. The custodians of knowledge about props are the playwrights. Many decades ago, I saw a play by Henrik Ibsen called \"Hedda Gabler.\" I remember vaguely that it was about a woman in an unhappy marriage, and her husband was in competition for an academic job with someone else. He was going to lose partly because he was boring and partly because the competitor had just written a magnificent book. ", "This was back in the days before there were copying machines and computers. As the play opens, there's a potbellied stove. In the beginning, the stove, with its open door, has some slightly glowing embers. The potbellied stove is always there, and as tension mounts in the play, you see a manuscript, a prop that Ibsen artfully used. You just know that something's going to happen because, as the play progresses, the fire gets bigger and hotter, and you know that manuscript is going to go into that fire. This memorable moment is what I remember about the play. ", "Playwrights have figured this out, but they aren't the only ones who can use props. Here's an example of the use of a prop, also from Seymour Papert. He was discussing how it's important to look at the problem in the right way. Here's an example that not only teaches that but also allows you to embarrass your friends in mechanical engineering. ", "Take a bicycle wheel and start it spinning. Then, apply some torque to the axle or equivalently, blow on the edge. The question is, does it go that way, or does it go that way? Mechanical engineers will immediately say, \"Oh, yes, I see\u2014right-hand screw wheel,\" and they'll position their fingers accordingly. However, they often forget exactly how to align their fingers with the various aspects of the problem. Typically, they get it right with about a 50% probability. Their very fancy education gets them to the point where they're equivalent to flipping a coin. ", "But it doesn't have to be that way because you can think about the problem a little differently. Here's what you do: take some duct tape and wrap it around a part of the wheel. Now, think about not the whole wheel, but just a small piece that's underneath the duct tape. As that piece rolls over the top, you blow on it with a puff of air. ", "What happens to that little piece that's under the duct tape? It must want to go that way because you banged on it like that. It's already going down like that. And what about the next piece? Same thing. Next piece? Same thing. So the only thing that can happen is that the wheel goes over like that. ", "Now, you'll never wonder again because you're thinking about the problem in the right way, and it's demonstrated by the use of a prop. You can try this after we're done. ", "Another example I like to remember is one from when I was taking 8.01. Alan Lazarus was the instructor at the time, and he was talking about the conservation of energy, kinetic and potential. There was a long wire in the ceiling in 26-100 attached to a much bigger steel ball\u2014not one like this. Lazarus took the ball up against the wall like this. He put his head flat against the wall to steady himself, and then he let go. ", "The pendulum takes many seconds to go over and back, and then gently kisses Lazarus's nose. You have many seconds to think, \"This guy really believes in the conservation of energy.\" Do not try this at home. The problem is that the first time you do this, you may not just let go. There's a natural human tendency to push. ", "So that's a little bit on the subject of props. It's interesting. Whenever surveys are taken, students always say more chalk, less PowerPoint. Why would that be? Props are also very effective. I'll give you my lunatic fringe view on this. It has to do with what I would call empathetic mirroring. ", "When you're sitting up there watching me write on the board, all those little mirror neurons in your head, I believe, become actuated, and you can feel yourself writing on the blackboard. Even more so, when I talk about this steel ball going that way and this way, you can feel the ball as if you were me, and you can't do that with a slide. You can't do it with a picture. You need to see it in the physical world. ", "That's why I think that\u2014oh, yes, of course, there are speed questions involved too that have to be separated out. But I think the empathetic mirroring is why props and the use of a blackboard are so effective. " ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 798, 842, 882, 917, 954, 978, 1007, 1045, 1109, 1133, 1183, 1209, 1226, 1242, 1280, 1319, 1380, 1409 ] }, { "num_chapter": 5, "title": "Effective Use of Slides in Presentations", "start_paragraph_number": 49, "end_paragraph_number": 77, "start_time": 1425, "end_time": 2175, "paragraphs": [ "Well, let's see\u2014oh yes, there is one more thing by way of the tools, and that has to do with the use of slides. I repeat, I think they're for exposing ideas, not for teaching ideas. But that's what we do in a job talk or conference talk\u2014expose ideas. We don't teach them. ", "Let me tell you a little bit about my views on that. I remember once, I was in Terminal A at Logan Airport. I'd just come back from a really miserable conference, and the flight was really horrible. It was one of those that feels like an unbalanced washing machine. For the only time in my life, I decided to stop on my way to my car and have a cup of coffee and relax a little bit. ", "As I was there for a few minutes, someone came up to me and said, \"Are you Professor Winston?