How to Speak (2018) [video] | Hacker News Reader

How to Speak (2018) [video]

ocw.mit.edu

531 pointspagade43 comments

Patrick Winston was easily my favorite professor. He took a special interest in everyone he met, and was also a great storyteller.

On the first day of the first class I took with him, I sat down in the front row. I'd never met him before, but he greeted me by name and asked me how I was doing. Apparently he'd taken the time to memorize everyone's name and face before the semester started, even though he had at least 60 or 70 students in that particular lecture.

(I was profoundly embarrassed when I fell asleep in the front row about 30 minutes later, but hey, I wasn't getting a lot of sleep in those days. I did the same at a Noam Chomsky lecture around the same time.)

Later, I took a much smaller grad class with Prof Winston that had maybe 15 people in it. We spent half the time reading and discussing great AI papers. On other days we'd just listen to fascinating stories he'd tell about Marvin Minsky, Carl Sagan, his time in the navy, dinner parties he'd been to with famous politicians, etc. He always took the time to distill some sage wisdom or advice from his experiences, too. It was the only class I never missed in my four years at MIT.

RIP Patrick Winston.

>Later, I took a much smaller grad class with Prof Winston that had maybe 15 people in it. We spent half the time reading and discussing great AI papers.

Is by any chance this recorded anywhere? I loved his AI class (MIT 6.034). He was one of my favorite teachers too. (Though OCW on my end.)

Unfortunately the grad class he taught was not recorded, because it was a seminar.

Although the readings & assignments are available on class website: https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/index.html

Oh gosh this looks way better than I thought it would be, but that's Winston for you. I dearly miss him, and am not a fan of the new MIT Data Science classes. (I work as a Data Scientist.) It feels like the philosophy and fun has been dried out into a terse brick of knowledge, making modern MIT more like the universities that copy it, instead of something fun and exciting.

I'm seeing if I can create an ad hock study group where we'll read the published articles and come up with our own conclusions. Sadly, it will not be the same, but I'm a big fan of Hofstadter and exploration of human consciousness, so I'll do my best to filling the shoes of a giant.

Record yourself making public speech and listen. There some very easy to correct mistakes, habits and mannerisms that remove power from speech. For example:

- Run-on sentences or not pausing enough between important sentences. If you have tendency to hurry up, it's less convincing and memorable. If you stop after a sentence, it sounds like you said something important and emphasizes it.

- vocal fry and nasal voice for women. For women in certain age groups there is culturally adapted creaky voice or alternatively nasal voice. It's possible to get rid of it with very small amount of practice. It's almost never normal voice, just adopted mannerism.

-"Uptalk" is the habit of ending all sentences with rising sound. Everything sounds like a question.

- I don't know the name for this, but some male speakers have tendency to start sentences in discussion with high pitch fast speech that slows down towards end. Even some very high profile journalists and podcast hosts have it to some extent. Ezra Klein for example.

>- vocal fry and nasal voice for women. For women in certain age groups there is culturally adapted creaky voice or alternatively nasal voice. It's possible to get rid of it with very small amount of practice. It's almost never normal voice, just adopted mannerism.

Do you know of any resources on this? I feel like I have to hear it and its alternative to know what you're talking about.

https://youtu.be/sY_6fFdRnik?t=91

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5VW5FMblho

also known as the valley girl talk

I think that focusing on these at first will just make beginner speaker freeze and never make speeches in the first place. Especially when it requires you to chamge life long mannerisms.

They are sort of stuff speaker should focus on once the nerves and content and structure were handled and speaker seek to step up on next level.

> vocal fry and nasal voice for women. For women in certain age groups there is culturally adapted creaky voice or alternatively nasal voice. It's possible to get rid of it with very small amount of practice. It's almost never normal voice, just adopted mannerism

I know it is petty, but god does it really irritate me when someone speaks like that. I have to consciously keep in mind not to be prejudiced against an accent, but no other innocuous thing ruins a first impression for me like that aspect of a person's voice.

To the two already mentioned ones, I will add the hoarse voice often caricatured in the stupid frat bro in movies. The breathy "hey bruh" sound is one that most more clearly evokes it in my head.

> "Uptalk" is the habit of ending all sentences with rising sound. Everything sounds like a question.

Aussie women talk this way.

Not in my experience. Cringey level of generalisation.

I stumbled onto Winston's advice as I was preparing for my Ph.D. defence which took place in early March (right before the COVID-19 shutdowns began). For the public presentation portion--a 45 minute talk aimed at a general audience--I took his suggestion to add a few props and regular 'breaks' from the technical content (as well as turning on all the lights in the lecture hall).

My dissertation dealt with robot navigation so I dug up an aeronautical chart and a 'flight computer' (circular slide rule) to motivate dead reckoning. The breaks were mostly pictures from conferences/trips where I presented my work. Both of these additions seemed to be quite well received based on some (somewhat impartial) feedback :).

One suggestion I'm still not completely sold on is to avoid saying 'thank you' at the very end. Ending on a visual that summarizes the work makes sense, but avoiding thanking the audience so as to not appear too deferential seems to me to be a stretch--isn't this just a simple courtesy? Wilson makes the analogy to political speeches which almost always end in some form of 'God bless America!', but I struggle to see an analogous sign-off that could be used in more academic settings.

