Most talks I attend have too many slides. Typically the speaker ends up skipping the last ten pages, expressing surprise that their time has run out so quickly. Even senior professors are surprised, though they’ve been giving talks for decades. Today we had 67 pages of mathematics for a 35-minute talk. One wants to laugh, and scream.

What’s going on here? One factor must be that mathematicians, who are geeky people, aren’t good at putting themselves in the heads of the audience. In preparing for the event, they don’t focus much on communication. They focus on their wonderful mathematics, whose details are so captivating!

A more unholy factor is that optimizing communication is never the whole purpose of a presentation. Audiences must be impressed as well as enlightened. If the talk is an incomprehensible torrent, alas, that may impress.

Like talks, papers are also too long. The reasons are the same, minus the comedy. I still want to scream.

[15 May 2024]