I flew to Denver, saw some people, went to my session and gave my talk, and flew back. The talk was fun, and in preparing it I had some general thoughts on presentations:

– You don’t have to try to impress the audience; just explain what you did. (Hal Stern gave me that advice 20 years ago, and it’s still good.)

– When writing articles, I always tell people not to include anything that you don’t want people to read. For example, don’t display a table full of numbers if you’re not expecting to convey some information with each number. Anyway, when preparing my talk, I realized that I hadn’t been following my own advice! I went back and looked at each slide and removed lots of material that I couldn’t really expect people to be looking at.

– You can’t optimize to every audience. In my talk, I chose to make the big picture clear, but that meant less detail on our data and our models. Sometimes I’ve seen the advice to start broad and then “drill down” to some interesting detail, but in practice you still have to make some choices. It’s ok to give a detailed, technical talk, but then you have to accept that people won’t be getting the big picture. If it’s going to be technical, get into it right away so you’ll have time to explain things.

– Plan to end 5 minutes early. Put extra stuff you need at the end of the presentation (after the slide you’ll end with), then you can use it to answer questions if need be.

After the talk, I rode to the airport in a cab with a statistician who said his dad is a political scientist. Who? Steven Rhoads. That’s the guy who wrote “The Economist’s View of the World”? Yeah. Wow–I love that book. And then on the flight back, the lady sitting next to me took a look at Red State, Blue State, and said she was going to buy a copy for her son, who’s an economics student. That was really cool–she’ll either buy the book, which is great, or she was just being polite, which isn’t so bad either.