(no subject)

[chhotii]

The 3 categories of questions that get asked after talks at a scientific symposium:

1) The nitty-gritty: "What strain of mice did you use in your experiment?"

2) The mildly speculative: "Would you expect to see similar results if you did such an experiment in primates?"

3) The wildly tangential: "What do you think your results on UPR expression in BiP-knockout mice say about the alienation we all feel in modern life?"

Comments

[happyfunpaul.livejournal.com]

Hee hee! There's a fourth category, but you don't see it AFTER talks (only in situations where questions are allowed during talks) and you generally don't see it at conferences at all. That's the "Dave Meyer question," which would be spoken by Dave Meyer specifically. to try to derail a grad student's talk. (Professor Meyer, at the Cognition and Perception Area of the Psychology Department at the University of Michigan, was not the only one who asked those questions, but he was most famous for them.

"Dave Meyer questions" are a mix of really insightful "I-see-a-problem" questions PLUS questions that are fine and CAN be answered but which disrupt the whole flow of a talk to answer. Granted, by the end of grad school, thanks to Dave Meyer questions, we had all been trained very well at How To Think On One's Feet And Not To Have One's Talk Derailed. But it was a nerve-wracking set of experiences, and one post-doc actually quit the field shortly after a talk, apparently because of Dave Meyer questions.