sevenfactorial:quantum-friend-theory: Additionally: If you’re making a slide-based presentat

sevenfactorial: quantum-friend-theory: Additionally: If you’re making a slide-based presentation, consider giving your slides to a non-expert without context. If they can put together your main points and overall narrative from slides alone, then your slides are doing something right!(From my twitter, which you can find here) I wanted to ask what do you mean by non-expert? Like someone who’s never studied your topic intensely or are we going all the way to someone not in your field or somewhere in between? Because for most presentations, I feel like someone outside the field entirely not really understanding it is expected. They won’t have the necessary basic vocab (sometimes I babble on about groups or partitions or literally whatever when I’m around non-math friends without expecting them to have any clue what I’m talking about and indeed they don’t). On the other hand, someone else in an adjacent topic or someone a bit younger does sound like a good choice. A couple weeks ago, @counter-example and I practiced conference presentations with each other a couple times which was extra helpful bc we tend to do pretty different math but we both have decent upper level undergrad math backgrounds. That’s awesome, @sevenfactorial! I’m glad you found someone who provides you useful feedback!Re: your opening question, I don’t think there’s a universally applicable answer. When I wrote “non-experts”, I had in mind pretty much anyone who hasn’t worked in the subfield of the presentation’s content, but you’re right that there’s likely some minimum overlap of knowledge necessary for useful feedback (a minimum which I imagine relates to the intended audience of the specific presentation; slides for a subfield-specific conference can be more technical than slides for the general public, for example). You’ve pointed out that choosing people in the same field but in a different subfield is a good strategy, and I agree.I most recently got feedback on my physics slides from a friend who is pursuing a math Ph.D., and his comments were extremely useful despite himself being unfamiliar with a large majority of the physics & jargon. Asking a variety of people seems most useful to me (the more data, the merrier), but as for what single individual would provide the most valuable input? I’m not sure.I also think it’s important to dial expectations to fit each feedback provider. For example, while my math friend doesn’t know a lot of the vocab that my audience would (so that a critique like “I don’t know what this word means” wouldn’t necessarily warrant action), he picked up that certain things were important from context and thus–even though the details escape him–he could identify the overall narrative. His lack of knowledge about my work is actually a boon: he can keep in mind the bigger picture without getting lost in the details that I might be distracted by. I figure that if he can follow my narrative without understanding the details, then I can be confident my organization will be crystal clear to my audience too. If he mentions that something seems important despite my intentions, then I can think about reducing my inadvertent overemphasis of that thing.So I’ll refine my earlier statement to be: I recommend acquiring feedback from multiple people at varying levels of familiarity with your content, while also being careful to gauge that feedback through both the perspective of each feedback provider as well as your eventual intended audience. (I was careful to use plural wording in the original tweet, but dropped it in my text addition on Tumblr, which I would change in retrospect.) -- source link
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