If you were listening to such a talk, you might get excited about following in their footsteps, or about going on a different hiking trip entirely. You'd learn some useful advice, gain confidence, and understand better how to cope when something went awry.
But you wouldn't mistake listening for having been on the trail yourself.
My Everest is not safe to climb. We make it somewhat safe for tourists on the backs of many dead or mistreated locals, a lot of litter that cannot be safely cleaned up, and a bunch of other harms that I can't remember.
And of course, sometimes you are presented with a wonderful theorem, that just makes you open the book/paper and start seeing why it is true.
Isn't the article assuming you already are a practitioner?
People in different areas of maths have radically different languages and ways of thinking about things. And subareas will develop their own ways of thinking and talking about things. If you are a young researcher, you almost certainly have to learn these, if you want to understand the area. A more mature researcher can be confident enough to understand the new area in their own language.
I never passed a math class after my second try at pre-calculus. Before that I never even had to look at a book. Looking back I think it was a failure for me to ask the right questions or a failure of the teachers to help me visualize how to work out the systems starting from basic principles. I couldn't solve anything without starting from scratch. Still can't. I get paid ludicrously well for making a marketable skill out of that form of reasoning, so I can't think it's either a mental flaw or laziness that prohibited me from grokking calculus in 12th grade. Somewhere in there was a failure to provide the reality handle that mapped to something I could reinvent if necessary.
[edit] fwiw I think I've reinvented trigonometry at least six times when I needed to for games. I never remember how it worked the last time.
One kid just groks the math. One kid groks the fun(){} ...in a perfect world, those brains should just complement each other, I guess.
I do recall when first taking calc they briefly mentioned delta-epsilion proofs and limits but really hand waved past it, which i guess would be hard if you want everything on solid foundations.
As the teacher looked at the results, he said I should receive a Nobel for my work. As my son told me that, I had a very long sigh...
I don't think you deserve a Nobel, but I do think that teaching your son to solve lots of different problems with algorithmic recursion is going to help him much more in life than memorizing the way to solve one problem on a math test.
I don't think I ever understood math except where it was logical, within the bounds of what I could deduce. But when I learned to write recursive algorithms, that capacity for deduction expanded exponentially.
(Eventually math switchs much more to be about proving things [inb4 someone yells howard-curry], but that is more mid-undergrad degree.)
This does sound like a psychological crutch 'living in the moment' technique of feeling good that you've achieved something (learning 3 things) rather than understanding the material or atleast the nature of the area/problem described in the talk.
Would the same benefits be had from skipping the talk and reading the conclusions slide?
I view this really as a trick for the more obtuse talks. I can fully take and benefit from notes on something i understand. But if i end up in a talk that is going to be beyond me, having the goal of not taking notes, but picking tidbits is often the only way to get anything out of it. If i take full notes i forget to listen as there's simply far too much to write down. If i take no notes, then after the next couple talks I've totally forgotten everything i "learned". If i take very few, short notes then i can still pay enough attention to try understanding but i also have a couple anchor points from which to remember the talk.
It's just a balancing act, especially when you're in a conference where you have to pick a new talk every 30 minutes for six hours a day for 4 days. It can get pretty ridiculous and having a better strategy than "just remember it" or "well write everything down" can be very useful when the most interesting talk to you is in the middle on day 3.