Paul Graham consistently says ‘um’ ~7 times per minute | Hacker News Reader

Paul Graham consistently says ‘um’ ~7 times per minute

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238 pointstbh127 comments

If anyone has a similar habit and wants to stop it I will tell how my high school fixed it for almost all of us.

In my (private) high school's health class "like" and "um" and others were referred to as "stop-words" by the teacher because people would say them instead of pausing. It's really obvious once you look for them, for instance here with pg but anywhere really. I remember hearing college tour guides that would literally say "um" after every single sentence, probably unbeknownst to themselves!

Almost every class in the school had projects, and the health class project was for us to remove the stop words from our speech by the end of the semester. We did this by all using recording software (had to submit either by cassette tape or wav/mp3) and answering questions such as "Do you want to live forever and why or why not?" by speaking for at least 5 minutes. These were our homework assignments maybe once a month, with the overarching goal considered as the class project.

We had to very consciously never use any stop words. We could pause the recorder if we had trouble thinking of what to say, but we could never say those words.

I was skeptical of the assignment at first but my class all agreed by the end of the semester that it made us much better speakers, simply learning to consider our pauses instead of filling the silence with "like" and "um".

As a follow-up to this, my HS English teacher broke me of this by forcing the mantra, "if you are about to say 'um', STOP TALKING'". These works are generally used to fill the speech gap while you are thinking. It seems weird at first to pause, but eventually it becomes natural.

My HS English teacher was even more harsh (but effective) - every time someone said um, ah, like, or any other tic/pause word, she'd immediately cut them off. 'STOP.' 'TRY AGAIN.' 'NO.' etc. She was relentless, forced students to stop, calm down, gather their thoughts, and say it directly. Most students were cured in a few days, and the really bad ones a few weeks at most.

This is generally not a bad thing, though. From my slight applied linguist background: These fillers are generally used in order to establish that the speaker's turn is not yet done. In a conversational situation, having pauses instead of fillers gives the listeners openings into the conversation to become the speaker.

In presentational speeches, fillers aren't so bad, but long pauses IMO are worse. It's a natural thing to have fillers. If you want to have less, just practice more and be more comfortable with what you're talking about.

I would posit that people that say "um" more, came from upbringings where they were more likely to be interrupted the moment they left a gap in conversation. That'd be an interesting study.

Yes. I find in America if you don't keep filling the space with noise when thinking, you lose the chance to finish your thought.

There's an even more low-tech way. Teacher starts calling you out on it. A little "ding" from a bell or similar draws your attention to it, when you wouldn't notice otherwise. After a while, your classmates will start policing each other, and even the quiet ones will speak up so they can play the "game" of avoiding filler words.

We did a similar thing in debate. When one person says 'um', so does everyone else. Stops the habit fairly quickly.

our partner in cx would stand behind us and hit us on top of the head every time we said "um" or "like"

That reminds me very strongly of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdOomYvnyNI&t=1m13s

I had a PM at Google who did debate in high school. In his debate class, everybody would throw a pen at him every time he said "um". He has very precise, articulate diction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtirDMfcOKE

I know girls that talk faster than they can think so every third word is "like". In this case it's not a pause but more of a tick. Sometimes I am in awe of the content density. They can talk for hours and say absolutely nothing.

"Like" is increasingly used to introduce a quotation, particularly in SoCal dialect. It's not necessarily the most elegant use of language, but it's not a pause or a tick.

kristianc was like, "It's not necessarily the most elegant use of language, but it's not a pause or a tick.", but that's not, like, the only use of "like" in American vernacular. It's also used to pause, or to, like, distance yourself from what you're saying.

Nice going... For sentences like your last example, in the past few years I've been hearing "as in" with increasing frequency. I find it quite annoying and would be very curious to learn about its origins, as in how did it start.

Minor interjection: the word you both want is "tic".

As someone who grew up in the suburbs of Southern California, It's been my experience that 'like' it's used to introduce a paraphrase that includes non-verbal communication and/or tones that introduce not-so-subtle comments regarding the paraphrase without directly commenting nor limiting yourself with a direct quotation.

For example, I could say "kristianc was like, OMG it is NOT a pause or a tic, it is SoCal dialect!" in a sarcastic tone and roll my eyes.

edit: This form of communication doesn't translate well into digital form - email, texting, etc. - unless both people are familiar with each other's body language and the dialect to visualize (at a conscious or subconscious level) the meaning.

