You don't claim that, of course, but something of similar intent is implied in this paragraph:
> A few years later I heard a talk by someone who
> was not merely a better speaker than me, but
> a famous speaker. Boy was he good. So I
> decided I'd pay close attention to what he
> said, to learn how he did it. After about ten
> sentences I found myself thinking "I don't
> want to be a good speaker."
A charitable reading of this section is "I've observed a correlation between vacuousness and effective rhetoric." What I (and presumably others) gathered is "Clarity of thought and rhetoric ability, pick one." Both seem either misguided or wrong.
I'll go ahead and assume that you're simply offering the passage as an anecdote. In that case, however, you're doing what you condemn -- rhetorics over conceptual purity and ideas. Can you elaborate a little?
Actually, a far more direct "charitable reading" of that is:
A. regardless of how good someone is at public speaking, it is largely independent of their writing skill.
An additional possible inference from the article is:
B. they may/should find it significantly more efficient to impart those or even more ideas in writing than in speech. That is, some aspect of writing itself is simply more efficient than speech for transfer of idea information.
However, I do agree that pg's article does seem to gloss over,
1. the binding effect of emotion to ideas. Emotion is far easier to impart and create via public speaking due to intonation, pauses, story-telling, comedy, body language etc (not even going to add side channels like slides, though they are likely important). Several studies have shown that, for example, comedy is an extremely strong means to reinforce the transfer of new information or complex ideas due to the body's physical and biochemical response.
2. audience interaction does not have to be negative or neutral, but can often reveal how much is new information or what those participants value the most.
Of course, ultimately, to expect pg to cover even a fraction of the full dynamics of public speech and language writing in one blog article maybe is asking a little too much :)
I don't see how you think that passage implies "people who speak [well] cannot think." All I'm saying is that speaking well depends little on having good ideas. That doesn't imply people who speak well can't have good ideas, just that they don't need to.
Playing soccer well depends little on having good ideas. Is someone who says that saying "clarity of thought or soccer ability, pick one?"
Now you're putting a spin on that passage that's simply not in the text. Quit the contrary: it's the opposite of what your essay seems to be suggesting.
> "I don't want to be a good speaker."
Why would you think that if rhetoric ability and good ideas are fully orthogonal? It'd amount to "The dude on stage is a brilliant speaker, which has nothing to do with inventiveness and clarity of thought, so I don't want to be a brilliant speaker." Nonsense. A much more reasonable interpretation is:
a) The guy on stage doesn't have any ideas and is a brilliant speaker.
b) Flashiness appears to preclude good ideas, or is at odds with it.
c) Hence, I don't want to be a good speaker.
If I'm still getting it wrong, please explain what the anecdote means -- especially given that, apparently, your essays contain only exactly what you intend them to contain.
I think you have a point that "I don't want to be a good speaker" implies something negative about being a good speaker. In context it can be understood as being a good speaker is in opposition to the goal of having better ideas. Perhaps a less controversial phrasing would be "I don't want to put forth the effort towards becoming a good speaker".
However, a more in depth reading is that being a good speaker is in opposition to the process of improving one's ideas. His example of being captivated by a good speaker, but on further reflection realizing how little content was conveyed, is a case-in-point. You lose the important signal of audience engagement with your ideas if you dazzle them through charisma. Without charisma to charm your audience, all you have left is whether your audience was engaged through the quality of your ideas. So in this sense being a good speaker is in fact in opposition to developing good ideas--you're losing meaningful signal regarding their quality.
You're right; if I wanted to be sure I couldn't be misinterpreted, I could have put it in something like the way you suggest. But I felt like a reasonably intelligent person with no axe to grind would understand what I meant. You always face this tradeoff in writing. If you hedge every statement so carefully that it couldn't be used by someone determined to misrepresent you, you end up with something that resembles a statement by a corporate PR department.
