The Final MIT Lecture Before He Died | 50 Years of Wisdom in 1 Hour

0:00 The uniform code of military justice specifies court-martial for any officer who sends a soldier into battle without a weapon. There ought to be a similar protection for students because students shouldn't go out into life without an ability to communicate. And that's because your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas, in that order.

0:31 I know that I can be successful in this because the quality of communication, your speaking, your writing, is largely determined by this formula. It's a matter of how much knowledge you have, how much you practice with that knowledge, and your inherent talent. And notice that the T is very small. What really matters is what you know. >> [clears throat] >> This point that came to me uh suddenly a few decades ago when I was skiing at Sun Valley.

1:03 I had heard that it was celebrity weekend, and one of the celebrities was a was uh Mary Lou Retton, famous Olympic gymnast, perfect 10s in the vault. And I heard that she was a novice at skiing, so when the opportune moment arrived, I looked over on the novice slope and saw this young woman who, when she became unbalanced, went like that. And I said, "That's got to be her. That must be the gymnast."

1:34 But then it occurred to me, I'm a much better skier than she is, and she's an Olympic athlete, not only an ordinary Olympic Olympic athlete, an outstanding one. And I was a better skier because I had the K, and I had the P, and all she had was the T. So you can get a lot better than people who may have inherent talents if you have the right amount of knowledge. So, that's what my objective is today.

2:00 And here is my promise. Today, you will see some examples of what you can put in your armamentarium of speaking techniques. And it will be the case that someone of those examples, some heuristic, some technique, maybe only one will make will will be the one that gets you the job. And so, this is a very non-linear process. You never know when it's going to happen. But that is my promise. By the end of the next 60 minutes, you'll have been exposed to a lot of ideas, some of which you'll incorporate into your own repertoire and they will ensure that you get the maximum opportunity to uh have your ideas uh valued and accepted by the people you speak with.

2:53 Now, in order to do that, we have to have a rule of engagement. And that is no laptops, no cell phones. So, if you could close those, I'll start up as soon as you're done. Some people ask why that uh is a is a rule of engagement. And the answer is, we humans only have one language processor. And if your language processor is enga- Could you shut the laptop, please? If your language processor is engaged, browsing the web or reading your email, you're distracted.

3:29 And worse yet, you distract all of the people around you. Studies have shown that. And worse yet, if I see a open laptop somewhere back there or up here, it drives me nuts. And I do a worse job. And so, that ensures that all of your friends who work who are paying attention uh don't get the performance that they came to have. >> [snorts] >> So, that's it for preamble. Let's get started. First thing to talk about, of course, is how to start.

4:06 Some people think the right thing to do is to start a talk with a joke. I don't recommend it. And the reason is that in the beginning of a talk people are still putting their laptops away. They're becoming adjusted to your speaking parameters, to your vocal parameters.

4:37 And they're not ready for a joke. So, it doesn't work very well. They usually fall flat. What you want to do instead is start with an empowerment promise. You want to tell people what they're going to know at the end of the hour that they didn't know at the beginning of the hour. It's an empowerment promise. It's the reason for being here. Uh what would be an example? Oh, I see. At the end of uh this 60 minutes you will know things about speaking you don't know now.

5:12 And something among those things you know will be make a difference in your life. Yeah, that's an empowerment promise. So, that's the best way to start. So, now that I've talked a little bit about how to start, what I want to do is give you some samples of heuristics that are always on my mind when I give a talk. And first of these heuristics is that it's a good idea to cycle on the subject. Go around it.

5:39 Go around it again. Go around it again. Some people say tell them what you want to tell them. Tell them again. And then tell them a third time. As if people weren't intelligent. But, the point is the reason is well, there are many reasons, one of which is at any given moment about 20% of you will be fogged out no matter what the lecture is. So, if you want to ensure that the probability that everybody gets it is high, you need to say it [clears throat] three times.

6:10 So, cycling is one of the things that I always think about when I give a talk. Another thing I think about is in explaining my idea, I want to build a fence around it. So, that it's not confused with somebody else's idea. So, if you were from Mars and I was teaching you about what an arch is, I might say to you, "Well, that's an arch." And that's not to be confused with some other things that other people might think is an arch. This is not an arch.

6:42 >> [snorts] >> That's not an arch. I'm building a fence around my idea so that it can be distinguished from somebody else's idea. So, in a more technical sense, I might say, "Well, my algorithm might similar might seem similar to Jones's algorithm, except his is exponential and mine's linear." That's putting a fence around your idea so that people can not be confused about how it might relate to something else. The third thing on this list of samples is the idea of verbal punctuation.

7:25 And the idea here is that because people will occasionally fog out and need to get back on the bus, you need to provide some landmark places where you're announcing that this is a good time to get back on. So, I might in this talk say something about this being my outline. The first thing we're going to do is talk about how to start. Then we're going to deal with these four samples. And among these four samples, I've talked about the first idea, that's cycling.