\" I think so, I said. I don't know. I guess I was trying to be funny. In any event, he said, \"I'm on my way to Europe to give a job talk. Would you mind critiquing my slides?\" Not at all, I said. \"You have too many, and they have too many words.\" ", "\"How did you know?\" he said, thinking perhaps I had seen a talk of his before. I hadn't. My reply was, \"Because it's always true. There are always too many slides, always too many words.\" ", "Let me show you some extreme examples of how not to use slides. For this demonstration, I need to be way over here, and when I get over here, then I can start to say things like, \"One of the things you shouldn't do is read your transparencies. People in your audience know how to read, and reading will just annoy them.\" ", "Also, you should be sure that you have only a few words on each transparency, and that the words are easy to read. I hope I'm driving you crazy because I'm committing all kinds of crimes. The first of which is that there are too many words on the slide. The second of which is, I'm way over there, and the slide's way over there. ", "You get into this tennis match feeling of shifting back and forth between the slide and the speaker. You want the slides to be condiments to what you're saying, not the main event or the opposite way around. ", "So how can we fix this? Step number one is to get rid of the background junk. That's always distraction. Step number two is to get rid of the words. When I reduced the words to these, then everything I read a previous time, I'm not licensed to say because it's not on the slide. I'm not reading my slides anymore, but I'm saying what was written on the slides in a previous example. ", "So, what else can we do to simplify this? Well, we can get rid of the logos; we don't need them. Simplification. What else can we do? We can eliminate the title. ", "Now, I want to talk to you about some rules for slide preparation. I'm telling you that the title doesn't have to be up there. By reducing the number of words on the slide, I'm allowing you to pay more attention to me and less to what's written on the slide. I mentioned it before: we have only one language processor, and we can either use it to read or to listen to the speaker. If we have too many words on the slide, it forces people in the audience to read and not listen. ", "A student of mine did an experiment a few years ago. He taught some students some web-based programming ideas. Half the information was on slides, and he said the other half. For a control group, he reversed it. The question was: what did the subjects\u2014freshmen at his fraternity\u2014remember best, what he said or what they read on the slide? The answer was what they read on the slide. When their slides had a lot of material on them, they didn't pay attention to the speaker. In fact, in the after-action report, one of the subjects said, \"I wish you hadn't talked so much. It was distracting.\"", "The last item is to eliminate clutter. Here's some clutter: there\u2019s no reason for those bullets. The problem of too many words is a consequence of a crime Microsoft has committed by allowing you to use fonts that are too small. You should all have a sample slide like this that you can use to determine what the minimum font size is that's easily legible. ", "[INAUDIBLE], what do you think of those? ", "AUDIENCE: Which size is right? ", "PATRICK WINSTON: What's that? ", "AUDIENCE: Did you ask me what size is right? ", "PATRICK WINSTON: Yeah, minimum, maybe. ", "AUDIENCE: 40 or 50. ", "PATRICK WINSTON: Yeah, he says 40 or 50. I think that's about right. 35 is beginning to get too small, not necessarily because you can't read it, but because you're probably using it to get too many words on the slide. ", "What other crimes do we have? Well, we have the laser pointer crime. In the old days, when we didn't have laser pointers, we used wooden ones, and people would wave these things around. It soon became almost like a baton twirling contest. Here's what I recommended in the old days for dealing with this kind of pointer. This is an example of the use of a prop. Jim Glass up there saw this talk about 20 years ago and said, \"Oh, yeah, I remember that talk. That's the one where you broke the pointer.\" It's amazing how props tend to be the things that are remembered. ", "Now, we don't have physical pointers anymore; we've got laser pointers. It's a wonder more people aren't driven into epileptic fits over this sort of stuff. Here's what tends to happen: look at that. It's a lovely recursive picture, and I can become part of it by putting that laser beam right on the back of my head up there. Then what do you see? You see the back of my head. I have no eye contact, no engagement, nothing. I was sitting with a student watching a talk one day, and she said, \"You know what? We could all leave, and he wouldn't know.