Favorite Quotes
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - HL Mencken
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"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius
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"The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease" - Sir William Osler
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" The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power." - Bob Sutton
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"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them - well, I have others." - Groucho Marx
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them" - Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." - Charles Mingus
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"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein
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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around." - Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
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"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." - Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a
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"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." - Thomas Sowell
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"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." - HL Mencken
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"If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow
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"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
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"There are no facts, only interpretations." - Nietzsche
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"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
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"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ====
Nov - 15
Dec - 19
Jan - 21
Feb - 8
Mar -
The curse of knowledge and presentations
18 Sep2009
I am working on one of my talks for the Academic Hospitalist Academy – didactic talks. Constructing a talk always take time – especially if you want to give a good talk. I have probably already spent 30 hours considering the topics in this talk. I have read several books and read my blog posts.
Today I was considering the curse of knowledge and stumbled upon this brilliant quote -
In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I attend too many presentations that bore the heck out of me. Now I will admit to a low boredom threshold. 
I recall the Nirvana song – Smells Like Teen Spirit with the refrain seen on the T-shirt.
One major factor in boredom is unnecessary complexity.
Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.
JFK dodged the Curse [with “put a man on the moon in a decade”]. If he’d been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon walk back fifteen years.
As I design this talk, and hopefully every talk, I strive towards shedding the curse of knowledge and speaking clear English. Knowing too much about a subject makes it more difficult to develop a simple sticky message. Yet, for most talks, those messages are the pay dirt. When I talk about sore throats I clearly have read too many articles and spent too many hours contemplating pharyngitis. Thus, I have to work even harder to strip away the cool fleshy nuance and present the important skeleton. I have to remind myself what the big teaching points are – and limit the number of points that I try to convey.
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter. – Blaise Pascal
When presenting, you must take the time to make your teaching points accessible – and that requires simplicity.
Since I write this while preparing my presentation about presentations, I would appreciate your thoughts about these thoughts. If I am off base – challenge me – if am spot on – please leave a brief spot on comment.
Thanks
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