All communication is to some extent subject to those limitations. Wittgenstein was so like "language acquires meaning through context, bro" but only in his like, later period.

Funny relevance: Taylor Mali at Def Poetry Jam http://youtu.be/SCNIBV87wV4

Believe it or not, you can talk for hours and say absolutely nothing without any disfluencies at all. I don't want to derail this thread into a political argument so I won't mention any specific examples, but I'm sure you can think of some yourself.

+1. More please.

I know girls that talk faster than they can think

Heh, I'm the other way around.

I am from the south so I think I probably pick up on the socal "like" more than people out west who hear it daily, and I distinctly remember listening to Marissa Mayer and attempting to count the instances in which she said it when I heard her speak about 7 or 8 years ago. The talk was very interesting and she didn't use it as a "thinking pause" however it was used very frequently.

My high school AP English teacher deducted a full 1% from presentation assignments for every "um" and "like" (except where the use of "like" was contextually appropriate).

Nobody got higher than a D on the first presentation. Nobody got lower than a B after that.

Half-OT: Note that words such as "like" and "um" are typically not referred to as stop words in (computational) linguistics. They are called filled pauses, or sometimes floor holders, depending on their function. Liz Shriberg's thesis was - as far as I know - the first extensive treatment of speech disfluencies in the field of computational linguistics.

The term "stop words" is, however, used in information retrieval. Here, it refers to words that appear very frequently in (almost) all documents in a corpus; so frequently in fact that they are taken not to carry any/much information content at all. Examples would be "the", "it", "and" etc. For many tasks in IR, stop words are removed from the document representation because they mostly introduce noise.

You've simply replaced one problem with another('umm's with pauses).

(assuming you see this as a problem. I actually think this is an overrated problem IRL.)

Pauses are the opposite of "a problem". They're one of THE MOST effective tools you have as a speaker. Listen to any great speech. Look out for the pauses. Imagine if the impact would've been the same without them.

That is a false equivalence--a rhetorical pause differs from a random pause. Random pauses are certainly preferable to any overt verbal tics.

I'm not a speech therapist or linguist etc. so wasn't aware of any formal distinction. I can tell you that "random" pauses, as you call them, are as useful as considered pauses. They slow down what's being said, which makes the speaker appear calmer, more considered, and so on.

What you say goes against common sense and experience. Pausing randomly in the middle of a train of thought is not on the same level as a carefully considered pause. There was a real-life case study of the difference on the Language Log where the subject was a presidential debate between Bush and Kerry. Kerry spoke at a moderate rate and made careful use of pauses--he had longer pauses before beginning his answers to the moderator's question, and he had shorter, calculated pauses for rhetorical effect. By contrast, Bush launched directly into his answer before hardly taking a breath, spoke hastily, tripping over his own words, pausing frequently and inappropriately during sentences in ways that did not suggest composure but rather confusion and incompetence. Obviously that impression was not helped by his other deficiencies as an speaker, but it was a major flaw in its own right.

Bush launched directly into his answer before hardly taking a breath, spoke hastily, tripping over his own words, pausing frequently and inappropriately during sentences in ways that did not suggest composure but rather confusion and incompetence

I pretty much had this speech impediment and had to see a speech language pathologist to get it fixed :) Your description contrasting the two types of pauses nails it.

What I wrote about pauses is about pauses as opposed to ums and ahs. The unstated assumption is that the rest of the package (message structure, body language and so on, as per PG's speech) is in sync.

While Bush is indeed a really good example of how not to do it, his failing was not pausing. His failing was, as you say, confusion and incompetence.

See my post below.

His failing was, as you say, confusion and incompetence

The same could be argued about 'umms': that the 'umms' aren't the problem, confusion and incompetence is.

Lol :-) I didn't say umms are bad. I said cutting them out can be good. If you're looking to improve then that's one something (one of many) you might seek to address.

Another might be how you make a statement. The one you made here is positional. It's positional in that I feel you're trying to push me into telling you you're right.

I may well be wrong, but that's what I feel when I read your comment above.