7:57 The second idea, building a And now the third idea is build is verbal punctuation. So, I'm enumerating and providing numbers. I'm giving you a sense that there's a seam in the talk and you can get back back on. Okay? So, now we're on a roll. Uh and since we're on a roll, can you uh guess what fourth idea might be here? An idea that helps people get back on the bus.

8:29 Ask a question. Yes. Asking a question. Ask a question. Yes. Thank you. So, ask a question. And so, I will ask a question. How long How much dead air can there be? How long can I pause? Uh I count it 7 seconds. It seems like an eternity to me to wait and not say anything for for 7 seconds, but that's the the standard amount of time you can wait for an answer. And of course, the question has to be carefully chosen.

9:04 It can't be too obvious because then people will be embarrassed to say what the answer is. Can't be too hard because then nobody will have anything to say. So, here are some sample heuristics that you can put in your armamentarium and build up your your repertoire of uh ideas about presentation. And now, if this persuades you that there is something to know, that there there there is knowledge, then I've already succeeded.

9:35 Cuz what I want to convince you of is that if you watch the speakers you admire and feel are effective and ask yourselves why they're successful, then you can build up your own personal repertoire and develop your own personal style. And that's that's my fundamental objective. And the rest of this talk is about some of the things that are in my own arm inventory that I think are effective. >> [snorts] >> So, next thing on our agenda as we start to discuss these other things is a discussion of time and place.

10:06 So, what do you think is a good time to have a lecture? 11:00 a.m. Yeah. And the reason is most people at MIT are awake by then and hardly anyone's going back to sleep. It's not right after a meal. People aren't fatigued from this or that. It's a great time to have a lecture. So, that brings me next to the question of what about the place?

10:39 And the most important thing about the place is that it be well-lit. This room is well-lit. Problem with the other kinds of rooms is that we humans uh whenever the lights go down or whenever the room is dimly lighted, it signals that we should go to sleep. So, whenever I go somewhere to give a talk, even today, the first thing I do when I speak to the audio-visual people is say, "Keep the lights full up."

11:15 Although I might reply, "People will see the slides better if we turn the lights off." And then I reply, "It's extremely hard to see slides through closed eyelids." What else can you say about the place? Well, the place should be cased. And I mean that in a colloquial sense of like if you're robbing a bank, you would go to the bank and you know, some some occasions before to see what it's like so there are no surprises when you when you do your robbery.

11:54 So uh whenever I go somewhere to speak, the first thing I ask my host to do is to take me to the place where I'll be speaking so that there are any weirdnesses, I'll be able to um to deal with it. Uh sometimes it might require some intervention. Sometimes it just might require me to understand what the challenges are. So when I came here this morning, I did what I typically do. I imagined that all the seats were filled with disinterested farm animals.

12:25 That way I knew that no matter how bad it was, it wouldn't be as bad as that. So uh finally, it should be reasonably it should be reasonably populated. It should be it should be the case that you know, if there are 10 people in this hall, everyone would be wondering uh what's going on that's so much more interesting that nobody's here. So you want to get a right-sized place that's doesn't have to be packed, but it has to be more than half full.

13:02 So those are some thoughts about uh time and place. The next thing I want to talk about is uh subject of uh boards and props and slides. Well, these are the tools of the trade. Uh I uh believe that this is the uh this is the the uh right tool for uh uh speaking when your purpose is uh informing.

13:33 Uh the slides are good when your purpose is uh exposing. But this is what I use when I'm informing, teaching, lecturing. And there's several reasons why I use it. For one thing, when you use the board, you have a graphic quality. It's the case that when you have a board, then you can easily exploit the fact that you can use graphics in your presentation.

14:04 So that's the graphic quality that I like. And the next thing I like is the like a speed property. The speed with which you write on the blackboard is approximately the speed at which people can absorb ideas. If you go flipping through a bunch of slides, nobody can go that fast. Finally, one great property of a board is that it's a can be a target.

14:34 Many people who >> [sighs] >> are novices at speaking find themselves uh >> [sighs] >> suddenly aware of their hands. It's uh as if their hands were private parts that shouldn't be exposed in public. So right away they go into their pockets. And this is considered insulting in some parts of the world. Or alternatively, maybe the hands will go in in in in back like this. I was once in a convent in Serbia.

15:05 And my host uh well, we were as soon as we entered, a nun came up to us and offered us a refreshment. And I was about to say, "No, thank you." when he said, "Eat that stuff or die." It's a question of a local custom and and politeness. But then uh before anything happened there, uh the uh nun pulled my hands off like this because it was extraordinarily insulting in that culture to have your hands behind your back.

