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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).
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.
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