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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3002 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 30, 2026

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Why are most people so godawful at presenting and demonstrating things when even the tiniest bit of knowledge and effort would make them 10x better?

This was inspired by a recent demonstration video I saw that took ages to get to the point while clearly not being about engagement or view time farming, but I see the same issue over and over again whenever people present things on stage or in videos. Even many professionals seem to be really bad at it.

A long time ago in a university far away we had a mandatory "Introduction to speech communication"-course that concentrated on the basics, including how to give actually good presentations. In retrospect, that course was by far the most bang for buck of any university course I ever took. After I took it, people started somehow thinking I'm a natural presenter by just remembering a few key points and applying them to my presentations without having any particular natural talent at it (and my presentations weren't much good either before the course).

It really isn't rocket science. Most of it could be summarized by "Get to the point. Less is more. Hook the listener by starting with the key idea briefly and only then cover any background and details. Repeat the key points at the end. Keep slides to max 3-4 points per slide and reserve anything else to auxiliary materials. Always show the entire slide at once so the viewer pays attention to what you say instead of wondering when the next point will be revealed. Show brief examples if applicable."

Really basic things, super easy to learn, super easy to apply with the tiniest bit of practise (if I can do it with my "Ackshually that's a very interesting detail, let's totally get sidetracked by it"-ADHD diagnosed brain, there's no reason most other people can't). Enough to easily get me into the top 10-20% of presenters and that includes people whose entire job it is to present and market things (like a marketing director at an old job saying "Skooma, why don't you present this since you're so good at it?" - in a group where half the people were from the marketing dept). Following those rules also makes presenting much easier as you have to do so much less (by leaving out pointless details and fluff and realizing nobody is going to remember most of it anyway so it doesn't matter if you leave out some tiny detail).

Most people don't practice for most things in life, and public speaking is no exception. By practice I mean deliberate concentrated sessions with the explicit goal of improving something, not just going through the motion. That's how you get teachers that such at teaching 10 years into their career, public speakers who suck after giving 10s of talks, gamers that are stuck in silver after 1000s of hours played, even if their intelligence is at least average.

There's this interesting article by Dan Luu where he argues that 95th percentile is not that good. He talks about public speaking as an example too so quite relevant to your point.

Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do

Your own experience supports his thesis. You had a class on communication, you acknowledge applying it wasn't difficult, and you can identify yourself as being in the top 10-20% of presenters.

To give a couple of concrete examples, I helped Leah prepare for talks from 2013 to 2017. The first couple practice talks she gave were about the same as you'd expect if you walked into a random talk at a large tech conference. For the first couple years she was speaking, she did something like 30 or so practice runs for each public talk, of which I watched and gave feedback on half. Her first public talk was (IMO) well above average for a talk at a large, well regarded, tech conference and her talks got better from there until she stopped speaking in 2017.

As we discussed above, this is more subjective than game ratings and there's no way to really determine a percentile, but if you look at how most people prepare for talks, it's not too surprising that Leah was above average. At one of the first conferences she spoke at, the night before the conference, we talked to another speaker who mentioned that they hadn't finished their talk yet and only had fifteen minutes of material (for a forty minute talk). They were trying to figure out how to fill the rest of the time. That kind of preparation isn't unusual and the vast majority of talks prepared like that aren't great.

Most people consider doing 30 practice runs for a talk to be absurd, a totally obsessive amount of practice, but I think Gary Bernhardt has it right when he says that, if you're giving a 30-minute talk to a 300 person audience, that's 150 person-hours watching your talk, so it's not obviously unreasonable to spend 15 hours practicing (and 30 practice runs will probably be less than 15 hours since you can cut a number of the runs short and/or repeatedly practice problem sections). One thing to note that this level of practice, considered obessive when giving a talk, still pales in comparison to the amount of time a middling table tennis club player will spend practicing.

