There is a related issue: Someone gives a research presentation that is quite mathematical, but the presenter is time limited and goes quite fast, or simply isn't good at explaining the mathematics to people who (unlike himself) didn't already spend months getting familiar with it. The math is easy for himself, so, by the typical mind fallacy, it seems to be easy in general.
In such situations often nobody in the audience likes to admit that they "zoned out" after the first few slides. After all, that would mean they aren't very bright compared to the others, especially when nobody or hardly anybody else complained about not being able to follow. Moreover, maybe it would have been fine to ask that naive basic question a few minutes ago, on slide 3, but now the talk is already into way more advanced territory on slide 10, so it is definitely too late now to say anything.
Which makes it likely that if you zoned out yourself, and you don't have a prior reason that most other listeners are significantly smarter than you, that actually most or many people "zoned out" as well, they just all don't want to admit it, like you.
What's a solution to this problem? Still ask your naive question at the end of the talk, indirectly admitting that you didn't understand most of it? But that would be too embarrassing for most people, so it's not a practical solution.
What's a solution to this problem?
Abolish the conference talk, turn everything into a giant poster session, possibly with scheduled explanations. Or use the unconference format, and everyone only talks with a table's worth of people at a time, possibly doing multiple rounds if there's interest.
Academic conferences as they work now are baaaad. No wonder people complained about them going remote for COVID, everything of value happens chatting over coffee and/or in front of posters, no one gives a shit or gains anything from the average talk, given by some tired and inexperienced PhD student who doesn't know how to communication well, thinks they have to jam their talk with overly technical language to be more impressive, and possibly has bad English to make things even harder to follow to boot. Absolute snoozefest, almost no reach outside of the very narrow group of hyper specialists already studying the same topic.
I think the main purpose of classes, presentations and talks is as a vehicle for specific forms of academic signaling, relationship and prestige-building projects, but let's set that aside and focus on learning.
You can likely get access to the speaker's slides and references via a post-talk email, and you can probably also get a response to a few questions if need be. So the only pieces of information you're truly missing out on when you zone out during a talk and can't recover the thread are:
- Anything the speakers says that goes beyond the contents of the slides
- Any pedagogical value the speaker provides, such as calling your attention to specific parts of the slides or receiving questions before or after
- Somewhere between 20 and 90 minutes of your life (and you can often either leave early or work on your laptop - possibly googling some of the background literature on the topic if you're really interested - as a fallback)
If slides, poster or abstract are available in advance, you can pre-study for a talk you really want to follow. The extra benefit is that you're less likely to zone out if you're familiar with the contents of the talk, since confusion leads to checking out.
In a class context, of course, you can often just ask lots of naive questions because that's the point of a class. If your teacher isn't receptive to questions, then you just treat the class like a talk, which is easy mode since the syllabus and reading will generally be provided in advance.
Of course, it's an extra burden to do all this pre- and post-study, but I think it is an unrealistic expectation that you'd be able to follow the details of cutting-edge research in a technical field that is not your own without an additional time investment beyond the talk itself.
Those are good points. Still, it would be great if listeners somehow could coordinate to interrupt the speaker as soon as the majority can't follow anymore.
I'll answer for both sides, as the presenter and as the audience member.
As the presenter, you want to structure your talk with repetition around central points in mind, as well as rely on heuristic anchors. It's unlikely that people are going to remember the nuances in what you are talking about in context. If you are talking about math for 60 minutes, continued references about math compete for people's memory. So when you want to anchor the audience to a concept, tie it to something very much unrelated to the topic you are primarily presenting on. For example, if talking about matrix multiplication, you might title the section "tic tac toe speed dating." It's a nonsense statement that you can weave into discussion about sequential translations of two dimensional grids that is just weird enough people will hear it through the noise of "math, math, math."
Then, you want to repeat the key point for that section again as you finish the section, and again at the conclusion of the talk summarizing your main points from each section, anchoring each summary around the heuristic you used. This technique is so successful I've had people I presented to talk to me 15 years later remembering some of the more outlandish heuristic anchors I used - and more importantly, the points I was tying to them.
As the audience member, the best way to save face on zoning out is to just structure your question as "When you talked about ____, it wasn't clear to me what my takeaway should be. What should I walk away knowing about that?" This way you don't need to say something like "I kind of got bored and was thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch - did I miss anything important?" Just "what should I know from that section?"
A good presenter will have padded the section a bit so summarizing what they think the main point was shouldn't take much time. It's also useful feedback for them as if you zoned out there, it's likely others did too so they might revisit or rework it if they plant to present it again.