“I’m excited to see what you build”

Youtube link if you want to speed it up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY

You can use this extension to change speed of all HTML5 videos: https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed

I've been using this extension for long time and it has changed my relationship to video content. I still prefer text to skim through and read at my own pace, but having keyboard shortcuts for video that work across all pages changes the game.

Long talks no longer seem daunting because speeding up and rewinding becomes like a second nature. I use the speed step of 0.1x and rewind step of 3 seconds for fine control, the default values were too imprecise. Maybe I should start slowing down songs I enjoy?

Communication is perception. Whose perception? The recipient(s).

I'm 2 minutes in. Lecturer revealed a formula for quality speaking. Knowledge, he says, is the biggest of the three components.

He then takes about a minute using an anecdote about Mary Lou Retton to demonstrate why knowledge is so important.

And yet, I'm wondering, how many people in his audience know enough about who she is to understand what he seems to want to say is an important point?

If they don't, then I think he just lost a bunch of them in the first two minutes.

Communication is perception and if his audience can't perceive his analogy, he hasn't communicated.

He did say who she was, and explained the relevant information about her that made his point.

I think it made his lecture even better - he was able to communicate using an anecdote about someone I never heard of, but gave enough context for it to make sense to me. Most people don’t think about this.

Agreed. He did explain, and still I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of someone unfamiliar with her. If I have never heard of her, how strongly does that anecdote land to convey the message about knowledge being a big K in the formula and far more important than talent?

Were you familiar with her prior to the lecture?

Did you know what the iconic hands in the air thing meant?

Hey! Interestingly I watched that video a few months ago and I didn’t know who that person was. It did trip me up and I had to listen to that passage twice to understand what he was trying to say. The rest of the video was amazing though!

So you definitely have a point.

I had never heard of her before and still do not know who she is. All the same the example worked well for me. Whether I had heard of this person or not seems of little importance.

The point he was making was that talent by itself is insufficient. While presenting her as a case study he gave enough information to convince me that this person clearly was someone with a lot of physical talent. Specifically he mentioned that she was an olympic gymnast and moreover that she wasn't only excellent but one that would routinely get full marks. All the same she was not good at skiing because she lacked knowledge of skiing and practice (in his words the main factors contributors to quality).

He explained who she was, so it did not matter.

Were you familiar with her prior to the lecture?

Did the point he was speaking about resonate with you?

Her name was not important.

I did not know who she was, he said, high mark achieving Olympic gymnast. It was exactly all the infomartion needed to make the analogy work. Him using her real name made the story authentic.

It didn't matter if I knew who she was (I did not), I got it perfectly

I watched this talk a few weeks ago and even though I didn't remember the name 'Mary Lou Retton' I remember the anecdote without having to view the video again.

He explains she was "a famous Olympic gymnast," and that's all that's relevant to the story. He was perfectly clear. It was a good analogy.

That's a good point about "famous olympic gymnast." I wonder if being familiar with the olympics is enough?

Also, with Simone Biles in the popular zeitgeist I wonder if someone not familiar with Mary Lou Retton might picture Simone instead when hearing "famous olympic gymnast."

> how many people in his audience know enough about who she is

Now I feel old.

It's kind of the same as I felt when I was talking to my nephews (who were born in 1992) a while back about assisted suicide and I mentioned Jack Kevorkian, and got blank stares. "Dr. Death?" I asked. Still nothing. Sigh. How quickly things fade away, which seemed noteworthy at the time.

Perhaps the key to effective communication is to avoid references to things which aren't universal across time...

I'm not american, never heard of Mary Lou Retton, still I understood the concept by his explanation, and loved his anecdote that was 100% clear even for me that never heard of that person.

What do you think enabled the analogy to work for you even though you hadn't heard of Mary Lou Retton?

I don't think the name matters. . the functional piece is someone highly adapted with KPT in their field had only T in the field of skiing. The olympics and her name are just dressing up for the story.

The fact that he compared his sport skills (in that case skiing) with an olympionic sport skills. That in my mind sounded like: "Well, she clearly had talent & potential, but he got the Knowledge for skiing, thus was better in that moment"

I'm Canadian but I remember her because I was around in 1984 when she competed in the Olympics.

People who are not from the US but are younger than age 35 now probably don't have a clue who she is. My assumption being a 10 year-old in 1984 would be old enough to remember her name now in 2020.

But saying she was an exceptional Olympic athlete, often getting "all 10s" (10 is good so she must be good) would give context.

Here is a summary of the main points http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-to-speak-by-pat...

Wow I had no idea Patrick Winston did this as a recurring lecture! Last year I ran into what I thought was a one-off lecture about lectures on youtube, from maybe the 90s? Really great to learn it was a whole series.

Here's a link to a playlist of the older talk I originally watched https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9F536001A3C605FC

You can see the impact that PHW had on his students and colleagues at his memorial website: http://memoriesofpatrickwinston.com/

`go install golang.org/x/tools/present` finished on the author's contact information. At first I thought it was weird, and after experience, it's a great slide to end on.

Now that I've watched Prof Winston's talk, I realise it's inspired. Thought it does say "Thank you" on the last slide. Oops.

https://github.com/golang/tools/blob/master/cmd/present/temp...

Apparently MIT Press has a book coming out from the author later this year on clear communication: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/make-it-clear

I am still trying to get a hang of the basics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmSYnOvEueo

direct youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY

He was 75 in that video! He's so incredibly sharp.

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