As a reasonably intelligent reader with no axe to grind (and who, on the contrary, really enjoys reading your essays), I too was under the impression (and had no reason to question it until seeing your comment) that you were arguing that writing is an objectively better medium for conveying what I'll call ponderable information (as opposed to information that would obviously be best transmitted through spoken word, such as "get me a decaf latte with two sugars" or "there's a bear behind you") than speaking is, and that being a good writer is more important (or superior in other ways besides importance) than being a good speaker. If the latter was not your intent, please don't kill these four messengers and assume we're just bad at reading. We're simply telling you that that's how your essay comes across, at least to some readers.
This set of posts actually serves as an interesting counterargument to what I interpreted your thesis to be. As I understood it, you feel that writing gives you more time to organize your thoughts, facilitating accuracy and depth more than speaking does. Good speaking, on the other hand, or at least the kind of "good speaking" that refers to being good at captivating an audience, necessarily involves ad-libbing a lot of the details, which means you can't expect to come up with sentences that are as well worded (which usually means as precise or concise) as those you would have delivered in writing. Therefore, writing is the superior medium for delivering information. Period. Speaking is better for things like letting people see you in person (if you're famous) or sometimes better for inspiring people to take action, which you suggest are themselves important, but that speaking is inherently worse than writing for the purpose of conveying information. Am I correct so far? I apparently incorrectly extrapolated that you felt that it's intellectually superior to be a good writer than a good speaker.
Now what was I talking about this discussion serving as a counterexample to your argument? Well, first of all, I agree with everything I think you said up until the conclusion that writing is always more effective than speaking for communicating information. As we saw from this misunderstanding, the written word doesn't provide the author with the live audience feedback that the spoken word does. If multiple readers are confused, the author has no recourse because he does not know that they are confused. Thankfully they can now post comments on the Internet. :) A good speaker, on the other hand, is so in tune with his audience that he knows when they are confused or when his tone seemed misinterpreted, and he can adapt on the spot, providing more examples or changing the inflection of his voice to clarify his tone. George Carlin, one of my favorite comics, was excellent at crafting his routines, but from what I've heard from people who saw him live, was atrocious at interacting with the audience because his written style didn't allow him to deviate from his script. Nevertheless, this afforded him the planning and precision of the written word, and it worked great for him. In fields besides comedy, the written word's advantages naturally win out over the spoken word more frequently, but don't discount good speaking as an effective way to deliver information. Great speakers sometimes get an audience to understand actual content (I've seen multiple speeches were Bill Clinton did that, as well as several TED talks that did) as or more effectively than great writers do.
The point was that before I watched this speaker in action, I still retained some of my naive belief that being a good speaker depended a lot on having good ideas. So when observing the super-duper speaker in real time confirmed what I'd noticed after the fact about the pretty-good speaker at the conference, I was more sure of it.
"Playing soccer well depends little on having good ideas."
This statement seems to me to be profoundly wrong.
Perhaps some ways of "playing soccer well" depend little on having good ideas. But soccer is a very complex game: the configuration space of the players on the field is ~2*11 dimensional per team (add the z dimension for jumping and the ball in the air and you see that the total coordinate and momentum space is even vaster than 44 dimensions). Good teams are capable of organizing into configurations on the fly which are more likely to lead to goal than other configurations, and they can do this in response to the configuration of the opposing team. The Spanish team that won the most recent World Cup is a great example of 11 players who self-organize into optimal configurations in real-time.
You might argue that some players can use pure athleticism to navigate through the 44+ dimensional space and score goals. Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona are great examples: see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYet49BToLw. They share a unique build which is suited to their style of soccer playing. They are not tall, have a low center of gravity, they can accelerate and pivot very quickly, and still they have a high top speed. That allows them to make runs like those "Goals of the Century" in the linked video in which they single-handedly beat the opposing team to a score.
