Clueless? Rude? Neither? Both?

It does seem rude to me, at least insofar as we want to say not picking up on the local norms (or trying to do so) is rude. My impression is that academics of all sorts often have a dangerous lacks of self-awareness, though, so this doesn’t surprise me very much. At my now-former department we always have a moderator for talks. Usually this role consists in introducing the speaker, saying when it’s time for a break or the reception, and keeping the list for questions if the speaker doesn’t want to do that herself. In such a case it would be the moderator’s job to tell the person interrupting to not do so, hopefully after the first case, but at least after the second.

An economist (who was on the hiring committee) did this at a job talk I gave (in Philosophy) many years ago (entry level). It was extremely difficult to deal with. After the third interruption, the department chair very coolly stopped proceedings and told him to stop.

The department chair has the respo0nsibility to prevent this happening, and in the case you describe, said chair failed in an important responsibility.

In non-interrupting cultures, is interrupting to clarify some confusion acceptable? Or does one have to sit through the entire talk confused if one doesn’t follow something early on? (Of course, if I were sitting in a talk in a different discipline where confusions would have to be clarified frequently, I wouldn’t interrupt and waste everyone else’s time just to educate myself.)

In philosophy, you are expected to sit through 60 minutes of reading in a monotone without interrupting, no matter how opaque or confused, or confusing, the talk.

Normally, in a department colloquium, at most 25% of the audience are up to speed with the subfield. One might think the norms are therefore a bit odd…

I do have one colleague who appears to sleep through most of every talk and then, very often, asks a penetrating question the formulation of which seems to rely on having understood the whole gist of the talk, as well of the details of some central part of the argument.

I did my grad school in UW-Madison econ. During my time there, there is only one of our faculty members that I know of who regularly attends seminars in other social science departments. But he was quite aware of seminar cultures in other departments, and does not really stick out much. The faculty members who would have been clueless in such environment normally don’t find anything in sociology or poli sci to their liking.

I’ve seen an ancient judge do the same thing — visibly appear to nod off, and then emerge from what looks like a refreshing nap with a question that would have required him to have been on top of everything said while he had his eyes closed.

Having been trained in one of the toughest of econ schools, Australian National Uni in the 1970s, I’ve been through this from just about every angle: speaker, chair, audience member, with some memorable disasters as both speaker and chair as well as watched from the audience (I hope I haven’t actually caused any, but cluelessness is in the eye of the beholder).

My current practice, consistent with economics norms, but usually also with completing the presentation in the allotted time

As speaker I announce in advance “Happy to take questions as I go, but keep the option of deferring them to the end”

As chair, I check the preferences of the speaker, and enforce them

As audience member, I tend to ask quite a few questions, but try to stick to clarification until we’ve reached the end of the paper.

Not every non-conformity amounts to rudeness. The fact that no one spoke up (in a room full of sociologists, no less) suggests a lack of confidence in the social norm. We’ve all been in situations where someone is doing something different from the way it’s “supposed” to be done, but we’re not sure if what’s being violated is a social rule or just a personal preference.
— she’s having a loud cell phone conversation in a small restaurant.
— he’s smoking amid a crowd of people at an outdoor concert.
— she’s singing to herself in the cubicle next to yours.
— he’s facing the wrong way on the elevator.
— Or to use a more personal example, in the subway system here in Washington, the unwritten rule for riding the escalator is “walk to the left, stand to the right.” Tourists don’t know this at first, so they’ll block the left side, and commuters behind them will sigh and roll their eyes. Only the boldest commuters, though, will actually bark at them to move.

Basically, in Eszter’s example and other such situations, everyone is wondering: “If I speak up, will the group agree that he is being rude or will it think that I am being uptight?” Note that the person who finally shushed the questioner was someone senior; i.e., someone who might reasonably expect his or her preferences to be adopted, or at least respected, by the group.