So another something one might improve, in addition to eliminating umms, is to move from a positional stance to a principled stance. [START Starship Trooper voice] Would you like to know more?[END Starship Trooper voice] :-)

I realise that the OP is about a speech, but I think universally dismissing "um"s isn't justified. A speech is not the same thing as a dialogue. Conversational fillers are useful to hold the floor (not that there aren't better ways than "um" but that doesn't mean "um" isn't useful or ineffectual).

I guess that depends on your objective. In either case (communicating a message, or arbitrary conversation) you can choose to be ok, or you can choose to be exceptional.

Ums in either case are a distraction, and to some annoying. The degree obviously varies from person to person. Being a good conversationalist is as counter-intuitive as skiing (where you have to lean forward when facing downhill) in that a good conversationalist is in fact a good listener, and only interjects to elicit more conversation from the other party. So... in a way you're right. Uming a lot when you're really just listening isn't going to affect anything ;-)

Making a speech is about communicting a message. There are many ways to structure that message, for example SCIPAB, but the structure and supporting slides, if any, can be spectacularly annihilated by a mediocre delivery.

To be exceptional you need to work on your delivery. That means slowing way down, not using ums and ahs, maintaining eye contact (I've addressed a 5000-strong crowd, so believe me when I say it's irrespective of the size of the audience), and getting your body language right.

Depends entirely on how good you want to be :-)

If you want to be exceptional you could do worse that start with The Voice Book (http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0571195253/ - Amazon.com is sold out). It's been derided somewhat elsewhere in this thread, but Toastmasters is another hugely useful route.

[Edit - forgot to describe SCIPAB]

(S)ituation

(C)omplication

(I)mplication

(P)osition

(A)ction

(B)enefit

There are plenty of smooth talkers who can give a good speech, without any umms, and yet leave the audience unfulfilled. Obviously there are just as many bad speeches full of too many umms.

I think there is a middle ground where 'umms' and general fillers make the communication more authentic and seemingly less rehearsed. Most people don't like listening to a robot, not even a well-rehearsed one.

Toastmasters is quite helpful for this. I did it for a while and highly recommend it. It's also a great way to practice social skills, generally.

I tried a similar thing in high school to stop saying 'like' as a filler word. For me, it completely backfired though - I found myself saying 'like' twice whenever I would have said it once!

I guess doing this as a group (as others have suggested) might work better.

Years later, and the habit went away by itself.

I did this and it worked well. Except.. I then started listening back and noticed I was adding filler like "you know what I mean?" instead, which is proving a more insidious problem to stamp out.

The best way to stop doing something is to become overly conscious of it. I used the same method to get "this" out of my writing.

There's also the "Subway Challenge":

Go to a restaurant like Subway where you go along a counter and tell the employee what you want on your food item. The challenge is to get through the whole thing without a single "um", "uh", or similar word. It's VERY easy to say "uhhh.... ummm.... pepper jack cheese!" when asked to make a choice on the spot like that.

Believe it or not I wrote the first draft of an essay about this yesterday. (I went on a one-day trip to NYC and wrote the first draft of one in each direction.) So stay tuned.

The data is two years old, but it looks like you're at the start of your traditional March/April/May writing tear: http://andrewacove.posterous.com/wip-pg-essays

As someone who's not a great speaker, it's always disconcerted me a bit about the disproportionate weight we (myself included) place on the manner in which a message is presented.

PG's a great thinker about the subjects he discusses, and his essays have a very high signal to noise ratio. But when this video was first posted the 'umms' was one of the top comment, and probably detracted quite a bit from the core message he was conveying. Had this been an essay, I suspect the reception would have been more positive.

Conversely, if you re-read the TSA blog response which we all ridiculed, it was actually an EXCELLENT response for a TV news journal format (think O'Reilly or Anderson Cooper). He dodged the issue, obfuscated a bit, threw in a few quips, and ended the blog post addressing a completely different issue. If the TSA rep had gave that response on TV, many people would have perceived the TSA to have 'won' the argument. But because it was in written format, we were all free to dissect for the actual content, and we came away underwhelmed.

REALLY good speakers have an almost magical ability to enchant audiences even if they're not saying anything of importance. Probably the best public speaker I've ever seen was a preacher who when I parsed for content wasn't saying much. A close second was a Yale undergrad years ago doing a debate competition about some trivial topic I can't even recall. I do remember the impression he left though, and thinking this guy was good enough to temporarily convince me that the sun revolved around the earth.