And finally, most presenters should treat a question like that as their failure, not yours. If I'm presenting, it's my job to confer the information, not your job to absorb it. If I'm not engaging enough or clear enough in that conveyance, you bet I'd want to know about it. The worst thing to have happen as a presenter is zero questions at the end. By all means ask a question like "wait, wtf were you talking about in the middle there?" over just silently walking out to lunch bewildered, confused, and apathetic.
I struggle with this frequently. Of course, in many cases I waltz into a talk where (I think that) the rest of the audience knows more than me, and in those cases I don't say anything. The best solution I've seen is to first build up a ton of social credit and then ask tons of questions. I've seen a few cases of fancy professors asking very basic questions that I was too afraid to ask, and knowing that nobody thought they were stupid afterwards.
If you feel like you're in danger of giving this talk at the beginning, it might be best to explicitly say at the beginning that you encourage all questions, even if they're naive. I recall going to a talk where the speaker did this twice, lots of people asked questions, and I learned that the axes of a graph meant something different than I first assumed.
On the weirder side of solutions, you could try classically conditioning yourself not to take embarrassment so poorly. If you're a sugar fiend, bring some candies to a talk and eat one for each question you ask.
I also struggle with the fact that sometimes during a talk, I zone out and don't know whether the speaker already answered the question I have, precisely because I was zoned out when they might have answered the question. In this case, I tend not to ask the question, since I don't want to take the time away from other people listening to the talk.
Not an answer to your question, just an extended quote from the late Fields medalist Bill Thurston from his classic essay On proof and progress which seemed relevant:
Mathematicians have developed habits of communication that are often dysfunctional. Organizers of colloquium talks everywhere exhort speakers to explain things in elementary terms. Nonetheless, most of the audience at an average colloquium talk gets little of value from it. Perhaps they are lost within the first 5 minutes, yet sit silently through the remaining 55 minutes. Or perhaps they quickly lose interest because the speaker plunges into technical details without presenting any reason to investigate them. At the end of the talk, the few mathematicians who are close to the field of the speaker ask a question or two to avoid embarrassment.
... Outsiders are amazed at this phenomenon, but within the mathematical community, we dismiss it with shrugs. ...
Mathematical knowledge can be transmitted amazingly fast within a subfield. When a significant theorem is proved, it often (but not always) happens that the solution can be communicated in a matter of minutes from one person to another within the subfield. The same proof would be communicated and generally understood in an hour talk to members of the subfield. It would be the subject of a 15- or 20-page paper, which could be read and understood in a few hours or perhaps days by members of the subfield.
Why is there such a big expansion from the informal discussion to the talk to the paper? One-on-one, people use wide channels of communication that go far beyond formal mathematical language. They use gestures, they draw pictures and diagrams, they make sound effects and use body language. Communication is more likely to be two-way, so that people can concentrate on what needs the most attention. With these channels of communication, they are in a much better position to convey what’s going on, not just in their logical and linguistic facilities, but in their other mental facilities as well.
In talks, people are more inhibited and more formal. Mathematical audiences are often not very good at asking the questions that are on most people’s minds, and speakers often have an unrealistic preset outline that inhibits them from addressing questions even when they are asked. In papers, people are still more formal. Writers translate their ideas into symbols and logic, and readers try to translate back.
Why is there such a discrepancy between communication within a subfield and communication outside of subfields, not to mention communication outside mathematics?
Mathematics in some sense has a common language: a language of symbols, technical definitions, computations, and logic. This language efficiently conveys some, but not all, modes of mathematical thinking. Mathematicians learn to translate certain things almost unconsciously from one mental mode to the other, so that some statements quickly become clear. Different mathematicians study papers in different ways, but when I read a mathematical paper in a field in which I’m conversant, I concentrate on the thoughts that are between the lines. I might look over several paragraphs or strings of equations and think to myself “Oh yeah, they’re putting in enough rigamarole to carry such-and-such idea.” When the idea is clear, the formal setup is usually unnecessary and redundant—I often feel that I could write it out myself more easily than figuring out what the authors actually wrote. It’s like a new toaster that comes with a 16-page manual. If you already understand toasters and if the toaster looks like previous toasters you’ve encountered, you might just plug it in and see if it works, rather than first reading all the details in the manual.
People familiar with ways of doing things in a subfield recognize various patterns of statements or formulas as idioms or circumlocution for certain concepts or mental images. But to people not already familiar with what’s going on the same patterns are not very illuminating; they are often even misleading. The language is not alive except to those who use it.
Okay, I liked that passage but maybe it wasn't very useful. Ravi Vakil's advice to potential PhD students attending talks seems more useful, especially the last bullet:
- At the end of the talk, you should try to answer the questions: What question(s) is the speaker trying to answer? Why should we care about them? What flavor of results has the speaker proved? Do I have a small example of the phenonenon under discussion? You can even scribble down these questions at the start of the talk, and jot down answers to them during the talk.