15:36 So, uh why is that? Well, it's it's usually a supposed that that's that it has to do with whether you're concealing a weapon. So, if your hands are in your pockets or behind your back then um it looks like you might have a weapon. And that's what I mean by the virtue one of these virtues of the of the board. Now, you have something to do with your hands. You can point at the stuff. >> [clears throat] >> I was once watching Seymour Papert give a lecture and I thought it was terrific.

16:05 So, I went a second time. First time to absorb the content, second time to note the style. And what I discovered is that Papert was constantly pointing at the board. And then I thought about it a little while and I noted that none of the stuff he was pointing to had anything to do with what he was saying. >> [laughter] >> Nevertheless, it was a effective technique. So, that's a just a little bit about the the virtue of the of of blackboards.

16:34 Now, I want to talk about props. You know, the custodians of uh knowledge about props are the playwrights. Uh many decades ago I saw a play by Henrik Ibsen. It was Hedda Gabler. Uh I remember vaguely that it was about a woman in an unhappy marriage and her husband was in competition for an academic job with somebody else. And he was going to lose. Partly because he was boring and partly because the competitor had just written a magnificent book. By the way, this is back in the days before there were copying machines and computers.

17:11 Anyhow anyhow, as the play opens there's a um pot-bellied stove. And in the beginning of the play the potbelly stove with its open door just has some slightly glowing embers. But the potbelly stove is always there and as tension mounts in the play and you see this manuscript, this prop that Ibsen so artfully used, you just know that something's going to happen because as the play goes on the fire gets bigger and hotter and finally all consuming and you just know that that manuscript is going to go into that fire.

18:02 It's a memorable thing. It's what I remember about play. So play writes have got this all figured out. But on the other hand they're not the only people who can use props. Here's an example of the use [snorts] of a prop also due to Seymour Papert. He was talking about how it's important to look at the problem in the right way. >> [snorts] >> And here's a an example that not only teaches that but makes it possible for you to embarrass your friends in mechanical engineering.

18:34 So here's here's what you do. Take a swi- bicycle wheel, you start it spinning and then you put some torque on the axle. Or equivalently you blow on the edge. And the issue is does it go that way or does it go that way? Now the mechanical engineers will immediately say, "Oh yes, I see. Right hand screw rule." And they'll put their fingers in this position but forget exactly how to align their fingers with various aspects of the problem.

19:08 >> [cough] >> And so it's usually the case that they get it right with about a 50% probability. So, their um very fancy education >> [sighs and gasps] >> gets them up to the point where they're equivalent to flipping a coin. But, it doesn't have to be that way because you can think about the problem a little differently. So, here's what you do. You take some duct tape and you put it around the part of the wheel like that.

19:38 And now you start to think about not the whole wheel but just the little piece that's underneath the duct tape. So, here that piece comes rolling over the top and at this point you blow on it with a puff of air. Forgetting about the rest of the wheel, what happens to that little piece that's under the duct tape? It must want to go that way cuz you banged on it like that. It's already going down like that.

20:00 And what about the next piece? Same thing. Next piece, same thing. So, the only thing that can happen is that the wheel goes over like that. And so now you're left to wonder again cuz you're thinking about the problem in the right way and it's demonstrated by the use of a prop. You can try this after we're done. >> [snorts] >> Another example I like to remember is one from when I was taking 8.01.

20:32 Al [snorts] Lazarus was the instructor at the time and he was talking about the conservation of energy kinetic and potential. And there was a long wire in the ceiling in 26-100 attached to a much bigger steel ball but one not unlike this. And Lazarus uh took the ball up against the wall like this. He put his head flat against the wall to steady himself and then uh he let go and the pendulum takes many seconds to go over and back and then gently uh kisses Lazarus' nose.

21:12 And so you have many seconds to think, "This guy really believes in the conservation of energy." >> [laughter] [clears throat] >> Um do not try this at home. The problem is that uh first time you do this, you may not just let go. There's a natural human tendency to push. >> [laughter] >> So, uh that's a a little bit uh on the subject of props.

22:05 You know, it's interesting. Whenever surveys are taken, students always say more chalk, less PowerPoint. And uh why would that be? Uh props are always also very effective. Why would that be? Uh I'll give you my uh lunatic fringe view on this. It um has to do with uh what I would call empathetic mirroring.

22:43 When you're sitting up there watching me write on the board, all those little mirror neurons in your head, I believe, become actuated, and you can feel yourself writing on the blackboard. And even more so uh when I uh talk about this uh steel ball going that way and of way, you can you can you can feel the ball as if you were me. And you can't do that with a slide. You can't do it with a picture. You need to see it uh uh in in the physical world. That's why I think that Oh, yes, of course, it's it's there there speed questions involved, too, that have to be separated out, but I think the empathetic mirroring is why props and the use of a blackboard uh are so effective.

