Trevor Burnham

I had a grotesquely familiar expe­ri­ence in an econ class today: The prof drew up a simple example of a simple concept, yet no one—myself included—understood it. Why? Multiple incon­sis­ten­cies. A variable name meant one thing in the premises, and some­thing else in the con­clu­sion; a vector was used inter­change­ably with its distance; the matrix dimen­sions didn’t match up. Indi­vid­u­ally, each of these small errors could have been caught and cor­rected. But taken as a whole, they destroyed every trace of coher­ence. As a result, half the lecture was spent with the frazzled pro­fes­sor trying to clarify things, only to confuse the audience further, to the point that students were yelling, “Enough! Forget it! Let’s move on!” These are PhD-​​level students at one of the top econ programs in the world. Yet the sit­u­a­tion was so ago­niz­ing that it drove them to pan­de­mo­nium.

When will people learn? If you’re address­ing an audience, it is your moral imper­a­tive not to waste their time. In par­tic­u­lar, there are three goals you must pursue:

1. Accuracy: Check your facts, and be rigorous
2. Clarity: Address points of possible confusion
3. Density: Convey as much infor­ma­tion as you can in as little time as possible

This doesn’t just go for math­e­mat­i­cal lectures. It goes for any inter­ac­tion with your fellow human beings, with the imper­a­tive growing stronger in pro­por­tion to the size of your audience. No matter how much you value your time, if you’re giving a talk that hundreds will attend or writing a book that thou­sands will read, you owe them your most strin­gent efforts. Think about it numer­i­cally: If you save 3,600 people one second each, you’ve just saved someone an hour.

The desire not to waste other people’s time has always been one of my defining traits. Not that I always succeed, but at least I’m embar­rassed when I fail. Some­times I worry that this men­tal­ity is not widely shared.

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