So you’re listening to a talk, and the speaker introduces a crucial step which you know — or perhaps only suspect — to be completely incorrect. What do you do? Do you raise your hand and point out the mistake? Or file it away momentarily, planning to ask them about it in private afterwards?
And does your answer change if the speaker is a senior scientist who will some day be writing you a letter of recommendation? What if it’s a fellow graduate student giving their first-ever technical seminar, and you know them to be intimidated by all these smart people in the room?
A Lady Scientist and PhysioProf have been talking about these issues. The former wonders whether there shouldn’t be some solidarity among grad students not to make each other look bad during journal club presentations, while the latter says that good perceptive critical questions are always in order.
My own attitude is pretty straightforward, and close to PP’s: it’s never impolite or out of order to ask appropriately probing questions about the material being presented at a scientific talk, regardless of the status of the speaker or the audience. It’s science, and we’re all on the same side; it doesn’t do anyone any favors to hide the truth in order to save someone’s feelings. Science is bigger than any of us, no matter how young and inexperienced or old and respected (feared) we may be. Not only should listeners feel free to ask any reasonable question of the speaker, but speakers should be honest enough to admit when they have said something that might be incorrect, rather than twisting around to find justifications for a slip-up. We’ve all made them; or at least I have.
To the extent that there is any sort of competition going on, it should not be “speaker vs. audience,” but rather “all of us vs. the natural world.” However, having staked out that absolutist position, it’s extremely important to recognize that we live in the real world. For one thing, many audience members tend to blur the distinction between “asking a good question” and “being an asshole.” There are people out there, one must admit, who tend to view seminar questions as a venue for them to demonstrate how smart they are, rather than learning about the subject matter in an open and collegial environment. There’s no excuse for that, and the guilty parties deserve to be smacked around, if only symbolically. Still, it’s no reason for the rest of us to equate hard questions with egotistical puffery, nor to soft-pedal questions that really are sincere. The biggest benefit of a talk, from the viewpoint of the speaker, would be to actually learn something from the questions and comments offered by the audience.
The other complication is that there is a competition going on, whether we like it or not. I personally don’t like it, and would vastly prefer to live in a utopia of unlimited resources where such competitions were unnecessary. But in the real world, there is a limited collection of goods — jobs especially, but other rewards of the profession — and a large number of people competing for them. And that competition never turns off. Academics are always judging each other, inevitably, and will use those judgments when it comes time to recommend or hire or give prizes to each other. So a real seminar is not simply a value-neutral examination of the facts; it’s a social milieu, in which interactions have real consequences.
Which is not to say that we should ever shy away from asking hard questions. But there are different ways to ask hard questions, and there’s nothing wrong with choosing the tone in which such questions are asked to match the occasion. Graduate students giving their first seminars need to learn that they will get asked tough questions, and that it’s okay — it’s not a devastating critique of their worthiness as scientists, it’s simply part of the process to which we are all ultimately subject.
A common technique to help students ease into the responsibility of giving talks is to have students-only seminars where the faculty are not permitted. The motivation for such things is admirable, but ultimately I don’t think they are a good idea. (As a disgruntled senior colleague once said, “Sometimes I learn something from listening to the students.”) Breaking down the barriers between “faculty” and “students,” and beginning to think of everyone as “researchers” and “colleagues,” should be an important goal of graduate school. It can all be intimidating at first, but it’s ultimately beneficial to learn to treat these artificial hierarchies as administrative annoyances, not natural categories.
The most successful graduate students are the ones that start thinking of themselves as colleagues right away. Go to the seminars, sit in the front, ask good questions, participate in the informal discussions afterward. It’s a big universe out there, and we’re all struggling to understand it, and working together is our only hope.
Dark Matter a movie reviewed in the NYT just – yesterday.
It is the subject of Novels and poetry and art and always in nature – the tried and true Challenged – there is always a fight ! the Vanguard appears.
Hi Sean, very nice post! Regarding the well-known problems Moshe mentioned above, I’d think it’s a point for ‘more a comment than a question’. Even if the problem is well-known, esp. if there are students in the room you can never be sure everybody has heard it before. But I’d agree that starting a longer discussion on always-the-same question in the beginning of a talk can be extremely annoying if you’re among those who actually wanted to hear the speaker and not the audience. Best,
B.
Moshe:”The context I had in mind is slightly different, where there are some well-known problems, certainly well-known to the speaker. Most recent example is a seminar I attended where the speaker derived a probability distribution which was non-normalizable and strongly cut-off dependent (aka completely arbitrary), both of the problems are so well-known that you probably could guess exactly the topic and perhaps even the speaker…This is an example where asking a question is not likely to generate new information.”
But remember W. Pauli vs. C.N.Yang at IAS presentation. Was Pauli wrong or behaved wrong?
Regards, Dany.
A good rule of thumb imo, is to think about it for at least 5 minutes before you ask the question. Try to make the question brief and tailored so it gets a brief yes/no reply so as not to derail the lecture on a tangent. If he/she is well passed that point, save the question for after the lecture.