> PG's a great thinker about the subjects he discusses, and his essays have a very high signal to noise ratio. But when this video was first posted the 'umms' was one of the top comment, and probably detracted quite a bit from the core message he was conveying. Had this been an essay, I suspect the reception would have been more positive.

You don't even have to guess-pg published the contents of this talk in the essay "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas", which was much better received than the video, judging by the HN threads.

Exactly. Having seen pg speak many times, I can say that his 'umms' actually give you the feeling that he is thinking hard about the topic versus just rattling out some predetermined idea.

As I stated in my earlier comment, I think 'umms' can actually help the speaker establish genuineness with the audience.

This is a common habit for PG. I've seen him speak in person 2-3 times and watched a handful of videos of him, and each time I noticed the amount that he said "um". Obviously the content is valuable and worth listening to, but it is naive to say that these sort of distractions by any speaker are worth overlooking.

Unfortunately, these are distractions from the content, which is what matters. Simple exercises could could help fix the habit with only a few hours of practice.

A trick that helped me in college was to say "uh" or "um" every other word while practicing a speech. This mental trick causes you to be hyper-aware of the habit, thus helping you to subconsciously stop inserting the words into speech. Try it out sometime.

> I wondered if he was a little nervous, but that didn’t seem likely for someone in his position.

All sorts of people can get nervous speaking in public, including people that are thought of as being 'natural' public speakers like Steve Jobs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzDBiUemCSY) and Sam Harris (http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-silent-crowd-overcomi...), as well as billionaires (http://www.quora.com/Peter-Thiel/How-is-Peter-Thiel-so-amazi...) and CEOs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3hu3iG8B2g).

One of the things even the high-powered public speaking trainers tell you is that the only way not to be nervous is if you no longer care. Any time you have an audience you actually want to learn something or be convinced to take some action, you should feel a bit nervous.

To my surprise, Ed Witten, one of the preeminent physicists of our time, is quite gifted in public talks and interviews from what I've seen of him. You'd expect someone explaining string theory to laymen to throw in a few "ums," but they're quite rare in this and other interviews (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1BcyxQCnoE&feature=rela...). I find it inspiring, as someone who's had issues with public speaking in the past, to see such a brilliant man handle a conversation with such ease.

If this research on PG, or other speakers, continues please also record the room temperature so we can see if the um rate varies with temperature.

I think you'll find it actually varies with pressure.

I predict a sharp up-tick at the point where the audience starts to peel all their clothes off.

Am I the only person who found the graph in the article a little weird? Wouldn't it have been more illustrative of the author's point (that the frequency of ums/uhs per minute was pretty consistent) to show a graph of ums/uhs per minute instead of total ums/uhs at any given time? (i.e. the graph should have been almost flat).

You're just asking for the derivative of the function he plotted.

Showing that the function is linearly increasing is the same as showing that it has a constant slope, in any case.

It's a very unique 'um', too. You could tell he was pretty nervous. But as someone who has had my 'um's during speeches ruthlessly pointed out to me, I'm basically trained to notice when someone says 'um.' PG's speech was tough to listen to.

It didn't seem like nerves. It appeared that he was thinking through some of these things on stage in more depth than he had previously done so the ums provided the time to collect the thoughts in a coherent manner.

that reminds me - I can't find the link now, but - someone had counted the vocalized pauses of college professors and averaged them by subject. They found that professors of math and hard sciences used the fewest, and that professors of philosophy used the most. Presumably, because, when there's less of a definitive answer to a question, you must work harder to come up with words to describe it.

Very distinctive 'Um' indeed. No kidding, I actually Googled 'paul graham um' after about two minutes. However the talk was great and the ways in which pg expressed his ideas was particularly interesting.

I would love a "Tech Jam" -- like a poetry jam, where you get in front of an audiance and can speak on any subject (tech related) for 5 minutes or so to get over the fear of speaking and to get over the propensity to say uhm all the time.

In such a jam, it would be great to let everyone follow some simple structure:

* My name

* My company

* My passion

* My skills as it related to that passion

Or something along these lines. Whatever the structure is - just let it be practice and not tied to anything other than stage time.

Practice. Practice. Practice. I've become a pretty good public speaker because of simply that. I absolutely adore this concept. No slides. Just a jam about something you love.