- Try to extract three words from the talk (no matter how tangentially related to the subject at hand) that you want to know the definition of. Then after the talk, ask me what they mean. ...
- New version of the previous jot: try the "three things" exercise.
- See if you can get one lesson from the talk (broadly interpreted).
- Try to ask one question at as many seminars as possible, either during the talk, or privately afterwards. The act of trying to formulating an interesting question (for you, not the speaker!) is a worthwhile exercise, and can focus the mind.
In research presentation, I'm always impressed when some of the brightest in the room have humbly asked the researcher to back up and explain something that others might find very basic but that's just a bit outside the questioner's domain. A speaker can tell when he's being asked something out of sincere curiosity. And rather than make me doubt the questioner's ability, it confirms it for me. It shouts confidence.
In groups that know each other well, I've also sometimes used humor to help ask the embarrassing question. Referencing the most-respected person in the room, I've sometimes said, "To help John here better understand (pausing and giving a wink to John), can you go back to slide 2 and explain how you got to step XYZ". It always gets a chuckle. And I get my answer.
I like "Could you repeat that in the same words?" so that people don't try to rephrase their point for no reason.
In addition to daydreaming, sometimes you're just thinking about the first of a series of points that your interlocutor made one after the other (a lot of rationalists talk too fast).
2When someone says that, I always use different words anyway, since its boring to use the same words.
1I don't say, "I just zoned out," but I do often say, "sorry, could you repeat that?" I think people are less likely to take offense to this.
Yeah, this sounds very reasonable. However, in a situation where the speaker won't take offense, I think specifying the reason for why you requested to repeat something could be nice. Sometimes people take "could you repeat this" to mean "could you summarize the last few minutes" or "I didn't understand, could you explain in more detail". Of course, this is a pretty minor cost, and it's better to ask someone to repeat things without saying why than to not ask at all.
Maybe this post should have been named "Attention is all you need"... Jokes aside, I think we have to be reasonable when it comes to how much information a human can digest in one day. All the emails, memes, papers, Youtube videos, chats, blogs, news etc. takes a toll. So if someone zoned out on you, is it perhaps more a sign of genuine fatigue than genuine disinterest.
The flip side of this is that it helps to speak in a way that’s almost repetitive to make sure someone who zoned out can catch back up.
For example, frequently once the subject/object of a sentence is known, people refer to the subject/object with pronouns instead of repeating the subject/object. If someone misses the initial definition, they are immediately lost.
(This also applies somewhat to writing — above, I’m repeating “subject/object” instead of “it”. People also zone out during reading, and this repetition saves them from having to scroll back up and figure out what a pronoun is referencing.)
Using repetitive speech can also cause people to zone out, irritate them, or make them think you're being forgetful.
Repetitive speech and other simplification tactics can also backfire. For example, if you try to oversimplify your presentation so that 'everyone can understand,' not realizing that a small core of fellow experts wanted and could have handled much more detail, while the majority weren't going to follow you (or care) no matter how much you simplified. If people then see you do this (performing pedagogy rather than inter-expert discourse), it can be seen as a misjudgment about the purpose of the event and the desires of the audience.
Repetitive speech has its uses, but it's important to be thoughtful about context, your goals, and the goals of your audience.
N=1 this never happens to me 1-on-1 — I am pretty much always completely engaged in any convo in person. (Not contradicting you in any way.)
Fully agree, depending on context and how open to it the other people involved are. Always acknowledge it in your head - notice that you got distracted and missed something. On work calls (and in-person meetings, and even 1:1 sometimes), I usually don't say it out loud unless it really matters. But then I fully agree to be direct about it - this happens to smart people a lot, and getting good at it is worthwhile.
My solution is to use the voice recorder app on my phone, so I can review any points I missed after the fact, and take notes about where I zoned out with timestamps so that I don't have to review the whole thing. If you have a wristwatch you can use the watch-time rather than recorder-time and synch up later, and it's not very obvious.
Do you do this during conversation or just during lectures? I feel like I should perhaps start doing this in lectures, although I might feel some qualms about recording a speaker without permission.
Just during lectures or work/volunteer organization meetings. I don't tend to zone out much during 1:1 or very small group conversations, and if I do, I'm only inconveniencing one or a few people by asking someone to repeat what they said, who would also be inconvenienced by my not being able to participate in the conversation because I've stopped following, so I just ask for clarification. I find zoning out happens most often when no response is required from me for an extended period of time.
I occasionally do feel a little qualmy, but whenever I have asked the answer has always been yes, and I keep the recordings confidential, reasoning that I do have a level of permission to hear/know the information and the main concern people will have is that it not be shared in ways they didn't anticipate.
I say things along the lines of “Sorry, can you please repeat [that/the last sentence/the last 20 seconds/what you said after (description)]” very often. It feels very natural.
