[cperciva]

I wouldn't say that I'm a good speaker, but I'm certainly a much better speaker than I used to be. It's not just about transmitting a certain number of bits of information per minute; it's also about making sure that those bits are being received at the other end. I often throw jokes (and quasi-jokes, like my "purpose of cryptography is to force the US government to torture you" line) into talks as a way to help keep the audience's attention; and I watch the audience for signs that I'm moving too fast or too slow for them.

But for all of this, I don't think the material I convey has suffered in the slightest. One audience member told me that my cryptography-in-one-hour talk was the "most densely packed hour of information" he had ever seen. If being a good speaker pushed me away from having and conveying good ideas, my talks should have been getting progressively less informative, not more so.

I posit that while PG is seeing a real effect, it's not the effect he thinks he's seeing. Rather than style detracting from substance, it seems to me that there's selection bias: In order to be invited to give talks, you must have at least one of {good ideas, good style}. As a result, those talks which are completely devoid of interesting ideas are inevitably given very well -- we never see talks which are given by poor speakers who have no interesting ideas. This in no way means that speaking well is responsible for the lack of substance.

[pg]

Being a better speaker doesn't necessarily mean your ideas are going to get worse. (I said in the first paragraph that I wished I were a better speaker. Why would I wish for that if I thought it made your ideas worse?) It's just alarming to me how little being a better speaker depends on making your ideas better.

[solipsist]

  Being a better speaker doesn't necessarily mean your ideas are going to get worse.

In your essay, you say:

  Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in
  many ways pushes you in the opposite direction.

Paraphrasing the above passage, "being a really good speaker ... pushes you in the opposite direction [of having good ideas]".

These two statements seems to be in direct contradiction of each other.

[pg]

No. It just means you have to expend extra effort.

[solipsist]

This is interesting. So you think that being a good speaker negatively impacts one's ideas, although it won't necessarily be noticeable to others? That is because those who are good speakers have counteracted the negative impact with more practice.

[cperciva]

Being a better speaker doesn't necessarily mean your ideas are going to get worse.

I must have gotten the wrong message from that essay. It seemed to me that from about the third paragraph onwards you were itemizing the bad things about good speakers.

[Jach]

For me it read like this: pg wants to become a better speaker, i.e. one who is able to better convey better ideas. But the notion of a Good Speaker that is trotted out as the ideal to strive for at places like, I presume, toastmasters et al., is just a particular kind of speaker that has hijacked the "good" qualifier.

[Shenglong]

Better speaking ability may not help with better ideas, but it does help with the introduction of ideas. I think most of us on HN are living in a bit of a microcosm, where people who we need to influence can objectively break down what we're trying to do.

When we need to expand our ideas to the masses, however, the focus becomes less on what the idea is, and more on how it's delivered. Preying on emotion, sequential logic, and subliminal notes, sometimes even the worst of ideas are promoted as good ideas.

In accordance with the last point of your essay, I'm not sure either, that speaking is used more for good. But if that's the case, now that we have so many people with good ideas, perhaps it's time to focus on delivering good ideas, and making the world better that way. (hmm... I just had an idea)

[entangld]

When we need to expand our ideas to the masses, however, the focus becomes less on what the idea is, and more on how it's delivered. Preying on emotion, sequential logic, and subliminal notes, sometimes even the worst of ideas are promoted as good ideas.

An idea is a signal. It's difficult to send complex signals over long distances while maintaining fidelity. We have to focus on the delivery. So we engage our audience emotionally to get them to listen and repeat messages we want people to understand. Subtle abstract notions are even difficult to deliver at close range. How difficult would it be to deliver one to a crowd without adding more energy (emotion) or simplifying it.

We shouldn't always blame people for not understanding. Sometimes there are good reasons for doing things the way we do them.

[tlammens]

The factor that makes ideas better (or in some cases worse) is thought, which comes with time. Speaking is very engaging at least for some people... (I notice this when I am in the car and talking to someone). It consumes a lot of attention, attention which can not be used to think about the problem. The same occurs when I have a discussion with someone. When I walk away after the discussion I get a lot of: "Oh, I forgot to say this, oh I forgot to say that", because you start direct your focus on thinking instead of talking. But I guess talking/thinking is not an "exclusive or" for some people.

[rimantas]

  > It's just alarming to me how little being a better
  > speaker depends on making your ideas better.

It's not about making ideas better, it is about getting them across better. If your idea has value of X, then speaking makes it aX + c, where c is some entertainment value, so the speech can be entertaining even if idea is worth zero.

However I do think that spending some time thinking about how to present your ideas in oral form can indeed help to improve them.