I agree with dsquared here (and in the philosophy case, too), with the addendum that rudeness can be linked to disciplinary culture insofar as there’s a tendency within the field to believe that acting like a boor is a reliable signal of brilliance or at least high seriousness. There’s no necessary connection between these two things, of course. The undersocialization/lack of social graces line of argument is pretty bogus too, because the eccentricity of high-powered intellectuals has in various times and places taken myriad forms, including overly-cultivated politeness, genial vagueness, or the tendency to be rather meek and conflict-averse. The “I act like this because I just don’t tolerate self-indulgent bullshit” line is more often than not just its own form of self-indulgent bullshit.

Polisci is an interesting laboratory – in International Relations, Comparative, Theory, and (to a lesser degree) American Politics talks follow the sociologist model – questions just for clarification.
But for Political Methodology (i.e. econometrics, sometimes game theory) – the norms are similar (if slightly less aggressive) than economists.
At our political methods talks and job talks it is not uncommon for the chair to announce that we “follow the economics model” for the talk – and so the same audience that may have patiently sat through 60mins of a job talk the day before will be happily jumping in at slide 3…

I think economists are fully aware of the social norms and take an odd pride in them – Levitt has given that as one example of how irreverent and independent economists are. So if an economists does that in a different social setting that’s just a sign that he is an arrogant asshole who thinks he’s better than the rest.
Isn’t Larry Summers supposed to have remarked that he has generally found that economist tend to be smarter than political scientists, who in turn are smarter than sociologists? I think that’s pretty typical.

Whoops, Sebastian’s comment I missed somehow.

I’m sympathetic – very sympathetic – to the point being made in the post. So often the economists’ interruptions are attention seeking and an invitation to a cleverness competition which is actually a distraction to the giver of the paper developing their point. But I’m a bit dismayed to see this written in terms of general manners and norms. If they’re the right kinds of questions – sympathetic, but seeking clarification of some point – then they can save a lot of time and improve the experience of all concerned. And ditto others’ comments on when a paper is being read.

My own experience agrees with Hidari’s: lots of people ask difficult and sometimes confronting questions, but the medicos are most likely to hijack a paper. As a supposed ‘ethicist’, I am often invited to give presentations at medical venues. Suppose half an hour is alloted to me: this may consist of five minutes of me, and 25 minutes of medicos telling me that I don’t understand philosophy as deeply as they do.

Dsquared, it is undoubtedly true that disciplinary norms like those prevailing in philosophy can serve as a mask for mere rudeness (Fodor, anyone?) But the mask is transparent; it’s not like the norm serves to inculcate the rudeness in most.

I came through from the parallel discussion on Brad deLong’s place.
I’m sympathetic to the idea expressed by Nick Gruen and Kieran Healey (#24 and #25) that interruptions can be constructive and add to the understanding of the paper for both presenter and listener. But in my experience, they almost never are. The incessant interrupter is much less likely to be living up to that ideal than the person that poses one or two pointed questions, which usually happens in the second half of the presentation or in the discussion/Q&A at the end.
Here are some simple tests:
1. Is the answer to the question on the next slide or two? (or in the paper)
2. Does the presenter get the space to answer the question, or is the answer interrupted as well?
3. When the presenter does get a chance to provide the answer, does the questioner continue to hold to their hypothesis or point of view even though they have no counter-evidence or argument to the presenter’s case?
4. Does the interrupter respond adequately to the presenter’s requests to defer questions to allow him or her to move on to the rest of the presentation?

If the answer to at least two of these is “yes”, it’s not constructive interrogation of the paper, it’s a jerk who prefers the sound of his own voice to the possibility of learning something new.

It’s strange that so much of the differing norms between disciplines gets explained by simple interdisciplinary chauvinism, such as “economists are arrogant bastards” or “sociologists are wishy washy people that don’t like their logic challenged”. It’s a rather inane way of looking at things, especially since I think alot can be explained by differences in what is being studied and how cases are made.

It’s been pointed out above that the economics style of interruption is also present in mathematics, political science etc. Surely this suggests something.