I realized that as a non-native English speaker, sometimes I ask someone to repeat things because I didn’t recognize the word or something, and so maybe in some situations an uncertainty over the reason for asking to repeat things (my hearing vs. zoning out vs. not understanding the point on the first try) helps make it easier to ask, though often I say that I missed what they were saying. I guess, when I sincerely want to understand the person I’m talking to, asking seems respectful and avoiding wasting their time or skipping a point they make.
Occasionally, I’m not too interested in the conversation, and so I’m fine with just continuing to listen even if I missed some points and don’t ask. I think there are also situations when I talk to non-rationalists in settings where I don’t want to show conventional disrespect/impact the person’s status-feelings, and so if I miss a point that doesn’t seem too important, I sometimes end up not asking for conventional social reasons, but it’s very rare and seems hard to fix without shifting the equilibrium in the non-rationalist world.
Interesting! Have you noticed that people repeat more or less than the past 20 seconds when you request that they repeat the past 20 seconds? I feel like I would find that more difficult to accurately measure 20 seconds of conversation than if someone told me to repeat everything I said after <particular talking point>. I don't think the difficult gap is huge, though, and I'm not sure if this is the case for most people.
Summary: Zoning out is difficult to avoid and common, zoning out without admitting it hurts your comprehension, therefore you should admit that you zoned out and ask people to repeat things.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve “zoned out” before. You’ve probably even zoned out when you’re trying to learn something interesting. In fact, I’d bet that you’ve zoned out when listening to someone you respect teaching you something interesting, and that you didn’t admit it, and that this left you with a gap in understanding that you may or may not have filled in later.[1] Perhaps I’m falling for the typical minds fallacy, but I don’t think I am. This happens to me very often,[2] and I think it happens to others, and I think that any community focused on rationality or scholarship or understanding ought to account for this. I doubt we’ll be able to prevent people from zoning out, but I know we can encourage people who are listening to admit when they’ve zoned out and we can encourage people who are speaking to patiently re-iterate the thing they just said without taking offense.
One time I was explaining something to a friend of mine and she said the unthinkable. “Sorry, I zoned out. Could you repeat what you said after first bringing up mitochondria?” I was at first somewhat taken aback, but quickly realized that I’ve been in the same position as her. I repeated myself and took less than a minute to do so. I think her understanding was better than it would have been if she hadn’t simply admitted she zoned out. I’m thankful she did it, since it brought the fact that I could do the same to my awareness. If you’re in the right company, admitting that you’ve zoned out has barely any cost and real benefits.
Zoning out when someone is talking to you is far more common if the things they’re saying are boring or hard to comprehend or otherwise unpleasant. It’s perfectly rational to, as a speaker, take “people are zoning out” as evidence of a poor job. However, if you were unpleasant to listen to, nobody would ask you to repeat yourself. If someone admits to you that they stopped paying attention and asks you to repeat yourself, it doesn't imply any fault of yours. The right thing to do in that situation is to resist the temptation to be offended or annoyed and just go along with it. Of course, there’s always a limit. If someone admits to zoning out twenty times in thirty minutes, perhaps you ought to suggest that they get some sleep. If someone admits to daydreaming for 20 minutes straight while you talked to them, then it's probably time to end the conversation.[3] Even so, most people don’t admit to this even once per week, and most fatal zone-outs are quite short. Telling others that you lost focus is done far less than it should be.
One of my favorite things about the rationality(-adjacent) community is that its members admit when they're wrong. We acknowledge that our knowledge is limited and that our intelligence is only human. We ask what unfamiliar words mean. We don’t try to hide our confusion or ignorance. It's a basic extension of the underlying principle of understanding and compensating for our cognitive shortcomings to also admit that we lost focus while listening, or got distracted by some irresistible thought that floated to the surface, or just needed a moment to let the things we just heard sink in. Paying attention for an extended period of time is actually kinda hard. Honestly, given that we had to sit in beige boxes for several hours a day for most of the year from ages 5-18 while someone preached to us about subjects we already knew, I’m surprised that reflexively zoning out isn’t radically more common. Or, perhaps it is and I’m just not aware of it because nobody admits to zoning out.
Just swallow your pride for one measly second,[4] admit that you stopped paying attention, and say the magic words: “Could you repeat that?”
Often when I only understand the first n minutes of a talk, it's because of a zone-out, and often I attempt to fill in the gaps too late for me to get anything. When there's a chain of reasoning that's supposed to be followed, zoning out can instantly end the game.
One reason I love reading books is that they're perfectly forgiving when I zone out.
This would probably make me mad because I would feel like my time and effort is being wasted, and I don't think I'm typical in this regard. Repeating the past minute feels like a pretty trivial cost, though. Let me know if your views on this are different from mine.
Easier said than done.