23:29 Well, let's see. Oh, yes, there is one more thing by way of uh the tools, and that has to do with the uh use of slides. I repeat, I think they're for exposing ideas, not for teaching ideas, but that's what we do in a job talk or conference talk. We expose ideas, we don't teach them. So, let me uh tell you a little bit about um my views on that. Um I remember once I was um in um Terminal A at Logan Airport. I'd just come back from a really miserable conference, and the flight was really horrible. It was one of those that feels like an unbalanced washing machine.

24:20 And for the only time in my life, I decided to uh stop on my way to my car and have a >> [sighs] >> cup of coffee and relax a little bit. And I as I was there for a few minutes, uh someone came up to me and said, "Uh are you Professor Winston?" "I think so," I said. I don't know. I guess I was trying to be funny. In any event, uh he said, "I'm on my way to Europe to give a job talk.

24:45 Would you mind uh critiquing my slides?" "Not at all," I said. "You have too many, and they have too many words." "How did you know?" he said, thinking perhaps I'd seen a talk of his before. I hadn't. Uh my reply was, "Because it's always true." There are always too many slides, always too many words. So, let me show you some extreme examples of how not to use slides. Well, for this demonstration I need to be uh way over here.

25:22 Um and uh when I get over here then I can start to say things like uh uh >> [sighs and gasps] >> One of the things you shouldn't do is read your transparencies. People in your audience know how to read, and reading will just annoy them. Also, you should be sure that you have only a few words on each transparency and that the words are are easy to read. And I hope that I'm driving you crazy because I'm committing uh all kinds of crimes, the first of which is that there are too many words on the slide.

25:53 Second of which is I'm way over there, and the slide's way over there. So, you get into this uh tennis match feeling of uh shifting back and forth between the slide and the speaker. You want the slides to be uh condiments to what you're saying, not the main event or the opposite way around. So, uh how can we fix this? Step number one is to get rid of the background junk. It's always a distraction. Uh step number two is to get rid of the words.

26:24 When I reduced uh the words to these, then everything I read a previous time I'm not licensed to say because it's not on the slide. I'm not reading my slides anymore, but I'm saying what what was written on the slides in a previous example. So, what else can we do to simplify this? Well, we can get rid of the logos. We don't need them. Simplification. What else can we do?

26:56 >> [snorts] >> Get rid of the title. Now I want to talk to you about some rules for slide preparation. I'm telling you the title doesn't have to be up there. By reducing the number of words on the slide, I'm allowing you to pay more attention to me and less to what's written on the slide. I mentioned it before, we have only one language processor and we can either use it to read stuff or to listen to the speaker.

27:21 And so if we have too many words on the slide, forces people in the audience to read the stuff and not listen. Student of mine did an experiment a few years ago. Uh he taught some students some um web-based programming ideas. Half the information was on slides. He said the other half. And then for a control group, he reversed it. And the question was what did the subjects, that is to say freshmen in his fraternity, what did the subjects remember best?

27:57 What he said or what they read on the slide? And the answer is what they read on the slide. When their slides have a lot of material on it, they don't pay attention to the speaker. In fact, in the after-action report, one of the subjects said, "I wish you hadn't talked so much. It was distracting." Well, the last item is eliminate clutter. Now here's some clutter. No we no we no reason even for those bullets.

28:30 So the too many words problem is a consequence of a crime Microsoft has committed by allowing you to use the fonts that are too small. So you should all have a sample slide like this that you can use to determine what the minimum font size is that's that's easily legible. Sherry, what do you think of those? Sorry, which size is right? What's that? Which you talking about, which size is right? Yeah. Minimum, maybe.

29:02 40 or 50? Yeah, he says 40 or 50. I think that's about right. 35 is a beginning to get too small. Not necessarily because you can't read it, but because it because you're probably using it to get too many words on the slide. >> [laughter] >> What other crimes do we have? Well, we have the laser pointer crime. And for that I brought a little You know, in the old days when we didn't have laser pointers, we used wooden ones, and people would go waving these things around, and pretty soon it became almost like a baton twirling contest. So, here's what here's what I recommended in the old days for dealing with this kind of pointer.

29:48 >> [laughter] >> This is an example of the use of a prop. >> [laughter] >> Jim Glass up there saw this talk about 20 years ago, and uh so, yeah, I remember that talk. That's one where you broke the pointer. It's amazing how props uh tend to be the things that are remembered. Well, now, uh we don't have uh we don't have uh physical pointers anymore. We've got uh we've got laser pointers. That's a wonder more people aren't driven into epileptic fits over this sort of stuff.

30:22 But, here's what tends to happen. Look at that. That's a lovely recursive picture, and I can become part of it by putting that laser beam right on the back of my head up there. And what do you see? You see the back of my head. I'm not I'm I have no eye contact, no engagement, nothing. I was sitting there with a student watching a talk one day and she said, "You know what? We could all leave and he wouldn't know."

