Thread by @alz_zyd_

Random presentation tip for econ/finance PhD students, esp. for technical/theory ish stuff:

When I first started presenting, I assumed a distribution of audience expertise that looked like this. Roughly normally distributed, most people know something about your topic matter

After a while I significantly changed my strategy, instead assuming a distribution that looks like this. Bimodal: some people know basically nothing about your topic, and some people know the topic as well as or better than you do

What's the difference? When you optimize for the first distribution, you tend to basically present to the hypothetical median audience member. This guy should know something about search models, right? So I'll cover the basic technical intuitions of search models

Basically going at the pace of a PhD second year class, then the median listener will be able to figure out how search models work, and follow my model and talk at a technical level! This seems like a reasonable train of thought, but IMO I now think it's a mistake

The issue with this strategy is you are teaching to the median person, but in the bimodal distribution, there is very little mass at the median! You end up going too slowly for the experts on the right, who know everything you're saying about the basics and thus fall asleep

And the non-experts have remembered sufficiently little about the basics of search models (and care sufficiently little) that you don't end up teaching them anything either. So, by teaching to the median, you lose on both sides.

With the bimodal distribution, IMO the right strategy is to make clear which parts of the talk are designed for who. Make intro, motivation, takeaways clear enough that the non-experts on the left can get something from the paper even if they don't know or care about the tech

Then, when you transition to the technical parts, you can talk at a level assuming people basically know the basic models/results in the field, allowing you to go much faster. The non-experts will fall asleep in this part, but this is by design!

Another benefit of thinking of a talk this way - as having pretty clearly delineated segments designed for everyone, vs segments designed for experts - is that it leads you to arrange the talk such that there are few and sharp transitions between the two regimes

Write a clear intro + takeaways. Then jump into the tech stuff and just talk at a pretty fast-paced level for the experts. Then when you get to takeaways, joke around something like "so I put you to sleep with all the math, now I'm doing the takeaways so you can wake up"

IMO, the "sharp transition" structure works better than a "slow gradual ramping up of difficulty" structure. Also, thinking about it this way makes clear you should structure the talk in a way that there are _few_ transitions between the expert and non-expert pieces

Which IMO also helps talk structure.

Caveats:
- Probably applies more to technical/theory ish fields, potentially less a concern for empirical work, though I present less empirical work so unsure
- YMMV, many different effective ways to present, just my $0.02

Oh and, I think I learned this from @lanierbenkard, when I was presenting my JMP and trying to explain multi-unit auction models math to the audience in my talk. I did a pretty good job with it I think! And he was like yeah don't do that, and told me the bimodal theory basically