> Every talk must begin with its motivation

Must is a strong word. Surely there exist good presentations that begin with something else.

It's definitely possible to break the rules. In fact, to give a truly outstanding talk that everyone remembers, you probably have to break the rules (speaking as someone who coded an entire Sigcomm presentation in a 3d game engine). But most early career researchers, for whom this advice is presumably intended, are not good enough at giving talks for that to be a good idea. In fact most tenured professors aren't too. If you do break the rules, you need to have a very clear idea in your head as to how you're going to pull it off, and a good idea of who your audience is and how they'll perceive it, and those are both hard to achieve without a lot of experience.

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JohnKemeny 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> The audience cannot care about your work until they understand the ‘value proposition’, to use still more contemporary capitalist jargon.

Hard disagree.

It is easy to imagine a problem that just sounds FUN.

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spicyusername 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Then "fun" is the value proposition.

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JohnKemeny 6 days ago | parent [-]

But then the claim is meaningless.

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AnimalMuppet 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

No; why would it be? Not everything is fun. Fun is one more reason why I might care, but it's not automatically true. You have to show me that I'm going to have fun.

If you can't show me why it's fun, or why it's relevant in some other way, then I'm out. (And you don't have very long to do it, either...)

[Edit to reply to tikhonj, because I'm rate limited: The "value proposition" is what makes it valuable to the listener. Why should they give you their attention and time? Value is "anything that makes people interested in what you're telling them", as opposed to all the things that don't make them interested. Since the "don't make them interested" set is not empty (far from it!), then no, it's not a tautology.]

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tikhonj 6 days ago | parent [-]

It's "meaningless" because if you broaden out the definition of "value" to "anything that will make people interested in what you're doing", the advice turns into a tautology.

	▲	jszymborski 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's still helpful to remind people that an audience will not care about what you are talking about until you tell them, in any way, why they should. So describing a fun problem is implicitly telling the audience why they should listen.
	▲	kd0amg 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And yet a lot of speakers still seem to need that self-evidently true statement pointed out to them. Tautological advice isn't necessarily bad or useless, especially for beginners.

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6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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IAmBroom 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To you.

These rules are not, "Skip one and you'll lose the whole audience."

They are, "Do this and you'll grab an optimum amount of attention and retention."

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derangedHorse 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

One can argue there’s a value proposition inherent in solving an interesting problem. It reminds me of the paper on optimal tip to tip efficiency:

https://ia800308.us.archive.org/32/items/pdfy-tG1MuMpwvrML6Q...

https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Optimal_Tip-to-Tip_Ef...