\" ", "So, what happens when you use a laser pointer? You can't use a laser pointer without turning your head and pointing it at something, and when you do that, you lose contact with the audience. You don't want to do it. So, what do you do if you need to identify something in your image and you don't want to point at it with a laser? This is what you do: put a little arrow on there and say, \"Now, look at that guy at the end of arrow number one.\" You don't need to have a laser pointer to do that. ", "The too-heavy crime\u2014when people ask me to review a presentation, I ask them to print it out and lay it out on a table. When they do that, it's easy to see whether the talk is too heavy, with too much text, not enough air, not enough white space, and not enough imagery. This is a good example of such a talk: way too heavy. The presenter has taken advantage of small font sizes to get as much on the slide as he wanted. ", "There are lots of other crimes here, but the too-heavy aspect is what I wanted to illustrate. By contrast, here\u2019s another talk I gave a few years ago. It wasn't a deeply technical talk, but I show it to you because there's air in it. It's mostly pictures of things. There are three or four slides that have text on them, but when I come to those, I give the audience time to read them. They're there because they might have some historical significance. ", "The first slide with a lot of text on it is an extraction from the 1957 proposal for the AI conference at Dartmouth. It was an extraordinarily interesting event, and that historical extraction from the proposal helps drive that point home. ", "What else have we got here? Oh, yeah, your vocabulary word for the day: this is a hapax legomenon. What that means is this is the kind of slide you can get away with exactly once in your presentation. This is a slide that gained some currency some years ago because it shows the complexity of governing in Afghanistan by illustrating how impossibly complex it is. It's something you in the audience can't understand, and that's the point. However, you can't have many of these. You can have one per work, one per presentation, one per paper, one per book. That's what hapax legomenon is, and this is an example of it.", "Well, I've shown you some crimes. So you might be asking, do these crimes actually occur? Yes, they do. [LAUGHTER] There's the hands in the pockets crime. There's a crime and time and place selection here. This is how you get to the Bartos Theater. First, you get on these steps over at the Media Lab, then you cross this large open space, and then you turn right down this corridor. [LAUGHTER] At this point, whenever I go in there, I wonder if there are torture implements around the corner. [LAUGHTER] When you get in there, you enter this dark, gloomy place. It's well named when they call it the Bartos Theater because it's a place where you can watch a movie, but it's not a place where you can give a talk.", "Now, on the subject of whether it happens, here's a talk I attended a while back in Stata. Notice that the speaker is far away from the slides. The speaker's using a laser pointer. You might ask, what's happening here? By the way, this is the 80th slide of the presentation. Notice that it extends with the words, \"this is the first of 10 conclusions slides.\" [LAUGHTER] So what's the audience reaction? That's the sponsor of the meeting. [LAUGHTER] He's reading his email. This is the co-sponsor of the meeting. He's examining the lunch menu. [LAUGHTER] What about this person? This person looks like he's paying attention, but just because it's a still picture. If you were to see a video, what you would see is something like this: [YAWNS]. [LAUGHTER] So yes, it does happen." ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 1425, 1452, 1486, 1510, 1524, 1553, 1574, 1589, 1620, 1635, 1667, 1719, 1747, 1752, 1754, 1755, 1757, 1759, 1760, 1775, 1825, 1874, 1906, 1949, 1978, 1998, 2044, 2105 ] }, { "num_chapter": 6, "title": "Inspiring Students and Passion in Teaching", "start_paragraph_number": 77, "end_paragraph_number": 83, "start_time": 2175, "end_time": 2487, "paragraphs": [ "Now, that's a quick review of tools. I want to talk about some special cases. We could talk a little bit about informing, or to say another way, doing what I'm doing now. But I'll just say a few words about that. In that kind of presentation, you want to start with a promise, like I did for this hour that we're going through now. Then it comes to the question of how do you inspire people? I've given this talk for a long time, and a few years ago, our department chairman said, \"Would you please give this talk to new faculty, and be sure to emphasize what it takes to inspire students?