30:56 >> [laughter] >> So, what happens when you use a laser pointer? You can't use a laser pointer without turning your head and pointing it at something. And when you do that, you lose the you lose contact with the audience. You don't want to do it. So, what do you do if you need to need to identify something in your image and you don't want to point out it with a laser? This what you do. Put a little arrow on there and say, "Now, look at that guy number one at the end of arrow number one."

31:23 You don't need to have a laser pointer to do that. The two heavy crime. When people ask me to review a presentation, I ask them to print it out and lay it out on a table. When they do that, it's easy to see whether the talk is too heavy. Too much text. Not enough air. Not enough white space. Not enough imagery.

31:54 This is a good example of such a talk. Way too heavy. >> [snorts] >> Uh this the presenter has taken advantage of uh small font sizes to get as much on the slide as he wanted. Lots of other crimes here, but the two heavy fact that it's too heavy is what I wanted to illustrate. So, here by contrast another talk, one I gave a few years ago. It's not a It wasn't a deeply technical talk, but I show it to you because there's air in it.

32:27 It's mostly pictures of things. There are three or four slides that have text on them, but when I come to those, I give the audience time to read them. And they're there because they might have some historical significance. The first slide with a lot of text on it is a extraction from the 1957 from the from the from the proposal for the 1957 AI conference at Dartmouth. Extraordinary interesting event and that historical extraction from the proposal helps drive that point home.

33:02 What else we got here? Oh, yeah. Your vocabulary word for the day. This is an appax legomenon. What that means is this is the kind of slide you can get away with exactly once in your presentation. This is a slide that got some currency some years ago because it shows the complexity of governing in Afghanistan by showing how impossibly complex it is. It's something we you and in the audience can't understand and and that's the point.

33:35 But you can't have many of these. You can have one per work, one per presentation, one per paper, one per book. That's what a That's what appax legomenon is and this is an example of it. Well, I've shown you some crimes and so you might be asking do these crimes actually occur? So, um they do. There's the hands in the pockets crime.

34:07 There's a um crime in time and place selection here. This is how you get to the Bartos Theater. First thing you do is you get down these steps over at the Media Lab. Then you cross this large open space. Then you turn right down this corridor. This point whenever I go in there I wonder if if if there torture implements around the corner. And then when you get in there, you get into this dark, gloomy place.

34:38 So, it's well named when when they call it the Bartos Theater because it's a place where you can watch a movie, but it's not a place where you can give a talk. Now, on the subject of does it happen, here's a talk I attended a while back in Stata. Notice that the speaker is far away from the slides. Speaker's using a laser pointer. And you say to me, "Well, what's happening here?" It's, by the way, the 80th 80th slide of the presentation.

35:12 Notice that it starts with words. This is the first of 10 conclusion slides. So, what's the audience reaction? That's the sponsor of the meeting. He's reading his email. This is the co-sponsor of the meeting. He's examining the lunch menu. What about this person? This person looks like he's paying attention, but this because this is a still picture.

35:46 If you were to see a video, what you would see is something like this. >> [laughter] >> So, yeah, it it does happen. Well, now, uh that's a a quick review of of tools. Now, I want to talk about some special cases. We could talk a little bit about informing or, >> [sighs] >> to say another way, doing what I'm doing now.

36:19 But, I'll just say a few words about that. Uh in that kind of in that kind of presentation, you want to start with a promise, like I I for this for this uh for this hour that we're going now. Then it comes to the question of how do you inspire people? I've given this talk for a long time and a few years ago uh uh our department chairman said, "Would you please give this talk to uh a new faculty and be sure to emphasize what it takes to inspire students."

36:47 And uh strangely I hadn't thought about that question before, so I started a survey. I talked to some of my incoming freshman advisees and I talked to senior faculty and everything in between about how they've been inspired. What I found from the uh incoming freshman is that they were inspired by some high school teacher who told them they could do it. What I found in the senior faculty they um were inspired by someone who helped them to see a problem in a new way.

37:19 And then what I saw from everyone is that they were inspired when someone exhibited passion about what they were doing. Exhibited passion about what they were doing. Yeah, so that's uh that's one one way to be inspiring. It's easy for me because you know, I do artificial intelligence. Um and uh how how how can you not be interested in artificial intelligence, right? I mean if you're not interested in artificial intelligence, you're probably not interested in interesting things.

37:56 So uh when I'm lecturing uh in my AI class, it's natural for me to talk about what I think is cool and how exciting some new idea is. Uh so it's that's the kind of that's the kind of expression of passion that makes a difference uh while informing with respect to this question of of of inspiring. Oh yeah, and of course during this uh promise phase, you can also express how cool stuff is. Let me give you an example of a lecture that starts this way. Uh I'm talking about resource allocation.