However I would still hesitate to say that Messi and Maradona don't need good ideas to make those runs. Exactly where they choose to run probably depends strongly on where the defenders are relative to the ball-carrier's position. Also how fast they choose to run at any moment can depend on how fast those defenders are moving--hence the utility of pivot moves. Watch Messi beat the defender that comes at him from behind at 36-37 seconds, shown from another angle at 48-49 seconds; Messi gives the illusion that he has eyes in the back of his head. But really he has played soccer so much that he can take one glace around the field and calculate which defenders can reach his position and how fast they must be moving and in what direction in order to do so. This is not a trivial calculation to do at the rapid speed required by the game.
One of my favorite positions to play is Center Midfield. This midfielder often has more control than any other player to influence to configuration space of his team. One of my favorite players to watch do this was the brilliant Zinedine Zidane. He was a technically gifted footballer, but that's a relatively small part of why I loved watching him. The main reason is because of his perspicacity and decision-making skills. It is not just as if he has eyes in the back of his head; it is as if he can see the game as we spectators see it, with a birds-eye view. His brain is closer some kind of soccer video game AI that can calculate the optimal place to put the ball based on current configuration of the 22 players.
One of my favorite matches was Zidane vs. Brazil in 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvYlvkWpPy4. Check out what Zidane does at 2:05-2:20. France is already up (on a Zidane assisted goal), so they do not need to score a goal. Still they would rather keep play near the opposing team's goal for the chance to score again and to decrease the likelihood of Brazil equalizing. So Zidane is basically playing keep away for the win. At 2:14 Zidane makes a hand gesture, directing a teammate into the space to his right. Brazil players respond, moving towards the space. Then he makes a pass in the completely opposite direction, which is probably what he planned to do all along. Possession is maintained by France and the clock ticks closer towards their victory.
I think he meant it as a quick example and wasn't really an indictment of soccer players - nevertheless your obvious passion and understanding of the game is appreciated :)
Your last paragraph about Zidane is interesting. Keeping possession is a bigger tactical advantage than many people previously thought. Imagine an entire team playing keep-away for the win, patiently building up to goals confident they will get them, and you essentially have Barcelona: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6A_K8oWqfk
Zidane was more of an attacking midfielder, which makes his contributions all the more obvious, but even Zidane himself knew that the core of a great team was as far back as the often unheralded position of defensive midfield. When his club Real Madrid sold Claude Makelele and bought David Beckham, Zidane remarked, "Why put another layer of gold paint on the Bentley when you are losing the entire engine?"
Despite the presence of more heralded players like Xavi, Iniesta, and Messi, Busquets is likewise the tactical centerpiece of Barcelona, almost purely due to his intelligence on the pitch. In defense, he drops back and positions himself to intercept passes rather than challenging for the ball, and once he has it he almost always makes the right decision where to put it next. And when Barcelona have possession, he pushes forward to form a triangle with the rest of the midfield, providing an open outlet to maintain possession and recycle it. If you chart out the passes Barcelona make in a typical match, there's usually a very heavy triangle between Xavi, Iniesta, and Busquets.
The most interesting part of Barcelona's tactic, though, is the way they seem to push even more players into the midfield. Their notional striker is Messi, but in his "false nine" role he plays closer to attacking midfield. Likewise, Barcelona's defenders push forward and hold a very high line. Defensive midfielders like Mascherano and even Busquets have been repurposed to play as central defenders, while Pique can make effective runs forward. Right-back Dani Alves usually rushes forward to play as a winger.
The interesting thing about Barcelona's style of play is that, while it's obviously a tactic well suited for a team full of good passers who have played with each other mostly since childhood, it can be surprisingly effective for other teams. Swansea have used it very effectively in the Premier League this season, while Borussia Mönchengladbach have gone from near-relegation to the Champions League places: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAx9kYx8qo4
I'll go ahead and assume that you're simply offering the passage as an anecdote. In that case, however, you're doing what you condemn -- rhetorics over conceptual purity and ideas. Can you elaborate a little?