
How to Speak (2018) [video] - pagade
https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-tll-005-how-to-speak-january-iap-2018/how-to-speak/index.htm
======
csallen
Patrick Winston was easily my favorite professor. He took a special interest
in everyone he met, and was also a great storyteller.

On the first day of the first class I took with him, I sat down in the front
row. I'd never met him before, but he greeted me by name and asked me how I
was doing. Apparently he'd taken the time to memorize everyone's name and face
before the semester started, even though he had at least 60 or 70 students in
that particular lecture.

(I was profoundly embarrassed when I fell asleep in the front row about 30
minutes later, but hey, I wasn't getting a lot of sleep in those days. I did
the same at a Noam Chomsky lecture around the same time.)

Later, I took a much smaller grad class with Prof Winston that had maybe 15
people in it. We spent half the time reading and discussing great AI papers.
On other days we'd just listen to fascinating stories he'd tell about Marvin
Minsky, Carl Sagan, his time in the navy, dinner parties he'd been to with
famous politicians, etc. He always took the time to distill some sage wisdom
or advice from his experiences, too. It was the only class I never missed in
my four years at MIT.

RIP Patrick Winston.

~~~
proverbialbunny
>Later, I took a much smaller grad class with Prof Winston that had maybe 15
people in it. We spent half the time reading and discussing great AI papers.

Is by any chance this recorded anywhere? I loved his AI class (MIT 6.034). He
was one of my favorite teachers too. (Though OCW on my end.)

~~~
kennethfriedman
Unfortunately the grad class he taught was not recorded, because it was a
seminar.

Although the readings & assignments are available on class website:
[https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/index.html](https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/index.html)

~~~
proverbialbunny
Oh gosh this looks way better than I thought it would be, but that's Winston
for you. I dearly miss him, and am not a fan of the new MIT Data Science
classes. (I work as a Data Scientist.) It feels like the philosophy and fun
has been dried out into a terse brick of knowledge, making modern MIT more
like the universities that copy it, instead of something fun and exciting.

I'm seeing if I can create an ad hock study group where we'll read the
published articles and come up with our own conclusions. Sadly, it will not be
the same, but I'm a big fan of Hofstadter and exploration of human
consciousness, so I'll do my best to filling the shoes of a giant.

------
nabla9
Record yourself making public speech and listen. There some very easy to
correct mistakes, habits and mannerisms that remove power from speech. For
example:

\- Run-on sentences or not pausing enough between important sentences. If you
have tendency to hurry up, it's less convincing and memorable. If you stop
after a sentence, it sounds like you said something important and emphasizes
it.

\- vocal fry and nasal voice for women. For women in certain age groups there
is culturally adapted creaky voice or alternatively nasal voice. It's possible
to get rid of it with very small amount of practice. It's almost never normal
voice, just adopted mannerism.

-"Uptalk" is the habit of ending all sentences with rising sound. Everything sounds like a question.

\- I don't know the name for this, but some male speakers have tendency to
start sentences in discussion with high pitch fast speech that slows down
towards end. Even some very high profile journalists and podcast hosts have it
to some extent. Ezra Klein for example.

~~~
proverbialbunny
>\- vocal fry and nasal voice for women. For women in certain age groups there
is culturally adapted creaky voice or alternatively nasal voice. It's possible
to get rid of it with very small amount of practice. It's almost never normal
voice, just adopted mannerism.

Do you know of any resources on this? I feel like I have to hear it and its
alternative to know what you're talking about.

~~~
nabla9
[https://youtu.be/sY_6fFdRnik?t=91](https://youtu.be/sY_6fFdRnik?t=91)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5VW5FMblho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5VW5FMblho)

~~~
xyst
also known as the valley girl talk

------
gbjw
I stumbled onto Winston's advice as I was preparing for my Ph.D. defence which
took place in early March (right before the COVID-19 shutdowns began). For the
public presentation portion--a 45 minute talk aimed at a general audience--I
took his suggestion to add a few props and regular 'breaks' from the technical
content (as well as turning on all the lights in the lecture hall).