\" Strangely, I hadn't thought about that question before. So I started a survey. I talked to some of my incoming freshmen advisees, and I talked to senior faculty and everything in between about how they've been inspired.", "What I found from the incoming freshmen is that they were inspired by some high school teacher who told them they could do it. From the senior faculty, they were inspired by someone who helped them see a problem in a new way. What I saw from everyone is that they were inspired when someone exhibited passion about what they were doing. So that's one way to be inspiring. It's easy for me because I do artificial intelligence. How can you not be interested in artificial intelligence? [LAUGHTER] I mean, if you're not interested in artificial intelligence, you're probably not interested in interesting things.", "When I'm lecturing in my AI class, it's natural for me to talk about what I think is cool and how exciting some new idea is. That's the kind of expression of passion that makes a difference while informing with respect to this question of inspiring. Oh, and of course, during this promise phase, you can also express how cool stuff is. Let me give you an example of a lecture that starts this way. I'm talking about resource allocation. It's the same sort of ideas you would need if you're allocating aircraft to a flight schedule or trying to schedule a factory or something like that. ", "But the example is putting colors on the states in the United States without any bordering states having the same color. So here it goes. This is what I show at the beginning of the class. This is a way of doing that coloring. You might say, well, why don't we wait until it finishes? Would you like to do that? No? Well, we're not going to wait until it finishes because the sun will have exploded and consumed the earth before this program finishes. [LAUGHTER] But with a slight adjustment to how the program works, which I tell my students they will understand in the next 50 minutes, this is what you get. Isn't that cool? You have to be amazed by stuff that takes a computation from longer than the lifetime of the solar system into a few seconds. ", "So, that's what I mean by providing a promise upfront and expressing some passion about what you're talking about. The last item in this little block here has to do with what people think they do at MIT. You ask faculty what the most important purpose is, and they'll say, \"Well, the most important thing I do is teach people how to think.\" And then you say, \"Oh, that's great...\" How do you teach people how to think? Blank stare. No one can quite respond to that part, that natural next question. ", "So, how do you teach people how to think? Well, I believe that we are storytelling animals. We start developing our story, understanding, and manipulating skills with fairy tales in childhood and continue on through professional schools like law, business, medicine, and everything else. We continue doing that throughout life. If that is what thinking is all about, and we want to teach people how to think, we provide them with the stories they need to know, the questions they need to ask about those stories, mechanisms for analyzing those stories, ways of putting stories together, and ways of evaluating how reliable a story is. That's what I think you need to do when you teach people how to think. " ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 2175, 2239, 2293, 2342, 2398, 2438 ] }, { "num_chapter": 7, "title": "Persuasion Techniques and Oral Exams", "start_paragraph_number": 83, "end_paragraph_number": 87, "start_time": 2487, "end_time": 2637, "paragraphs": [ "But that's all about education. Many of you here are not necessarily for that, but rather for this part: for persuading, which breaks down into several categories: oral exams, not shown, shop talks, and getting famous. I won't say much about oral exams other than the fact that they used to be a lot scarier than they are today. In the old days, reading the literature in a foreign language was a part of that, and there was a high failure rate. When you look back on those failures, the most usual reason for people failing an oral exam is failure to situate and a failure to practice. ", "By \"situate,\" I mean it's important to talk about your research in context. This is a problem that's being pursued all over the world. There hasn't been any progress before me in the past 30 years. Everyone is looking for a solution because it will have an impact on so many other things, such as situating in time and place and feel. ", "As far as practice is concerned, yes, practice is important. But that doesn't mean showing your slides to the people you share an office with. The problem with that is that if people know what you're doing, they will hallucinate that there's material in your presentation that isn't there if it isn't there. A variation on the scene, by the way, is that your faculty supervisor is not a very good person to help you debug a talk because they, in fact, know what you're doing. They will, in fact, hallucinate that there's material in your presentation that isn't there. ", "So, you need to get together with some friends who don't know what you're doing and have them\u2014well, you start the practice session by saying, \"If you can't make me cry, I won't value you as a friend anymore.