Otoh if the lecturer doesn’t know what he’s talking about (all too often) or the subject is so grotesquely speculative, silence should remain golden. Its just not worth making a fool of the person or of yourself (eg everyone else knows how speculative or wrong the idea is).
The setting is important too. For instance, if you are listening to QCosmology speakers, where the entire subject is by its nature 3 or 4 steps into theory never never land, pointing that very fact out accomplishes nothing and just irratates.
It seems to me that it is a bit irresponsible to sit silently in the audience and allow a speaker to present a result that relies upon some clear error. After all, there are likely to be many in the audience that will be misled if you don’t point out the mistake. Of course, it is good to be polite and to try to minimize the humiliation of the speaker if you can. But, anyone giving a scientific talk should expect the audience to ask difficult questions. Also, scientists really need to be able to accept their own errors and move on, so I don’t think that we are doing students much of a favor by allowing them to avoid confronting their mistakes.
I have known a couple scientists who have great difficulty in accepting their mistakes, and it really seems to me that this does much more harm to their scientific productivity than the actual mistakes do.
Grad student seminars are wonderful because elimination of the `head trip’/fear-factor of faculty, gives the student a`dress-rehearsal’ into the dynamics of presenting a technical talk, learning time-management & visual aids skills, & gaining confidence of delivery, without fear of being intellectually gutted.
Research seminars are no-holds-barred, with pirhanas and barracuda’s always present. Neophytes should always vet their talk the day before to a knowledgeable colleague to minimize hemmoraghing the water. When Great White sharks are present, like Feynman or Pauli, follow the advice given to Weisskopf by Peirels:
“Knock on the door of the Great White the morning of an afternoon talk, and tell them precisely what you intend to say. They will bitch & moan, about this & that point, but no matter; give your talk exactly as you had planned to. Great Whites will remain mum, because they already told you so, and hate to repeat themselves !”
I think Feynman was a complete dick in this respect, being unpatent with inept speakers at seminars – and he should have known better for he has been on the wrong end of stick in his younger years, from Oppenheimer and others.
I work at a chemistry+biology institute and we get applicants for staff job/postdoc positions giving their research presenations all the time. Sometimes they are not very experienced presenters or they may have a language problem so sitting through the talk can be a mild duress – but the speaker suffers more, so it is OK.
I think it is a matter of common decency to be polite and if there is an inept part in their talk it is best to argue about it discreetly, one-on-one. They have to survive the whole interview day and if you rip them apart publically right at the beginnig, you are doing no favor to yourself or to them. Its bad enough they had unimpressive job talk, you don’t need to rub it into them in withering questions in front of the whole department.(I feel less charitable to pompous and famous people in this regard). It helps to remind to ourself what it was like interviewing for a job.
I agree with Sean that a good question/comment should always be asked/given.
One thing that makes me proud to be a physicist is that even the leaders of the field occasionally say “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand.” There is an understanding that no one knows everything, and that lack of understanding is about as likely to be caused by distracted attention, limited background, poor presentation, or incorrect conclusions. Of course, when a leader of the field says “I don’t understand,” there is a much stronger insinuation that the lack of understanding is due to the ideas being incoherent. But I think this is because, in the end, when a leader of field doesn’t understand something, this is the reason why.
My graduate advisor once found it amusing to speculate how much of the high-energy physics literature would survive if it were purged every time a paper was learned to be in some way “wrong.” Some of the most prized work in physics would now be seen to contain comments or arguments that are misguided or naive. The important thing is to be “wrong” in the “right” way: good work builds upon solid intuition from analogy and is otherwise insightful enough to survive aspects of speculative details. If a person’s work is routinely “wrong” in the “wrong” ways, then it is ultimately good for science that this person gets pushed aside in the field. Of course this is very sad for the person involved, but this is just the sad fact of life that not everyone can do anything he/she wants.
On a similar topic, Sean, what about errors in textbooks?
Back on the 10th of October 2006, I took Jim Kakalios to task in my blog for a simple mathematical error in chapter one of his popular science book “The Physics of Superheroes”. An error on which he bases his argument for all subsequent chapters. He acknowledged the error in an email and agreed to put it in his (online) errata sheet.
See http://www.savory.de/blog_oct_06.htm#20061029.
But never did so.
Now what does one do when the textbook is wrong and the author refuses to correct the error? Name-and-Shame doesn’t appear to be working…
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Sean wrote:
There’s also the poor audience to consider. I don’t think “raising a stink” is good, but if there are people in the audience who might not know the speaker may be doing something wrong, they deserve to be told. Quickly, efficiently, and gently.
John and Bee, I’d agree with that, and in my home institution, where I am responsible for the education of our students, I am likely to make a short comment about well-known pitfalls, especially if the speaker doesn’t. I am just saying this is something to be aware of, silence does not mean complete agreement with everything that is going on, and if you discover some really obvious flaw, it may just be part of the conventions of the field – something people are aware of and are willing to ignore at the moment.