Any venue /event you can think of that would allow this (like a bar with an open mic)? You're back in Brooklyn now though, correct?

Any HNers from SFBay interested in this? I'd love to give this a go - I'll call it UMJam :)

I'm gonna talk to GA about it. Or just start my own public house in NY for it ;)

I bought UMJAM.com - lets put a page up :)

I was there for his pycon talk, and it seemed to me (they stood out for me as well) that he was using disfluencies to express disbelief or punctuate something extraordinary or unexpected with humor. I do this too? But instead of uhm, I'll end a statement on a rising tone as in an interrogative?

You’re in good company. The rising tone at the end of a sentence used in a non-interrogative context is called uptalk or a high rising terminal [1]. Its increased use has been a far-reaching dialect shift that has been ongoing for a couple of decades now. The New York Times published an article on it in 1993 [2] and just recently another [3] with a good overview of how its use has mostly spread into every corner of the American populace. Perhaps my favorite discussion of uptalk is an analysis of some of George W. Bush’s speeches in which he extensively employs it [4].

###

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/magazine/on-language-like-...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-...

[4] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002708.h...

This is just a minor end-of-thought speaking affectation. I've never really been bothered by it. John Carmack has an even more characteristic "um" which comes out like the word "I'm". That honestly did bother me at first, but you get over it after a while.

Not a big deal unless you're really worried about your first impression. Once you're where John Carmack or Paul Graham is, that's not an issue.

I recently noticed that Chuck Klosterman's delivery sounds a lot like an excited Paul Graham. He's a good model for what Paul would sound like with more flow between individual thoughts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yTwbga3lGM#t=39m10s

I quit on my own, instantly, within 3 minutes of practice by simply TALKING SLOWER. It's like I gave my brain enough time to send words to my mouth and I stopped saying "um" and pausing immediately. It felt miraculous. lol.

Neat post. Good way to highlight how easy it is to use your app (I'm assuming it's easy).

I clicked on your logo on that page, and although it is a clickable element, NOTHING HAPPENED. Please, please, please, please link your logo to your home page. Please.

I have noticed that my annoyance at a speaker's 'um' goes way up when I don't like the speaker, or the subject matter is turning me off.

When the new division head announced that we'd been acquired because Sprint loved everything about us, and he was only introducing a few minor, very cosmetic, changes? All I could focus on was his 'um's.

That and my resume.

pg talking about why Hacker News has it's quirks? Loved it.

I guess the same thing happens with spouses. My second wife does things that I -know- should annoy me. They do when other people do them. But with her .. it's cute. Adorable. Another reason why I love her so much.

Been almost fifteen years since I got hitched - I guess it's true love.

I first read many PG's essays, and only recently has seen him on video. But, by that time, my attitude was set in such way, that I take his ummms as a sign that he is taking a wee bit of time to translate what is going in his head into more human understandable form. His essays show clearly the depth of thinking. Such thoughts need extra effort/time to translate from human lisp to human language. So, I have no problem that PG takes a second now and then to formulate a thought to be understandable by a wider audience.

I really think my answer here on Quora about Peter Thiel explains the main part of this: http://www.quora.com/Peter-Thiel/How-is-Peter-Thiel-so-amazi...

I don't think it's nerves as much as it's a mismatch between someone's internal intelligence/thinking speed and their ability to translate that into speech on the spot.

Yes, absolutely. Different people think in different ways--some in language, some in images, and some even more abstractly. (I suspect this is the key to mathematical talent--whether or not you can think purely in mathematical abstractions without the need of other aid.) So unless you're thinking in language already, there's often a translation process you have to run your thoughts through before saying them, and this process can be expensive, especially with the pressure of people looking at you.

This is something that can be curbed with practice. If you give your presentation to someone, they should point this out. To get better at public speaking, you should try to curb any behavior that detracts from the message that you want to deliver.

I remember listening to RMS talk at the HOPE conference one year and it was painful to watch him talk. He obviously needed very long breaks when he was speaking, using them to take sips of Pepsi. The pauses were at times in his speaking were almost planned for some sort of applause or at best internal agreement and reflection on the idea. It was all very awkward, if you can't tell.

It was RMS, so nobody cared, but I'm sure that he could have gotten his message across better with some effort.