If you've studied pedagogy, you might say that the help I gave to Leah was incredibly lame. It's known that having laypeople try to figure out how to improve among themselves is among the worst possible ways to learn something, good instruction is more effective and having a skilled coach or teacher give one-on-one instruction is more effective still5. That's 100% true, my help was incredibly lame. However, most people aren't going to practice a talk more than a couple times and many won't even practice a single time (I don't have great data proving this, this is from informally polling speakers at conferences I've attended). This makes Leah's 30 practice runs an extraordinary amount of practice compared to most speakers, which resulted in a relatively good outcome even though we were using one of the worst possible techniques for improvement.

If you practice and do any sort preparation for your talk, you're already better than the average person. Most people go through most of life just winging it, and out society is built to be resilient that way. The upside to this is that you can probably become an "expert" relative to the population on most disciplines with just some effort.

Seems like there is some opportunity to teach effective communication as a side hustle. Business professionals already pay $1000s for bullshit courses anyways.

I would wager that this has something to do with the field of education in general. There is a reason that the Jason Arday character was able to become an Oxford professor in education. I imagine that there just isn't a ton of great competition, and the existing one is supportive of DEI.

Similarly for marketing departments, which are most likely stacked with women, that are ambitious, rule-following and socially-adjusted enough to show up consistently and suck up to the higher-ups.

Thinking about this, most of the existing products of knowledge are locked behind walls and walls of the 'librarian' type, which is an overwhelmingly female, administrative type of person, which is probably not concerned primarily with the efficiency of accessing and intellectually using knowledge as much as with following the proper procedures of gatekeeping it.

We have institutionalized 'Those who can't do, teach' and therefore the teaching is bad and nobody really has a culture of good teaching.

This might be a consequence of the web 1.0, google and wikipedia ethos of 'knowledge should be free'. Because knowledge cannot be properly monetized, agentic people, adventurers, industrialists, etc have turned away from selling knowledge as a good product.

Gone are the days when a single man was enough to revolutionize knowledge, so the men of Science of this day have to battle the librarians probably as much as they actually do Science.
ex: Augustin Pyramus de Candolle who singlehandedly described 37,000 plant species and established botanical nomenclature. I bet that guy could give you a good presentation. But maybe not.

Possibly giving talks or watching talks at the boys club of the day was a lot more fun than what we get now, where a pin-up shirt gets you in trouble.

Perhaps the angle of 'knowledge should be free akshually' is the better one. We can see this cannibalization of productive people's skills happening right now. Stackoverflow used to be a bunch of nerds answering other nerds' questions. And they would do it around the office too, when 'just google it' wasn't an appropriate answer. Now all the nerds just ask a LLM which was previously fed by stackoverflow, and they less often learn how to explain something to somebody else.

Actually it's about ethics in video game journalism.

  1. Practice makes perfect, but most people only give presentations and demonstrations at most a couple of times per year, so they never get better. Also, only a tiny minority ever record themselves and go back over the recordings to see how they might improve (particularly by excising “uh,” “um,” “er,” etc.).

  2. Relatedly, most people don’t prepare properly. I’ve heard it said that you should ideally spend an hour of preparation for every minute you’ll spend speaking. That may be taking things to an extreme, but a ratio of one hour preparing to 15 minutes speaking has always struck me as the absolute bare minimum. I think most bad presenters just wing it.

  3. “I’ll just wing it” might be more common among extroverts. They enjoy talking to people and assume that those skills will transfer seamlessly to giving presentations (they don’t). On the other hand, some introverts have a deathly fear of public speaking, so they suck because they’re nervous.

  4. Nervous people especially, but also others, talk too fast. Sometimes this is unavoidable if you have to cram a lot of information into a sort time frame (for example), but it’s pretty common even when there are no real time constraints. Talking too fast isn’t great on its own, but it also usually leads to more “ums,” since the brain can’t keep up with the tongue.

  5. Very few people take a systematic approach to learning new skills, especially outside a classroom setting. So even if they think “I’d like to be a better presenter” (which more likely than not never even occurs to them), they’ll never take the next step of thinking “how?” And most people who did take a communications class in college regarded it as a silly freshman blow-off class; it didn’t occur to them that they might actually learn something valuable from it. (To be fair, though, many colleges treat that class the same way, assigning it to any random adjunct who happens to be teaching a lighter-than-normal load.)

