Why is the ability to do good science orthogonal to the ability to give a good presentation? I would think intelligence and creativity would be common attributes to both skills. 30 years of watching science seminars makes me think the two skills are independent of each other.
@mv @Ferris_vball the burden is close to none on the audience. It's the burden of the presenter to know the audience and cater their talk to the knowledge and expertise of the audience. You can't give a spexialized seminar talk to a department colloquium. Nor I would say you can use the same graphs or slides for that talk. *Knowing your audience* is literally the first step of scientific communication.
@mv If a message is not received by the intended target, it is a failure of the sender. A speaker needs to take into account the audience they are communicating with. I would say 100% of the burden is on the speaker for the intended audience. That does not mean everyone attending a talk is in the intended target of the speaker though. Some percentage of the audience may not understand without fault of the speaker if the speaker had a different audience as target.
@Ferris_vball I think it's mostly because of scientists' own ignorance or arrogance. Giving a good scientific talk is a skill. However you usually "pick up" this skill here and there and is generally assumed to known by students. In fact scientific communication is a scientific field of its own that needs to be thought to students so that at least people have an appreciation that giving a scientific talk takes more time and effort than putting few slides together. However, even in well meaning departments that mandate this kind of training or classes, it's usually seen as a formality and encumbrance by students and faculty. You wouldn't expect someone to be successful in your field without having learned the field. Yet scientific communication is treated similarly by scientists who have no formal training in it yet somehow "knows" how to give good talks.
@Ferris_vball In your experience and thinking, what fraction of the burden of a "good presentation" is on audience? Paul Dirac and Lars Onsager come to mind when I ask that. Their audience struggled simply because their work was quite deep.