38:34 Uh it's the same sort of stuff you would think of when you're So it's it's the same sort of ideas you would need if you're allocating uh aircraft to a flight schedule or trying to schedule a factory or something like that. But the example is uh putting colors on the states in the United States with no neighboring states having the same color. So here goes. This is what I show in the beginning of the class. This is a way of doing that coloring.

39:02 And you might say, "Well, why don't we wait till it finishes?" Would you like to do that? No. >> [clears throat] >> Well, we're not going to wait till it finishes because the sun will have exploded and consumed the Earth before this program finishes. But with a slight adjustment to how the program works, which I tell my students you will understand in the next 50 minutes, this is what you get. Isn't that cool? Yeah.

39:33 You got You got to be You got to be amazed by stuff that takes a computation from longer than the lifetime of the solar system into a few seconds. So that's what I mean by providing a promise up front and expressing some passion about what you're talking about. Well, the last item in this uh little block here is uh it has to do with what people think that they do at MIT. You ask a faculty what the most important purpose is and they'll say, "Well, uh the most important thing I do is teach people how to think."

40:07 And then you say, "Oh, that's great. How do you teach people how to think?" Blank stare. No one can quite respond to that part, that natural next question. So, how do you teach people how to think? Well, I believe that we are storytelling animals. And that we start um developing our story understanding and manipulating skills with fairy tales in childhood and continue on through professional schools like law, business, medicine, engineering, everything.

40:45 And we continue doing that throughout life. So, if that is what thinking is all about, then when you want to teach people how to think, you provide them with the stories they need to know, the questions they need to ask about those stories, mechanisms for analyzing those stories, ways of putting stories together, ways of evaluating how reliable the story is, and that's what I think you need to do when you teach people how to think. But, that's all about education and uh many of you are not necessarily for that, but rather for for this part, for persuading, which breaks down into several categories, oral exams, not shown, job talks, getting famous.

41:29 I won't say much about the oral exams other than the fact that they used to be a lot scarier than they are today. In the old days, um reading the literature in a foreign language was part of that, and there was a a high failure rate. And when you look at the when you look back on those on those failures, uh the most usual reason for people failing an oral exam is failure to situate and a failure to practice.

41:58 By situate, I mean it's important to talk about your research in context. Uh this is a problem that's being pursued all over the world. There hasn't been any progress before me in past 30 years. Um everyone is looking for a solution because it will have impact on so many other things. So, that's situating in time and place and feel. And then as far as practice is concerned, I guess practice is important, but that doesn't mean uh showing your slides to the people you share an office with.

42:31 The problem with that is that um if people know what you're doing, they will hallucinate that there's material in your presentation that isn't there if it isn't there. Uh a a variation on the theme, by the way, is your faculty supervisor is not a very good person to help you debug a talk because they in fact know what you're doing and they will in fact hallucinate there's material in your presentation that isn't there. So, you need to get together some friends who don't know what you're doing and have them well, you start the practice session by saying, "If you can't make me cry, I won't value as a friend anymore."

43:10 And then when you get to the faculty uh on a uh oral exam, it will be easy. You see um difficulty uh the amount of flak you get from somebody is proportional to age. Uh the older somebody is, the more uh the more they understand where they are in the world. But but the young people are trying to show the old people how smart they are. So, so so they'll be vicious. So, whenever you have an opportunity to have an examining committee that's full of people with gray hair, that's what you want.

43:40 Well, that's just a word or two about something I haven't listed here. Let's get into the subject of job talks. So, I was um sitting in a bar uh many years ago uh in uh San Diego. I was a member of the Navy Science Board and I was saying with a couple of uh my colleagues on the board, uh Dolores Etter from the University of Colorado. Uh uh she made me so jealous I could spit because she'd written 21 books and I'd only written 17.

44:11 And then the other one was uh Bill Weldon from the uh University of Texas. He was a electro-magnetism guy and he knew how to use rail guns to to drive steel rods through tank armor. These were interesting people. So I said um what do you look for uh in a uh faculty candidate? And um within a 1 microsecond Dolores said that they show us they've got some kind of vision.

44:43 Quickly followed by Bill who said they have to show us that they've done something. Oh. That sounds good, I said. And then I said to them how long does a candidate have to establish these two things? What do you think? Well, compare your answer to theirs.

45:15 5 minutes. So if you haven't expressed your vision if you haven't told people that you've done something in 5 minutes you're you're you've already lost. So you you have to be able to do that and let me just mention a couple of things in that connection. Here which is you know, the vision is in part a problem that somebody cares about and something new in your approach.

45:47 So the problem is understanding the nature of human intelligence and the approach is asking questions about what makes us different from chimpanzees and Neanderthals. Is it merely a matter of quantity or we just a little bit smarter in some continuous way or do we have something that's fundamentally different that chimpanzees don't have and Neanderthals either? And the answer is yes. We do have something different. We are symbolic creatures.