Compared to sociology and other social sciences or history, economics is better (but perhaps not best) served by logic chains present in maths and elsewhere…or at least that’s they way it is practiced. If you have a logic chain with “if A, then B, then C”, it makes alot of sense to interrupt at A if B and C are contingent on it. If the case relies on each slide, each slide must be challenged if the case is to stand.

It’s not practical to do this in sociology or other disciplines. This is due to the nature of that which is being studied rather than the capacity of those studying it. A case has to be made with A, B, C, D, E, F and G all suggest H, taken together H seems a reasonable conclusion. It isn’t contingent on any of the first seven points in isolation, so a challenge within talk won’t serve discussion much.

Of course, maybe it’s an economics bias to see culture as the endogenous product of practical factors rather than an exogenous force of destiny….

rudeness and bullying of a kind that has been driven out of lots of other workplaces.

Has it?

So I come from a seminar culture (math) where interrupting the speaker with questions throughout the talk is the norm, and not considered aggressive. When I’m giving a math seminar and only one person is asking questions, I’m pretty thankful that person’s there

Just an anecdote about this. A few years ago, a math PhD. student from Harvard gave a talk at the PhD. student seminar in Paris. As usual (for the latter), nobody asked any question, neither during the talk nor after. After the talk, he came and asked me if he had done anything wrong, because he was surprised, to put it mildly, about how non-adversarial the audience was.

Let me expand on JSE’s comments about math talks:

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.”

“I guess if almost none of the questions were types a-d and almost all of them were type e, and you didn’t talk about it later but had the discussion right there, that would be interesting… for the presenter and the one person who asked the good question.”

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.

Adapting to the local norms is a good idea, but can be difficult when they are normative but not descriptive. In my experience, statistics seminar speakers and audiences are in favor of having more questions than they usually get — audiences tend to just sit there. I’ve been thinking about this because I have been on sabbatical and therefore have been in the audience in unfamiliar locations. I was reassured by the fact that I received (unprompted) favorable comments on the fact that I asked questions, even though most of the locals didn’t.

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.

dsquared @15: the fact that lots of economists do behave this way isn’t due to a “culture” or anything that needs to have allowances made for it – it’s just rudeness, plus the fact that academic economists have developed a culture of allowing assholes to get away with it. It’s not like different countries having different concepts of personal space at all – it’s just a culture of making the excuse of “robust intellectual inquiry” for simple rudeness.

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.]

Wow. I didn’t realize there were academic cultures where you *could* interrupt for anything other than “I think this is really slide 4”. My experience is with papers in: various biological sciences, history of science, history of medicine, popular culture studies, media theory, computer-mediated communications, probably others. In all of these, the presenter is expected to get all the way to the end, then have time for questions — but the presentations are supposed to be 15-20 minutes or less, short enough for the audience to hold things in their heads.

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.

I thought I’d add a comment about mathematics talks: I would agree with #34 and say that it varies a lot between places. At my UK university, it’s pretty rare to interrupt a speaker, and then usually only to ask a basic, clarifying question (as in to question if that’s a “t” or a “b” on the board). Analytic questions almost always wait until the end (and even then, we tend to be terribly polite).

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 #23: I’m an economist too, but in Environmental economics where the culture is less boorish ad their is a higher proportion of women, and we tend to come out of the lower status land grant programs. In environmental I find the interrupting question style great for the reason’s Brad mentions-but in general we are much nicer and genuinely trying to help the author or gently suggest they are on the wrong path. In the general economics culture, like the infamous MIT/Harvard labor public ones, the seminar culture just allows people to behave like d(*&(* and as an author you learn very little from those seminars. Really there is no point in presenting to a bunch of people whose only goal is to prove they are smarter than you (In most cases I am fully aware that they are smarter-that is why I want their opinion.)

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

as a professor in an engineering discipline, what we usually do is for the person doing the introduction to define the rules for asking questions at the start of the talk. The rules differ depending upon the type of talk. For instance, interrupting during a 15-20 minute conference talk is generally not done, but during a half an hour or hour long talk, questions during the talk are encouraged.