[kevinalexbrown]

False modesty aside, I am a very good public speaker. Doing debate in high school, I had an undefeated regular season, as in not losing a single round. I say this just to point out that I'm not a mediocre public speaker championing the written word.

Paul Graham is right, but it depends more on context than he suggests:

Speaking about a technical subject, you want to communicate the ideas themselves. The emotional content in this case is noise. Paul suggests in the notes that academic talks are more immune to this, but having been to quite a few academic talks and given a few myself, I still find them quite inferior to written papers and one-on-one conversations. True, people can still inject the emotional appeals in papers or conversations, but they tend to get more easily noticed and filtered by the reader or listener without the spellbound effect.

Political debates are perhaps an exception. When you watch a presidential debate, you're not only looking for the president with the best ideas, but a president you believe has the leadership capacity to carry them out. You might personally want the president who has the best ideas, regardless of how charming they appear on camera, but like it or not, a lot of that leadership rests on personal charisma.

[rshe]

This may be particular to the field of biology, but I find biology talks to be much more interesting than papers. One contributing factor is that important papers in Science and Nature are subject to stringent length limitations. This limits the writer's ability to unfurl a coherent narrative. Oftentimes, years of research are condensed into a handful of figures and sentences that cannot convey the more subtle points of the argument (for that the reader is directed to the supplementary information, which is often many times longer than the actual paper).

On a more macroscopic scale, talks also allow scientists to highlight deeper themes that are often lost in the minutiae of a technical paper. This is especially important in biology because we want to find universal paradigms from experiments done on model organisms. A talented speaker can distill the most important themes from a body of research in a way that writing rarely achieves.

In summary, talks are a great medium for conveying conceptual narratives. In biology talks, the important assertions are almost always backed up by a slide that shows real data. However, if I am an expert in a particular subfield and really want to get into the details, of course I'll go read the paper.

[madhadron]

As someone who's passed as a native in physics, biology, compsci, and math, this is peculiar to biology, or rather to the culture of academic biology today, where the laurels go to those who can make the biggest mountain out of their molehill of data. Thus you have grand assertions, followed by a slide with a dozen gels, half of which are blurred, which show that under some very strenuous assumptions and some very particular conditions, something might be a certain way if you squint hard enough.

Journal length limits are partially responsible for the culture of bad writing in academic biology, but it cannot explain why most of my colleagues in biology could not express technical ideas clearly in writing even without length limits.

If you go to the older literature you will find papers much clearer than any biology talk I've heard. Arthur Koch's papers on cell shape are good examples. There was also a culture of monographs that is missing today. The best examples I can think of off the top of my head are one by Henrici (http://www.archive.org/details/morphologicvaria00henr) and Schrodinger's 'What is life?'(whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf ) are the two examples that occur to me off the top of my head, or Chargaff's scientific essays in 'Heraclitean Fire'.

Disclaimer: I loathe the culture of academic biology and believe that most of its practitioners should be defunded in favor of serious biological research.

[rshe]

I have to disagree with your characterization of modern biology. I was more trying to make a point on the information value of talks versus papers. Your comment reminds me a frequent quarrel at my school on how math is superior to physics, which is superior to bio/chem. Of course everything in the humanities is "worthless." I don't what to attribute to you beliefs that you don't hold, but this is the undercurrent that I'm feeling: http://xkcd.com/435/

I do think there are many great papers coming out in biology today, and scientists are still fully capable of writing insightful books and essays for the general public. I can see why some papers feel like a collection of trivial data, but trust me, beautiful and convincing data is well appreciated. While exaggeration of results is also a problem, we are trained to read all papers with a critical eye. There are always good papers and bad, but here are some links to ones that I think are good:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v397/n6715/full/397168a... http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7058/abs/nature03... http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(09)00963-5 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5928/807.abstract (Hopefully you'll be able to access these - if not, that's a whole nother problem about academic papers)

I won't comment too much on your generalizations, but I want to note that it is hard to predict a priori which findings from academic research will become useful for industry later on. I think you'll find defunding academic biology to be a pretty unpopular viewpoint. Perhaps you could elaborate on what serious biological research means? (Plus, I'd say paying graduate students 30k/yr is a pretty efficient labor force)