talks about talks

The point of academic talk is to try to persuade your audience to agree withyou about your research. This means that you need to raise a structure ofargument in their minds, in less than an hour, using just your voice, yourslides, and your body-language. Your audience, for its part, has no toolsavailable to it but its ears, eyes, and mind. (Their phones do not, in thisrespect, help.)

This is a crazy way of trying to convey the intricacies of acomplex argument. Without external aids like writing and reading, the mind ofthe East African Plains Ape has little ability to grasp, and more importantlyto remember, new information. (The great psychologist GeorgeMiller estimated the number ofpieces of information we can hold in short-term memory as "the magical numberseven, plus or minus two", but this may if anything be an over-estimate.)Keeping in mind all the details of an academic argument would certainly exceedthat slight capacityCosma Shalizi at Three-Toed Sloth