\" [LAUGHTER] Then, when you get to the faculty for an oral exam, it will be easy. You see, the difficulty\u2014the amount of flak you'll get from somebody\u2014is proportional to age. The older somebody is, the more they understand where they are in the world. But the young people are trying to show the old people how smart they are, so it's subtly vicious. Whenever you have an opportunity to have an examining committee that's full of people with gray hair, that's what you want. " ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 2487, 2535, 2556, 2592 ] }, { "num_chapter": 8, "title": "Job Talks and Faculty Candidate Expectations", "start_paragraph_number": 87, "end_paragraph_number": 94, "start_time": 2637, "end_time": 2890, "paragraphs": [ "Well, that's just a word or two about something I haven't listed here. Let's get into the subject of job talks. I was sitting in a bar many years ago in San Diego. I was a member of the Navy Science Board, and I was sitting with a couple of my colleagues on the board: Delores Etter from the University of Colorado. She made me so jealous I could spit because she'd written 21 books, and I'd only written 17. The other one was Bill Weldon from the University of Texas. He was an electromagnetism guy, and he knew how to use rail guns to drive steel rods through tank armor. These were interesting people. ", "So, I said, \"What do you look for in a faculty candidate?\" Within one microsecond, Delores said, \"They have to show us they've got some kind of vision,\" quickly followed by Bill, who said, \"They have to show us that they've done something.\" Oh, that sounds good, I said. Then I asked them, \"How long does a candidate have to establish these two things? What do you think?\" ", "Well, compare your answer to theirs: five minutes. If you haven't expressed your vision, if you haven't told people that you've done something in five minutes, you've already lost. So, you have to be able to do that. Let me just mention a couple of things in that connection. Here, the vision is, in part, a problem that somebody cares about and something new in your approach. ", "The problem is understanding the nature of human intelligence. The approach is asking questions about what makes us different from chimpanzees and Neanderthals. Is it merely a matter of quantity, or are we just a little bit smarter in some continuous way? Or do we have something that's fundamentally different that chimpanzees and Neanderthals don't have? The answer is yes, we do have something different. We are symbolic creatures. Because we're symbolic creatures, we can build symbolic descriptions of relations and events. We can string them together and make stories. And because we can make stories, we can... that's what makes us different. ", "So that's my stump speech. That's how I start most of my talks on my own personal research. How do you express the notion that you've done something? By listing the steps that need to be taken in order to achieve the solution to that problem. You don't have to have done all of those steps, but you can say, \"Here's what needs to be done.\" ", "An example: we need to specify some behavior. We need to enumerate the constraints that make it possible to deal with that behavior. We have to implement a system because we're engineers, and we don't think that we've understood something unless we can build it. And we've built such a system, and we're about to demonstrate it to you today. That would be an example of enumerating a series of steps needed to realize the vision. ", "So then, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you conclude by enumerating your contributions. It's kind of a mirror of these steps, and it helps to establish that you've done something. So that's a kind of general-purpose framework for doing a technical talk. " ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 2637, 2685, 2724, 2764, 2809, 2838, 2863 ] }, { "num_chapter": 9, "title": "The Importance of Recognition and Fame", "start_paragraph_number": 94, "end_paragraph_number": 105, "start_time": 2890, "end_time": 3184, "paragraphs": [ "Now, only a few more things left to do today. Getting famous is the next item on our agenda because once you've got the job, you need to think a little bit about how you're going to be recognized for what you do. ", "So, first of all, why should you care about getting famous? I thought about this in connection with a fundraising event I attended once, a fundraising event for raising money to save Venice from going underwater and having all of its art destroyed. Anyway, I was sitting here, and JC was sitting here. That was Julia, the late Julia Child. As the evening wore on, more and more people would come up and ask Julia to autograph something or express a feeling that she had changed their life. And it just happened over and over again. ", "So eventually, I turned to Julia and I said, \"Ms. Child, is it fun to be famous?\" She thought about it for a second and said, \"You get used to it.