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Comment by retsibsi | Hacker News Reader

I think they're copping this criticism because it's neither one thing nor the other. If it was really just a group of scientists being themselves, some of us would appreciate that. And if it was inauthentic but performed by great actors, most people wouldn't notice or care about the fakeness. This is somewhere in the middle, so it feels very unnatural and a bit weird.

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You're describing low skilled presenters. That is what it looks like when you put someone up in front of a camera and tell them to communicate a lot of information. You're not thinking about "being yourself," you're thinking about how to not forget your lines, not mess up, not think about the different outcomes of the prompt that you might have to deal with, etc.

This was my point. "Being yourself" on camera is hard. This comes across, apparently shockingly, as being devoid of emotion and/or robotic

Yeah, but I disagree with you a bit. If it were less heavily scripted, it may or may not be going well, but it would feel very different from this and would not be copping the same criticisms. Or if they unashamedly leant into the scriptedness and didn't try to simulate normal human interaction, they would be criticised for being "wooden" or whatever, but it wouldn't have this slightly creepy vibe.

I get you.

I think for me, just knowing what is probably on the teleprompter, and what is not, I am willing to bet a lot of the "wooden" vibe you are getting is actually NOT scripted.

There is no way for people to remember that 20 minutes of dialog, so when they are not looking at the camera, that is unscripted, and viceversa.

I agree with your take, makes a lot of sense. I think most of the criticism I see directed at the presenters seems unfair. I guess some people expect them to be both genius engineers and expert on-screen personalities. They may feel a little stiff or scripted at times, but as an engineer myself I know I’d do a hell of a lot worse under these circumstances. Your view seems like a reasonable one to me.

Extremely robotic.

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