Reading this thread, the masses of 'um's here really feel contagious.. i wouldn't want to be starting a speech right now.

I have to say PGs 'UHM's were very noticeable (distracting, even), although that perhaps was a little influenced by the prior mention.

Finally- slightly OT but i missed the discussion thread- I was really disappointed by Paul's responses to the questions asked. While I understand it is difficult to come up with a proper response on the spot, i thought the questions particularly about university's peripheral 'roles', and manufacturing-oriented start-ups were really insightful and his mostly side-stepping answers really missed an opportunity.

I am someone who says UM a LOT.

I think and speak very fast - but when I speak in front of others, my physical speaking ability doesnt keep up with my thinking and I end up saying UM a lot.

I watched others speak and never say UM and I just don't know how they do it.

Just like anything else, public speaking is a skill. To do it well requires focused practice. Learn to keep your mind and your mouth at the same pace and be willing to have silence while you think, rather than um, or have something more substantial to come out of your mouth than um.

It isn't easy of course, but any skill worth learning isn't.

When trying to improve public speaking skills this is a common thing to work on. It's certainly not easy at the start, but it is something that can improve a lot with practice, even for particularly nervous or fast-speaking individuals.

This post and all the comments seems a little rude. This isn't a 4h or toastmasters feedback forum. Letting someone know they need to work on their public speaking skills is something better done in private. Whatever they were trying to communicate they were doing their best to communicate it at the time, and it's rude to focus on speech difficulties instead of content. Believe it or not some individuals have neurological conditions that prevent super-clear communication, but it's not a nice thing to point out outside of a venue designed to improve public speaking.

I find it's not the frequency of these words, but the volume and inflection that's the problem. There are a series of computer science lectures on youtube, and also some courses I had at university where the lecturer says UMMMMM at a substantially higher volume than the rest of their speech, and drags it out for a second or more.

The resultant sound is like a cow mooing, or someone doing an offensive impersonation of a downs syndrome patient at the top of their voice. The effect is totally unbearable and I have no idea how people sit through hours of this stuff.

Link please?

Vocal pauses are natural, and they happen. Our brains can handle them. Why is it even considered personal betterment to expend energy replacing them with whitespace?

The link to the video[1] (at least at the time of posting) is wrong—it's a talk by Katie Cunningham! The correct link is [2].

[1] http://pyvideo.org/video/628/keynote-paul-graham-ycombinator [2] http://pyvideo.org/video/626/keynote-paul-graham-ycombinator

Maybe this one speech was an outlier; I haven't noticed this in previous pg speeches (in front of 300+ people, and some televised things like the NY event).

Peter Thiel, on the other hand, has consistently technically-bad speech patterns, but the content is compelling enough to make up for it.

Tracking the same speaker in multiple venues/contexts vs. comparing different speakers seems a lot more interesting.

I didn't think he was nervous. That just sounded like his speech pattern. I found it refreshing that he didn't sound like a salesman.

Is there any early videos of him speaking where he exhibits stuttering (or other speech impediment)? It sounds like when people who "self-treat" (intentionally or not) and substitute one impediment for another, ideally one less apparent.

Then again maybe it's one of those habitual things, for example when someone says "Knowwhatimean" repeatedly.

Umm, no: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/67469618/

The 'um's are not the parts that matter.

Apparently you're not familiar with the signal to noise ratio.

I have an uncle who is a scientist. He speaks very slowly. And he leaves long pauses between his sentences. The reason for that is that he actually thinks through what he says. There is relatively little 'signal', but the value of what he says is large enough to make up for the low bitrate.

In your example, the "signal" would be what he says and I'm assuming you mean the silence to be the "noise". Large enough gaps between information could lead to a distortion of the message, regardless of how profound the information may be.

I think that was Jemka's point. Sidnal/noise ratio is not the same thing as throughput.

For instance imagine that instead of stopping to think, your uncle turned on the radio during the pauses. The same amount of useful information would be transmitted but we would not say that both scenarios are equally desirable.

Silence is the desirable pause method. It allows the audience to absorb and understand the signal better.