My dissertation dealt with robot navigation so I dug up an aeronautical chart
and a 'flight computer' (circular slide rule) to motivate dead reckoning. The
breaks were mostly pictures from conferences/trips where I presented my work.
Both of these additions seemed to be quite well received based on some
(somewhat impartial) feedback :).

One suggestion I'm still not completely sold on is to avoid saying 'thank you'
at the very end. Ending on a visual that summarizes the work makes sense, but
avoiding thanking the audience so as to not appear too deferential seems to me
to be a stretch--isn't this just a simple courtesy? Wilson makes the analogy
to political speeches which almost always end in some form of 'God bless
America!', but I struggle to see an analogous sign-off that could be used in
more academic settings.

~~~
Swizec
“I’m excited to see what you build”

------
hamhamed
Youtube link if you want to speed it up
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY)

~~~
Xeanort
You can use this extension to change speed of all HTML5 videos:
[https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed](https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed)

~~~
jmiskovic
I've been using this extension for long time and it has changed my
relationship to video content. I still prefer text to skim through and read at
my own pace, but having keyboard shortcuts for video that work across all
pages changes the game.

Long talks no longer seem daunting because speeding up and rewinding becomes
like a second nature. I use the speed step of 0.1x and rewind step of 3
seconds for fine control, the default values were too imprecise. Maybe I
should start slowing down songs I enjoy?

------
heymijo
Communication is perception. Whose perception? The recipient(s).

I'm 2 minutes in. Lecturer revealed a formula for quality speaking. Knowledge,
he says, is the biggest of the three components.

He then takes about a minute using an anecdote about Mary Lou Retton to
demonstrate why knowledge is so important.

And yet, I'm wondering, how many people in his audience know enough about who
she is to understand what he seems to want to say is an important point?

If they don't, then I think he just lost a bunch of them in the first two
minutes.

Communication is perception and if his audience can't perceive his analogy, he
hasn't communicated.

~~~
dante_dev
I'm not american, never heard of Mary Lou Retton, still I understood the
concept by his explanation, and loved his anecdote that was 100% clear even
for me that never heard of that person.

~~~
heymijo
What do you think enabled the analogy to work for you even though you hadn't
heard of Mary Lou Retton?

~~~
dante_dev
The fact that he compared his sport skills (in that case skiing) with an
olympionic sport skills. That in my mind sounded like: "Well, she clearly had
talent & potential, but he got the Knowledge for skiing, thus was better in
that moment"

------
mad44
Here is a summary of the main points
[http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-to-speak-by-
pat...](http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-to-speak-by-patrick-
winston.html)

------
jonchurch_
Wow I had no idea Patrick Winston did this as a recurring lecture! Last year I
ran into what I thought was a one-off lecture about lectures on youtube, from
maybe the 90s? Really great to learn it was a whole series.

Here's a link to a playlist of the older talk I originally watched
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9F536001A3C605FC](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9F536001A3C605FC)

------
kennethfriedman
You can see the impact that PHW had on his students and colleagues at his
memorial website:
[http://memoriesofpatrickwinston.com/](http://memoriesofpatrickwinston.com/)

------
hendry
`go install golang.org/x/tools/present` finished on the author's contact
information. At first I thought it was weird, and after experience, it's a
great slide to end on.

Now that I've watched Prof Winston's talk, I realise it's inspired. Thought it
does say "Thank you" on the last slide. Oops.

[https://github.com/golang/tools/blob/master/cmd/present/temp...](https://github.com/golang/tools/blob/master/cmd/present/templates/slides.tmpl#L71)

------
a_bonobo
Apparently MIT Press has a book coming out from the author later this year on
clear communication: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/make-it-
clear](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/make-it-clear)

------
totetsu
I am still trying to get a hang of the basics.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmSYnOvEueo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmSYnOvEueo)

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gavreh
direct youtube link:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY)

------
typon
He was 75 in that video! He's so incredibly sharp.