46:18 And because we're symbolic creatures we can um we can uh build symbolic descriptions of relations and events. We can string them together and make stories. And because we can make stories, that's what makes us different. So that's that's that's my stump speech. That's how I start most of my talks on my own personal research. How do you ex- press the notion that you've done something? By listing the steps that need to be taken in order to achieve the solution to that problem.

46:53 You don't have to have done all of those steps, but you can say here's here's what needs to be done. An example. Here's what needs to be done. We need to specify some behavior. We need to enumerate the the constraints that make it possible to deal with that behavior. We have to implement a system because we're engineers and we don't think that we've understood something unless we can build it. And we built such a system and we're about to demonstrate it to you today.

47:19 That would be an example of enumerating series of steps needed to realize the vision. So then blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and then you conclude by you conclude by enumerating your contributions. It's kind of mirror of of these steps and helps to establish that you've done something. So that's a kind of general purpose framework for doing a technical talk.

47:53 Now >> [sighs] >> only a few more things left to do today. Getting famous is the next item on our agenda because once you've got the job, you need to think a little bit about how you're going to be recognized for what you do. So, Well, first of all, why should you care about getting famous? I thought about this in connection with a fundraising event I attended once.

48:29 Fundraising event for raising money to save Venice from going under water and having all of its art destroyed. Anyway, I was sitting here and JC was sitting here. That was Julia, the late Julia Child. And as the evening wore on, more and more people would come up and ask Julia to autograph something or express a feeling that she had changed their life and just that happened over and over again.

49:04 So, eventually I turned to Julia and I said, "Ms. Child, is it fun to be famous?" And she thought about it for a second and she said, "You get used to it." But you know what? Heard to me, you never get used to being ignored. So, it's you know, it's it's Here's a way to think about it. Your ideas are like your children and you don't want them to go into the world in rags. So, what you want to do is to be sure that you have these techniques, these mechanisms, these thoughts about how to present ideas that you have so that they're recognized for the value that that that is in them.

49:43 So, that's why it's a legitimate thing to concern yourself with with packaging. Now, how do you get remembered? Well, there's something I like to call Winston's star. And every one of the items I'm about to articulate has a starts with an S. So, if you want your presentation ideas to be remembered, one of the things you need to do is to make sure that you have some kind of symbol associated with your work.

50:15 So, this arch example is actually from my PhD thesis many, many years ago. And in the course of my work at that time, uh this work on arch learning became mildly famous and I didn't know why. It was only many years later that I realized that that work accidentally had all of the elements on this star. So, the first element is that there was a kind of symbol. It's the arch itself.

50:46 Next thing you need is some kind of slogan. A kind of phrase that provides a handle on the work. And in this case, the phrase was one shot learning. And it was one shot because the program I wrote learned something definite from every example that was presented to us. So, in going from a model based on this configuration to something that isn't an arch based on that configuration, the program learned that it has to be on top.

51:19 One shot learning. So, that's a symbol, slogan, and now we need a surprise. Yeah, the surprise is you don't need a million examples of something to learn. You can do it with one example if you're smart enough to make use of that example appropriately. So, that was the surprise. You can learn something definite from each example. Next item was a salient idea.

51:54 Now, when I say salient idea, I don't mean important. What I mean is an idea that sticks out. Uh Some some theses, funnily enough, have too many good ideas and you don't know what it's all about because which one is it? So, you need an idea that sticks out. And the idea that stuck out here was the notion of a near miss. You see, this is not an arch, but it doesn't miss by much.

52:24 So, it's a near miss. And finally, you need to tell the story of how you did it, how it works, why it's important. So, that's um a bit on uh how to not so much get famous, but how to ensure that your work is recognized. Well, that that's uh we're almost finished because now we're we're down to this last item, which is uh how to stop. And when we come to that, uh there's a question of All right, well, what is the final slide?

53:03 And what are the final words? So, uh for the sign of final slide, let me give you some examples of possibilities. How about this one? Well, you might see that slide >> [sighs and gasps] >> and uh think to yourself, there are 1,000 faculty at MIT.

53:34 Nice piece of work, but not so much but it's only a tiny piece of work if you divide by 1,000. So, when you show a whole gigantic list of collaborators at the end of the talk, it's a kind of it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a kind of let down because it suggests that nobody knows what Did you do anything significant? Now, you've got to you've got to recognize your collaborators, right? So, where do you do that?

53:58 Not on the last slide. On the first slide. All this was on the first slide. These are the collaborators. So, you don't want to put them at the end. You don't want a slide like this. How about this one? This is the worst possible way to end a talk. Because this slide can be up there for 20 minutes. I've seen it happen. It squanders real estate. It squanders an opportunity to tell people who you are.

54:28 It's It's just What about this one? >> [laughter] >> I often see it. I've never seen anybody write it down. Also, wastes opportunity. Oh my god. Even worse. All of these slides do nothing for you.

