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by pg 5204 days ago
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.
5 comments
solipsist 5204 days ago 

  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.

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pg 5204 days ago
No. It just means you have to expend extra effort.
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solipsist 5204 days ago
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.
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cperciva 5204 days ago
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.

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Jach 5204 days ago
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.
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Shenglong 5204 days ago
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)

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entangld 5204 days ago
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.

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tlammens 5204 days ago
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.
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rimantas 5203 days ago 

  > 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.

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