It’s been a while since I posted anything, and there’s a good reason for it: Quantum mechanics. My last post was in a series of three (or more) covering the dissection of a He-Ne laser that is still sitting on my desk at work. That post covered the power supply which is relatively straightforward to discuss even if the reader isn’t an electrical engineer. Ok, well, at least I could show pictures of the dusty old guts of a laser built thirty-plus years ago.
The next post in the series needs to deal with optical gain. And optical gain is based on photon absorption and emission which is in turn based on quantum energy levels in atoms. This isn’t a topic that lends itself to annotated photographs, and it tends to be almost exclusively mathematical in nature. Thinking about how to briefly cover the fundamentals of gain in a laser got me thinking about something else: the so-called Curse of Knowledge.
This is a phrase that may have been coined by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. (Whether they coined the phrase or got it from somewhere else, I don’t know, and it’s irrelevant. It’s a really good book.) The basic idea is that as you understand a particular topic more and more yourself, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain it to someone else. You start to make assumptions about what your audience knows, and these assumptions aren’t necessarily conscious (i.e. you’re glossing over important background material without even realizing you’re doing it).
The remainder of the Heaths’ book covers techniques (under the SUCCESs moniker: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, story) for avoiding the Curse and making your ideas stickier (i.e. to make them memorable to a wider audience). This was also referenced in Gar Reynolds’ book Presentation Zen a copy of which I kept handy recently while putting together an internal presentation on the basics (and history) of imaging technology for my colleagues at Logic.
The presentation seemed to be well-received, and I may have avoided some of the Curse. After the presentation, one engineer thanked me for presenting the information at “[his] level.” He is a software engineer, and while still an engineering discipline filled with highly intelligent people (with a vast knowledge of their own legendary arcana), software engineering is pretty far afield from optical engineering and physics.
Additionally, many people commented on the overall presentation style, which I take to mean, “Thank you for not using the corporate template and reading bullets from the slides for an hour.” I hope more presentations I attend start to follow this lead (which is of course following the lead of Gar Reynolds and others).
I’ve thought about recording the presentation and posting it here, but before I do that I would have to replace several of the images with my own, images from the public domain, or purchased images. Because the presentation was initially for a one-time, internal lunch meeting, I just grabbed a bunch of images from the web in the interest of time. (I know. I’m a terrible person.)
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