54:59 They waste an opportunity for you to tell people to leave people with what you with who you are. Well, what about this? Is it a good one? It might seem so at first, but here's the problem. If you say these are my conclusions, these are perfectly legitimate conclusions that nobody cares about. What they care about is what you have done. And that's why your final slide should have this label.

55:32 Contributions. It's a mirror of what I said over there about how job talks ought to be ought to be like a sandwich. And the final slide, the one that's up there while people are asking questions and filing out, it ought to be the one that has your contributions on it. Here's an example from my own stump speech. Yeah, this is what uh I talk about a lot. Yes, here are the things that I typically demonstrate. And I wait for people to read it.

56:04 And then the final element there is this is what we get out of it. So, that's an example of a contribution slide. All right, now what about the other part? You know, you got your final slide. That slide up there is a contribution slide. Somehow you have to tell people you're finished. So, let's uh check out a few possibilities. One thing you could do in the final words is you could uh tell a joke.

56:40 It's okay. By the time you're done, people have adjusted themselves to your voice parameters. They're ready for a joke. I was sitting in another bar this time in Austin, Texas with a colleague of mine named Doug Lenat. And Doug's a fantastic speaker. And so, I said uh to Doug Doug, you're a fantastic speaker. What's your secret? And he said oh I always uh finish with a joke, and that way people think they've had fun the whole time.

57:13 >> [laughter] >> So, yeah, a joke will work uh down there. Uh how about uh this one? Thank you. I don't recommend it. It's a weak move. You will not go to hell if you conclude your talk by saying thank you, but it's a weak move, and here's why.

57:45 When you say thank you, even worse, thank you for listening, it suggests that everybody has stayed that long out of politeness, and that they had a profound desire to be somewhere else, but they're so polite they stuck it out, and that's what you're thanking them for. So, once the wild applause has started, you can mouth a thank you, and it's not there's nothing wrong with that, but the last thing you do should not be saying thank you.

58:11 Now, you say to me, "Well, doesn't everybody say thank you?" Well, what everybody does is not necessarily the right thing. And I I like to illustrate how some talks can end without saying thank you. I I I like to draw from political speeches, >> [clears throat] >> but the ones that I heard recently aren't so good, so we're going So, what I I'm going to have to go go back a little bit. So, here's the Governor Christie. He gave the uh Republican keynote address one year.

58:44 Uh this is the end of his talk. Let's see what he does. >> [applause] >> And together, everybody, together, we will stand up once again for American greatness, for our children and grandchildren. God bless YOU, AND GOD BLESS AMERICA. >> [cheering] >> THAT'S UM A classic benediction ending. God bless you. God bless America. Now, I I I don't want to be partisan about this, so I think I better switch to the keynote address in the uh Dem- Democratic Convention.

59:20 That was delivered that year by by Bill Clinton, who knows something about how to speak. If that is what you want, if that is what you believe, you must vote and you must reelect President Barack [cheering] Obama. God bless you and God bless America.

59:50 Now, watch this. Let's go back a little bit and redo it. What I want you to see is that at one point he seems to be almost pressing his lips together, forcing himself not to say thank you. And then there's another place where he does a little salute. So, watch for those this time around. If that is what you want, if that is what you believe, you must vote and you must reelect President [cheering] Barack Obama.

60:17 God bless you and God bless America. >> [cheering] >> There's where he's pursing his lips. There's the salute. Yeah, I think that's pretty good. Now, what what what are we going to take away from this? Well, um I suppose I could conclude this talk by saying uh God bless you and God bless America. >> [laughter] >> It's the food of the ideology, but uh it might not work so well. But, what you what you can get out of this is you don't have to say thank you.

60:49 Uh there are other things you can do. And you know, it's interesting that uh over time people figure this out and there's some stock ways of ending things. So, uh in the the Catholic Church, in the good old Latin Mass, it ended with ite missa est, which uh translates approximately to okay, the Mass is over, you can go home now. And of course uh at the musical concerts, uh you know that uh it's time to clap not at the end of the song but rather when the uh conductor goes over and shakes hands with the concert master. Those are conventions that tell you that the that the event is over.

61:34 So uh >> [sighs] >> those are all possibilities for here but one more possibility and that is that you can salute the audience. And by that I mean you can say something about how how much you value your time at a place. So I could say well it's been a a great fun being here. Uh it's been a fascinating to see what you folks are doing here at MIT.

62:05 I've been uh much stimulated uh and and provoked by the kinds of questions you've been asked. It's been really great and uh and and I I look forward to coming back on many occasions in the future. So that's salute to the audience. You could do that. >> [sighs] >> Well, there it is. Um you know what? Uh I'm glad you're here. And and the reason is by being here I think you have demonstrated an understanding that how you present and how you package your ideas is an important thing.

62:37 And I salute you for that. And uh I uh suggest that you uh come back again and bring your friends. >> [applause]