Ha - funny, this is the first thing I noticed when watching the video of this presentation, and it drove me so crazy I only made it through the first 3 minutes before I had to stop watching. Wish it wasn't the case, would have loved to watch the whole thing, but it was maddening....

absolutely - david crockford has the same problem, and I just simply couldn't listen to his entire javascript series

had brilliant university professors who were the same.

people need to realize that this is fixable, and is very important to fix if they want to share information more effectively

I'd rather listen to an average presenter with great content than a great presenter with average content.

Nonetheless, it's impressive he can even public speak at all given the fact he's a hacker by nature.

this is just ridiculous and dismissive of everyone who has ever tried to better themsleves

I'm a hacker by nature and have been bettering myself through Toastmasters for years. I didn't find the comment dismissive. Public speaking is a skill that takes a lot of effort to develop and maintain. I agree it's impressive when someone who spends lots of time hacking (and communicating 1:1) can also deliver an effective speech in front of a crowd, even if that speech has flaws.

I believe its common for great thinkers/writers. If someone is able to speak something valuable faster without the need to feel pauses it means that he either super-fast thinker or he memorized/polished his speech, which is something, i guess, PG dont have time for.

Hmmm. I commented on this in the other hacker news entry (for his talk) and got a -1 for it. I guess this is just a habit formed after many years. The quality of the talk is still great and that what's most important.

I've really enjoyed the presentation but I've noticed the 'um' too. hopefully pg will see this thread as constructive criticism and he'll make an effort to get rid of the 'um'.

Before I watched the talk I read comments complaining about the 'um's, so I was extra focused on it. When I watched the talk I did not find it distracting at all. YMMV

Good way to get attention to your service, and I did check it out, but, uh, pricing? Would have considered service but unknown cost made me head back to HN.

Apologies for the way, way off topic post, but we'll be announcing pricing soon. Hopefully in a couple of days, and we'll be sure to 'tell HN' when we do. It's likely to be between $30/month and $200/month depending on volume.

Yeah, shameless linkbait. Sorry. :)

Maybe not entirely on topic but does anyone have any good tips on dealing with stammer or stutter related issues? Maybe exercises or something?

His brain has too much throughput for his mouth to handle! So he uses 'Um' as a kind of verbal buffering device.

pg also ends a lot of sentences with "right?" I used to have the same affectation, and have worked hard to eliminate it. The main one that remains in my own speech is saying "so" (as a transition) a bit too much. I have the video to prove it; you'll see what I mean on Pi Day.

i loved the content, but i think that he could use some coaching on how to give presentations. i did find the 'um's to be distracting.

who cares?

Tough crowd.

Indeed I can only hear the first 3 minutes as those 'um's starts to drive me crazy, hope he watches his own speech and improves his speech skill soon.

Barack Obama does the same thing.

And "like"

The only people this matters to is people who count how many times the speaker says "um". Toastmasters types. The rest of us can see the forest for the trees.

It was very distracting. It takes quite a bit of training to eliminate pauses from speech but it takes significantly less effort to replace 'um' with a pause.

Pauses aren't even bad. Pauses give your audience an opportunity to process what you're saying. I've had pauses encouraged to me.

The problem is, like the FedEx arrow, once you see (hear) it, you can't avoid doing so in the future.

I think that many people don't consciously note a thing, but it still has an effect upon them.

This does not apply to PG, but sometimes I find myself disliking a speaker but not quite realizing why until hours after the discussion when I can freely introspect and disentangle my emotions.

Simply understanding your own biases, and emotional peeves doesn't make you elitist which is what you seem to be implying by mentioning the "Toastmaster types".

It is an error to assume people who pay attention to trees don't understand forests.

It distracts, no matter if you count or not. And really, if you do a lot of public speaking and respect your audience—do a favor to your audience and try to improve. Sure, audience will bear with almost anything and more so if what you say is interesting—but why make them suffer?

I think that's a sign of greatness. Mark Zuckerberg has, um, the same trait.

'umms', intentional or not, can actually help the speaker in seeming more genuine.

For example, I hit on a lot of women and in the process, over some time, end up saying basically the same lines and stories. I risk coming across as too-smooth/scripted which is just as bad as being very nervous.

Especially when retelling a story, I intentionally inject plenty of 'umms' and look up as if I am trying to recollect something from my memory.

That just proves you're a creep.

I'll bite. How does it prove that I am a creep?

Obviously it's very subjective... but how can you not see why the type of person who isn't always reading up on "negging" and the like would think you a creep for that?

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