Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I suppose you need to say up front what the expectations for the meeting are. I give and sit on presentations from other researchers, and I have even come up with a metric to express how many questions there are: MTTI, mean time to interruption. I have been in presentations with an MTTI of 1 minute. A typical presentation has an MTTI of about 5 minutes. A presentation with "few" interruptions has an MTTI of about 15 minutes.

Generally, questions come in three classes: clarification ("I'm not sure I understand, can you explain..."), discussion ("Have you considered extending this to..."), and criticism ("I think there is a problem with this approach..."). In an academic setting, all are welcome unless otherwise stated. (Sometimes we say no discussion and critical questions because of time limitations.)

However, what is never acceptable is someone commandeering the presentation and using it to talk about their own thing. Moderators will step in if it starts devolving like that.

So, simply, you need to let your audience know what the format is, because had I been in your audience, I may have asked questions, too.

I don't think Katz was merely asking questions. From the article:

> Speaker: Talk talk talk talk. Talk talk talk? Demo demo demo.

> Katz: Wait, why are you doing it that way? You should be doing it this way.

[...]

Katz plugged in his own laptop, and proceeded to redo the demo.

That's not the behavior of someone who is curious. It's the behavior of someone who thinks they know better. Whether or not they actually do, the point of the article is to not attempt to show them up in front of everyone else.

I'm separating "Why are you doing it that way?" from "Move over" because I see them as two separate things. There is also a spectrum of first.

"You should be doing it this way" is on the rude side of what is acceptable in academic circles. That is, people will think you're rude for phrasing it that way, but the content of what you said is legit. A more polite version is "Did you consider doing it this other way? If so, why did you choose your way?"

What I'm saying is even if the content is legit, you don't interrupt someone during their presentation. User smacktoward says this rather well further down in this submission's comments:[0]

> "Was Katz right?" is not the most important part. It's arguably not even relevant. If someone is presenting, and they say something that's incorrect, there are better ways to deal with it than pushing them off the platform and announcing that the Real Genius has arrived.

[0]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832936

I also see and give a lot of academic presentations, and I'm not aware of any venue that encourages someone from the audience to commandeer a talk. "Let's take this offline" is so common as to be a cliche, and if the speaker got flustered enough to get caught up in it, a decent moderator steps and makes that call. There are many reasons for this. One is that it's simply the polite thing to do. Another is that the audience may want to hear the talk rather than whatever particular point you're hung up on being the only topic of conversation. Yet another is that it's very unlikely that the speaker has absolutely nothing of value to contribute, so it's in everyone's best interest that emotions have a chance to cool down a bit rather than the speaker deciding he's never going to talk to that asshole from the crowd again.

We weren't at this meetup of course, but it very much sounds like that's what should have happened here and didn't.

I'd also point out to anyone thinking that being right is an excuse for this sort of behavior that people will remember you being an ass long after they've forgotten you being right.

You might have missed this sentence: However, what is never acceptable is someone commandeering the presentation and using it to talk about their own thing. Moderators will step in if it starts devolving like that.

Oddly enough, yes, I did. Six lines of text, and I blew right past that one. Sorry about that. :)

I was there. Here is the event timeline here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3833063

Gist that someone else recaptured here: https://gist.github.com/1893359

"I suppose you need to say up front what the expectations for the meeting are."

no, you absolutely do not. the onus is absolutely on the speaker here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com