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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

This is such bad advice because it leads to tedious contents pages that people read out twice. You shouldn't need to do more than tell people what problem you're trying to solve, and you definitely shouldn't need to tell people what you just told them. You just told them! If they don't know what you told them then you didn't do a very good job.

Seriously no good presentation I've ever seen has followed this tedious format.

Definitely agree about practice though. Makes a huge difference.

Also record yourself with a phone. Closest feeling you can get to a real audience.

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The intro/outro is not an agenda, but a summary of the key things you want people to remember from your presentation.

Example:

1. Today I’m going to show you how I make gold from toilet paper. You can do this too, you just need 3 sheets of toilet paper.

2. I developed this process myself in a caravan in my front garden, blah blah blah. (Explain the process)

3. And that’s how you make gold from toilet paper. You can do this too - go and get your 3 sheets of toilet paper, and give it a go!

It may not be a great presentation, but people are more likely to come away from it remembering what you wanted them to remember because you made those points so clear. Great presentations do break these rules, but you’re more likely to be confusing than great.

Better to be dry and clear than attempt to be interesting while leaving your audience lost.

I don't think it is. It's a commonly taught technique to flight instructors and I personally think it does often work.

Not saying it applies in all situations.

I think it does depend on narrowly scoping the presentation.

> tell people what problem you're trying to solve

That's literally step one in OPs advice. It's just a pat way of conveying the "introduction > argument > summary" format for presenting and it scales really well from 3 slides to x.

1. This problem I'm trying to solve (i.e. I'm going to tell you how I solved this problem - Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em) 2. This is how I solved the problem (Tell 'em) 3. This is the outcome (i.e. This is what the solved problem looks like - Tell 'em what you told 'em)

>That's literally step one in OPs advice.

No, it's your generous, retroactive re-writing of the OP's advice. If you genuinely don't understand that you communicated something that wasn't in the original, then your communication skills are not at the level that justifies the confidence with which you're posting.

He was interpreting it generously, which is a pretty good way to keep discussions civil. The site guidelines say to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says", and I think that has happened pretty well here.

That ... doesn't apply when the topic at hand is the validity of oft-repeated conventional wisdom. In that case, the real anti-pattern to pretend that the conventional wisdom actually means a specific (sane) interpretation that lives only in one HN poster's head.[1]

Which, coincidentally, is the very thing I was criticizing.

It's really bizarre to see "be charitable in discussions" used to defend Orwellian reinterpretation of bad advice no one actually follows.

[1] See sanewashing https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sanewashing

Yes that's how the advice should be interpreted, but it is bad advice because it's not how it is actually interpreted. It fails to communicate a good idea.

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