  6. Most people are fuzzy thinkers. They include unnecessary details and get lost down rabbit holes when they present because that’s just how they always think. Even with ample preparation time, it probably wouldn’t occur to them to change that aspect of their presentation.

1: I recently had to sit through a 4 hour presentation where the speaker said "uh" after every TWO words on average.

Plan the goddamn sentence in your head before opening your mouth, and then deliver it in one flow. Fuck.

During college, after a lecture from a teaching assistant I took it upon myself to inform him that he'd said "you know" literally N times (I don't remember the specific number, but it was in the dozens) and suggest that he avoid that in the future.

"Just wing it" is such insidious advice, because that's what it looks like all the best speakers are doing, even though they're not (for the most part). The trick nobody tells you is that the best way to come across as comfortably speaking extemporaneously is actually to put a ton of work into preparation. The more you prep, the less "prepared" you will come off as. Authenticity, ironically enough, does not come naturally to most speakers, and requires a higher level of familiarity with your material than most people are willing to put the effort into getting.

But also once you've given broadly the same talk a few times you don't really need to prep it again. Vaguely modify the structure depending on audience interests and time allotted, make sure you're pitching at the right level, slot in a couple of new things if they come up and you're cooking with ingredients you know.

  • Stress hurts. I mechanically know the rules, but in high-stakes or in front of especially skeptical it's easy to ramble or try to add too many humanizing details that weren't in the original plan. And different people react to stress differently: my boss tends to crack jokes, and I've seen people who tend to freeze up even for topics they could normally recite in their sleep.

  • We train them wrong. From 2000-2005, it was common for introductory communications technology courses to emphasize animations, and forget to talk about why you should never fucking use them. I've seen college courses that encouraged people to make sure their slides had enough detail that they wouldn't need notes. A lot of well-meaning high school courses form teaching presentation skills as small series of one-and-done tests with feedback, rather than improving the same presentation over time, which just reinforces whatever bad habits someone came in with.

  • Sometimes we're training for something else. There's something going on with a lot of US federal government and especially DoD spaces where overcrowded text is mandatory, rather than a failure mode. My guess from unrelated engineering world stuff is that the slidedeck is supposed to act as a distributable record for review later, and the conversation an invitation for discussion, but when that transfers over to one-to-very-many presentations the whole thing falls apart.

  • There's a difficult tension between good presentation and good storytelling, and most people naturally gravitate more toward the latter. Great presenters can interleave a story, but it's hard to tease a key idea when you want to leave your big conclusion for the climax.

  • A lot of people just seem to struggle fully modeling the extent other people might not share information they have, even if the know it at an intellectual level. This tends to be the sort of thing that (at least outside of government slide decks) seems to be what results in giant fifty-point slides or explanations that keep getting interrupted by 'first I gotta explain X'.

Stress hurts. I mechanically know the rules, but in high-stakes or in front of especially skeptical it's easy to ramble or try to add too many humanizing details that weren't in the original plan.

This is fairly easy to notice when it happens and totally understandable but not really what I mean.

I'm talking specifically about the things anyone can do that almost inherently will make their presentation / talk better simply by applying an almost mechanistic set of rules: Do X. Don't do Y. If you do those and "fail" due to stress, it'll come off as a one time failure instead of "man, this guy sucks as a presenter".

We train them wrong. From 2000-2005, it was common for introductory communications technology courses to emphasize animations, and forget to talk about why you should never fucking use them. I've seen college courses that encouraged people to make sure their slides had enough detail that they wouldn't need notes.

This might be it. Probably 80% - 90% of my teachers failed those basic things in slide design. Ie. never put too much on one slide and keep visual distractions to absolute minimum. Also whoever suggested adding animations to slides should be shot and their family cursed to the seventh generation.

A lot of people just seem to struggle fully modeling the extent other people might not share information they have, even if the know it at an intellectual level.

Aka "people are goddamned idiots". That would be the only thing that explained why people in the university kept repeating the same mistakes they were explicitly taught to avoid in a very easy to understand way on that course that every single student had to take.

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