Personally as someone who learns best by the Socratic method I like my positions tested and sharpened in dialogue and tell people that before I begin. Plus I do get bored with the sound of my own voice after a while.

But there have been a few times where I’ve said “so I can keep my train of thought and outline the whole case, can we defer any questions until the end of the presentation please?”. IME people will respect explicitly stated preferences. Certainly I do.

So the kind of exchange that Brad is holding up is an ideal that is almost never reached in mainstream economics.

Being a programmer, a description of deep social cluelessness from someone in a math-heavy discipline makes me immediately think of mild autism. This is a hot topic in the computer world these days, with a growing realization that it may be more common among programmers than in the general population.

Interestingly, programming is another field which has long harbored a tendency to totally ignore social factors. I think the assertions that the majority of programmers working for industry are autistic are overblown, but I think the proportion is higher in academia, and that tends to encourage the habit among computer science graduates. (In fact, there are people who argue that social awareness is actually an impediment to being a good programmer!)

Actually, this last year I’ve been a participant in a “working seminar”, where as a group we’ve been trying to understand a mutually new area. It’s become a bit of a joke that I (and a more senior person) ask a ridiculous number of questions, sometimes slightly derailing the original talk. But a joke to the point of having to really tone it down when we invited other people in, as it was so unusual. I would defend my behaviour (mostly) by saying that it was a working seminar, and if I wasn’t understanding something, then what was the point?

Indeed, I wish people asked more questions in seminar talks: often the speaker can just aim too high, and loose everyone in the room, and then we all spend the next 40 minutes being bored. But I’ve always thought that the problem in Math is that the learning curve can be really steep. If we’ve invited speaker X, and they are currently working in subfield Y, then it’s not particularly fair to effectively ask them to give an introduction to Y (with little or no hope of hence explaining their own contribution) just because we don’t know much about it (as why did we invite them in the first place?)

On the other hand, at large conferences (as opposed to department talks or colloquia), the format that Doctor Science discusses is the norm: the talk is uninterrupted until the end.

In none of the fields in which I have gone to hear presentations has anybody ever read from a paper aloud. I can’t imagine sitting through something like that.

I think the presentations I go to are (by comparison to either math or econ) highly data- or text-driven. You present thesis, methodology, historical data or experimental results or critical analysis, then summarize and say what’s next. You have to see how the whole thing holds together first, then poke holes.

So is this an accurate summary?

1. Lots of economists are inexcusably rude arseholes.
2. There is a culture among economists of tolerating and rationalising such rudeness.
3. The same is not true of of many (most?) other categories of academics.
[4. The above are brute facts, or at any rate no explanation for them is likely to be of interest in this context.]

This makes a lot of sense. I agree that presenters are often in a position to ask not to be interrupted or to defer responding to a question. In this particular case, it’s a bit less obvious since it concerned a job candidate who may not have known that the person was not a department member (nor would he necessarily know the dept norms, although I think they tend to be fairly uniform across sociology depts).

Also, there are important categories of questions other than (a)-(e) above. There are the variants of (a) and (b) where the information is not on the next slide, or anywhere else in the talk.
There is (d) where the disagreement with that model is the key point that makes the question interesting. There are
(f) Your example doesn’t seem to satisfy conditions (ii), (vi), or (ix) of your proof, are we misunderstanding you?
(g) Is there any situation where Assumption A would be a reasonable approximation or is this meant to be a toy problem? [not in the pejorative sense, but in the sense of a tractable simplification – a ‘spherical cow’]

That is, there are a lot of potential questions that are for clarification in the sense of clarifying whether we have misunderstood you or just disagree with you. Any given question of this sort may be indistinguishable from assholery, but as a collection it should be possible to tell the difference—and a department or other seminar community should make sure that it understands the difference. I also agree with John Quiggin that the speaker’s preferences are important, and these should be elicited and in typical circumstances respected.

It’s also possible that in some disciplines it is much less likely that there will be useful questions. Perhaps in philosophy the ‘chunk size’ of arguments is larger and it is harder to tell whether an issue will be peripheral or important before the end. Perhaps in some lab disciplines there isn’t any point asking questions until after all the experimental results are presented, by which time you might as well wait until the end.

In most areas of life, a meeting will naturally drift into a two-person conversation (usually the leader and one other person), unless the leader makes an effort to keep it on track. A meeting can spend 90% of the time on one clearly minor issue, if the leader allows it. And 90% of the time, that one other person is somebody who’s deeply in love with the sound of their own voice.

So some of this may be due to the speaker not realizing that he/she is a meeting leader, and can & should fee free to defer questions, or to shut down lines of questioning.

At least in my (History) department, the normal practice is to circulate a paper that may or may not be in progress, then give a presentation which is not reading the paper (I was explicitly told by my adviser in my first research seminar to never, never read your paper), and then there’s a lively discussion afterward.

I think this does condition interruption as rudeness in several ways. First, since the presentation isn’t the paper, it’s not a matter of “no value added;” the presenter is putting forward a new formulation of their ideas. Second, since history is very much about narrative, even when a paper is very analytical, it wouldn’t make sense to start throwing up questions when you haven’t yet heard the full account. Third, given that everyone expects a give-and-take AFTER, it would be seen as jumping the queue.

At least in the departments I’ve been in, it’s more or less considered a duty to ask questions, as a way of showing interest and helping the speaker gauge how well they are getting their point across (as well as engaging better with the material and therefore learning more, of course). If everyone stops asking questions, they’re sending the message that they’ve stopped caring and have decided to spend the rest of the seminar thinking about something else. This sometimes happens, but it’s embarrassing for the speaker.

Answering frequent questions is considered one of the speaker’s duties. In fact, this is the whole point of the talk: if it weren’t going to be highly interactive, we could all just read a written version instead. From this perspective, discouraging questions, or even asking for them to be held until the end, is unspeakably rude. It indicates that the speaker is a prima donna who is more interested in giving a performance than in actually connecting with the audience.

From this perspective, I can sympathize with the economist in the sociology talk. Perhaps his thought processes went like this: “Gee, nobody else is asking questions. I guess they think the talk’s a total disaster, but I actually like it, so I’ll be sure to speak up so the speaker recognizes that at least one audience member cares. Hmm, the rest of the audience seems impatient. They must want the talk to end as quickly as possible (and resent my wasting time engaging with an obviously incompetent speaker), but I still think it would be rude to let the speaker think I’ve grown bored.”