\" [LAUGHTER] But you know what occurred to me? You never get used to being ignored. ", "So here's a way to think about it: your ideas are like your children, and you don't want them to go into the world in rags. What you want to do is to be sure that you have these techniques, these mechanisms, these thoughts about how to present ideas that you have so that they're recognized for the value that is in them. So that's why it's a legitimate thing to concern yourself with packaging. ", "Now, how do you get remembered? Well, there's something I like to call Winston's star. Every one of the items I'm about to articulate starts with an S. So if you want your presentation ideas to be remembered, one of the things you need to do is to make sure that you have some kind of symbol associated with your work. ", "This arch example is actually from my PhD thesis many, many years ago. In the course of my work at that time, this work on arch learning became mildly famous, and I didn't know why. It was only many years later that I realized that that work accidentally had all of the elements on this star. ", "The first element is that there was a kind of symbol: it's the arch itself. The next thing you need is some kind of slogan, a kind of phrase that provides a handle on the work. In this case, the phrase was \"one shot learning.\" It was one shot because the program I wrote learned something definite from every example that was presented to us. ", "So in going from a model based on this configuration to something that isn't an arch based on that configuration, the program learned that it has to be on top: one shot learning. So that's a symbol and a slogan. ", "Now we need a surprise. The surprise is that you don't need a million examples of something to learn. You can do it with one example if you're smart enough to make use of that example appropriately. So that was the surprise: you can learn something definite from each example. ", "The next item was a salient idea. Now, when I say salient idea, I don't mean important. What I mean is an idea that sticks out. Some theses, funnily enough, have too many good ideas, and you don't know what it's all about because which one is it? So you need an idea that sticks out. The idea that stuck out here was the notion of a near miss. You see, this is not an arch, but it doesn't miss by much. So it's a near miss. ", "Finally, you need to tell the story of how you did it, how it works, and why it's important. So that's a bit on how to not so much get famous, but how to ensure that your work is recognized. " ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 2890, 2903, 2961, 2979, 3006, 3032, 3054, 3086, 3103, 3125, 3163 ] }, { "num_chapter": 10, "title": "Concluding Your Presentation", "start_paragraph_number": 105, "end_paragraph_number": 112, "start_time": 3184, "end_time": 3390, "paragraphs": [ "Well, we're almost finished because now we're down to this last item, which is how to stop. When we come to that, there's a question of, all right, what is the final slide? And what are the final words? ", "So, for the final slide, let me give you some examples of possibilities. How about this one? You might see that slide and think to yourself, \"There are 1,000 faculty at MIT. Nice piece of work.\" But it's only a tiny piece of work if you divide by 1,000. ", "When you show a whole gigantic list of collaborators at the end of a talk, it's a kind of letdown because it suggests that nobody knows. Did you do anything significant? Now, you've got to recognize your collaborators, right? So where do you do that? Not on the last slide, but on the first slide. All this was on the first slide. These are the collaborators, so you don't want to put them at the end. ", "You don't want a slide like this. How about this one? This is the worst possible way to end a talk. [LAUGHTER] Because this slide can be up there for 20 minutes. I've seen it happen. It squanders real estate and an opportunity to tell people who you are. ", "What about this one? I often see it, but I never see anybody write it down. It also wastes opportunity. Oh my God, even worse. All of these lines do nothing for you. They waste an opportunity for you to tell people\u2014 to leave people with who you are. ", "Well, what about this? Is this a good one? It might seem so at first, but here's the problem. If you say these are my conclusions, these are perfectly legitimate conclusions that nobody cares about. What they care about is what you have done. That's why your final slide should have this label: contributions. ", "It's a mirror of what I said over there about how job talks ought to be like a sandwich. The final slide, the one that's up there while people are asking questions and filing out, ought to be the one that has your contributions on it. Here's an example from my own stump speech. Yes, this is what I talk about a lot. Here are the things that I typically demonstrate. I wait for people to read it. The final element there is this is what we get out of it, so that's an example of a contribution slide. " ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 3184, 3208, 3239, 3262, 3294, 3324, 3351 ] }, { "num_chapter": 11, "title": "Final Words and Audience Engagement", "start_paragraph_number": 112, "end_paragraph_number": 124, "start_time": 3390, "end_time": 3662, "paragraphs": [ "Now, what about the other part? You've got your final slide up there. It's a contribution slide. Somehow, you have to tell people you're finished. So let's check out a few possibilities. One thing you could do in the final words is tell a joke. It's okay. By the time you're done, people have adjusted themselves to your voice parameters. They're ready for a joke. ", "I was sitting in another bar, this time in Austin, Texas, with a colleague of mine named Doug Lenat. Doug's a fantastic speaker. I said to Doug, \"You're a fantastic speaker. What's your secret?\" He said, \"Oh, I always finish with a joke, and that way, people think they've had fun the whole time.\" [LAUGHTER] So yes, a joke will work down there. ", "How about this one? Thank you. I don't recommend it. It's a weak move. You will not go to hell if you conclude your talk by saying thank you, but it's a weak move, and here's why. When you say thank you, even worse, thank you for listening, it suggests that everybody has stayed that long out of politeness and that they had a profound desire to be somewhere else. But they're so polite, they stuck it out. And that's what you're thanking them for. ", "So once wild applause has started, you can mouth a thank you, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the last thing you do should not be saying thank you. Now, you might say to me, \"Well, doesn't everybody say thank you?\" Well, what everybody does is not necessarily the right thing. ", "I like to illustrate how some talks can end without saying thank you. I like to draw from political speeches, but the ones that I've heard recently aren't so good, so I'm going to have to go back a little bit. Here is Governor Christie. He gave the Republican keynote address one year. This is the end of his talk. Let's see what he does. [APPLAUSE] ", "CHRIS CHRISTIE: \"And together, everybody, together. We will stand up once again for American greatness for our children and grandchildren. God bless you, and God bless America.\" [APPLAUSE] ", "PATRICK WINSTON: So that's a classic benediction ending: God bless you, God bless America. Now, I don't want to be partisan about this, so I think I'd better switch to the keynote address in the Democratic Convention. It was delivered that year by Bill Clinton, who knows something about how to speak. [APPLAUSE] ", "BILL CLINTON: \"If that is what you want, if that is what you believe, you must vote, and you must re-elect President Barack Obama. God bless you, and God bless America.\" [APPLAUSE] [LAUGHTER] ", "PATRICK WINSTON: Now, watch this. Let's go back a little bit and redo it. What I want you to see is that at one point, he seems to be almost pressing his lips together, forcing himself not to say thank you. Then there's another place where he does a little salute. So watch for those this time around. [APPLAUSE] ", "BILL CLINTON: \"If that is what you want, if that is what you believe, you must vote, and you must re-elect President Barack Obama. God bless you, and God bless America.\" [APPLAUSE] ", "PATRICK WINSTON: That's where he's pursing his lips. [LAUGHTER] There's the salute. [LAUGHTER] I think that's pretty good. ", "Now, what are we going to take away from this? Well, I suppose I could conclude this talk by saying, \"God bless you, and God bless the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,\" but it might not work so well. " ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 3390, 3428, 3457, 3498, 3515, 3546, 3561, 3584, 3607, 3623, 3637, 3648 ] }, { "num_chapter": 12, "title": "Conventions of Ending a Presentation", "start_paragraph_number": 124, "end_paragraph_number": 130, "start_time": 3662, "end_time": 3776, "paragraphs": [ "What you can get out of this is that you don't have to say thank you. There are other things you can do. It's interesting that over time, people figure this out, and there are some stock ways of ending things. ", "In the Catholic Church, during the good old Latin mass, it ended with \"ite missa est,\" which translates approximately to, \"OK, the mass is over, you can go home now.\" [LAUGHTER] Of course, at musical concerts, you know that it's time to clap not at the end of the song, but rather when the conductor goes over and shakes hands with the concert master. Those are conventions that tell you that the event is over. ", "So those are all possibilities for here. But one more possibility is that you can salute the audience. By that, I mean you can say something about how much you value your time at a place. ", "I could say, \"Well, it's been great fun being here. It's been fascinating to see what you folks are doing here at MIT. I've been much stimulated and provoked by the kinds of questions you've been asking; it's been really great. I look forward to coming back on many occasions in the future.\" So that salutes the audience. You can do that. ", "Well, there it is. You know what? I'm glad you're here. The reason is that by being here, I think you have demonstrated an understanding that how you present and how you package your ideas is an important thing. I salute you for that. [LAUGHTER] ", "I suggest that you come back again and bring your friends. [APPLAUSE]" ], "paragraph_timestamps": [ 3662, 3673, 3711, 3731, 3758, 3776 ] } ]